DEATHBED AND PROMOTION

Light entered the dim room wrong—not bulb light, something cleaner and older.

Jacob appeared at the bedside for the first time in Val's memory: gentle where Heaven would later prove cruel, not Daniel's sport-kill grin, patient in a way that felt too calm for a dying man's room.

"Do you regret your life?"

Val could not answer at first. Jacob warned that death would hurt more unless Val chose another path.

"There may be something better."

He said a Human Angel would be looked down on—that standing might matter someday, that rising high enough could change his lot. The warnings read like a country Val had never visited. He did not understand how bad it could get. He only understood the empty chairs and the white ceiling, and that this stranger was offering a door.

The catch landed last: take the path and he might never return to the Mortal Realm. Val did not fully grasp what he was giving up. He grasped that staying meant dying alone.

Val hesitated, then whispered, "…Yes."

Promotion snapped through him like being pulled by a hook he could not see. Heaven opened toward City 5. His body lightened the wrong way. He had no words yet for level or gate or rank—only the terror that even a second life might discard him the same way the first had.

On the threshold he still felt replaceable. Fear did not vanish because Jacob had offered a way out. It packed itself into his ribs and followed him into whatever came next.