Originally, Chiba had thought that what his past self had gone through was a slaughterhouse of human nature, a devil's prank, a nightmare. But he had never expected that this place...
Was hell! Yes, hell!
No matter how long a nightmare lasted, there would always come a moment when one woke up.
But hell was endless.
And what his past self had experienced was precisely that endlessness. Every survival, every loss of consciousness, every awakening was a trial of humanity.
Though he did not know who was controlling all of this behind the scenes, why he had come to such a world after dying, or rather, why he had fallen into such a phenomenon, one thing was certain: this place, this world, or rather, this phenomenon, was hell.
An endless hell.
And endless pain.
After witnessing trial after trial, torment after torment of human nature, scene after scene—from the first cabin and basement, to the forest campsite of the second scenario, and then everything that followed—it all seemed to expose the most evil parts of human nature. In the face of such cruelty, every good thing in humanity appeared so fragile and insignificant.
To be honest, even Chiba, who had experienced the Naruto World, was nearly driven to despair.
Yet his past self had persevered. Carrying hope that had already become an obsession, he experienced it again and again, as though there were no end, enduring that hell over and over.
Yes, his past self had endured.
Not only had he endured, but through those repeated cycles of hell, he had unknowingly found a group of collaborators who likewise clung to survival with near-obsessive determination.
Six people.
Besides him, six people had gradually gathered around him through those repeated scenarios. The seven of them formed a team.
The first was