This was not how he had imagined Hell would be like.

White. The ceiling and walls that had greeted him as soon as he'd opened his heavy eyelids. The attire of the man currently peering down at him, saying something his muddled brain could not digest. Every corner of the place was painted with old, boring white; a scene far too different from how popular tales had described the netherworld.

No repentant screams of wicked souls. His skin didn't burn at all. Nothing suggested he had woken up somewhere near an inferno.

No, he was not in hell.

But he was certain he was not in heaven either.

Otherwise, he would not be experiencing these uncomfortable sensations as if he'd developed arthritis all over his body. His muscles and bones ached to the point that even lifting his pinky had been an uphill struggle. The pain in his back especially stuck out.

He shifted his eyes, finding them the only part he could move without issues. His gaze landed on the person in the white coat standing next to the bed where he'd realized he was lying.

"Mr. Villena?"

A sliver of alertness came upon him. His head cleared enough to grasp the words of the person at last.

He tried to open his mouth to say something, ask where he was, but his stiff jaws prevented him from doing so. And even if he had managed to part his lips, he doubted the dryness in his throat would have allowed him to get a single word out.

Resigned to his current condition, he could only close his eyes to collect his thoughts. He sighed, the small puff of air creating a warm mist around his lower face and making him aware of the thing covering his nose and mouth. An oxygen mask, he reckoned.

He'd pretty much figured out the situation. Around ten years ago, he'd been in a similar state.

I guess I survived. And here I believed I was a goner for real this time.

Vague memories of the night of the accident flashed in his mind. He had no clear recollection of the events after the car with him in the front passenger seat had crashed. The last thing he could remember before he'd lost consciousness was the devastated voice of a man calling out his name.

"Rence! Laurence!"

It must have been Kian, he thought with relief.

His friend at work had been the one driving at the time of the unfortunate incident. If Kian had that much energy to cry then, it just meant that the guy had been in a better condition than him.

I'm glad.

His eyes flew open as something cold pressed against his elbow pit. Peering down, he saw another middle-aged man in a white and blue scrub suit wrapping a blood pressure cuff around his upper arm and pressing the metallic chest-piece of the stethoscope on the crook of his limb.

The doctor, whom he'd first seen, was still there. A woman stood beside him, a blue clipboard and a pen in her hands.

Laurence explored the room with his eyes as one of the nurses continued checking his vital signs. While he still believed it looked too colorless like most places in hospitals, he noted that this particular room had better furnishing than the one he had when he was seventeen.

New questions appeared in his head. If his guess was true, he wanted to know who had been bearing his medical expenses here.

He knew only two people, those close friends of his, who would care enough to pay for the best treatment they could get for him, but neither of them could really afford such a fancy room.

As his gaze stopped at the door of what he assumed was a washroom, Laurence mused on whether their company had a hand in this situation. Although it sounded unlikely, it was a reasonable explanation.

Or maybe the hospital services have improved in those many years. I haven't been in one since I was a kid after all.

He wondered for how long he had been unconscious. Days? Weeks? It felt like the car crash had occurred just a while ago, but he suspected it was far from the actual case, judging by how his senses seemed to have gone slack.

His attention went back to the trio of medical professionals as they talked about terms he could barely understand.

The female nurse flipped the patient's chart holder, giving Laurence a glimpse of the name written on the front cover.

Before he could read the text, a feminine cry snapped through his focus.

"Rence!" A petite woman rushed to the bedside and grabbed Laurence's pinky and ring finger in her shaking hands. Her voice cracked as she sobbed. "You're awake. You're finally awake. I knew you'd come around."

Laurence managed a small frown and gave the woman an odd stare. He studied the few strands of chin-length, ash-brown hair stuck on her pale, tear-stained cheeks, before he found her tired gaze.

Despite the dark circles under her eyes, Laurence recognized the grace on the lady's face. And if he had to determine her age based on appearance, he would say she was in her late twenties or early thirties.

The woman weakly smiled as their eyes met. Her words came off calmer when she asked, "Can you see me, Rence? Can you recognize me?" She squeezed the man's fingers, yet the gentleness in her hold didn't go away. "You really scared us. You've been unconscious for nine months."

Puzzlement washed over Laurence. An alarm bell went off at the back of his mind.

He recalled that he and Kian had met with the accident on the night of January 13, 2023.

Nine months. A large wall calendar by the foot of his bed displayed the month of October for the year 2023, confirming he was indeed asleep for that long.

As surprising as the information was, something else knocked Laurence for a loop.

He looked back at the woman and made another attempt to open his mouth, desperate to ask a question.

Who are you?

"It's me, Jade, your older sister," said the woman, as if reading Laurence's thoughts.

The warning signals in his head grew louder at the same time as the heart monitor beside his bed produced sharp beeps. He breathed heavily, feeling his heart pound against his chest. Wide-eyed, he glanced behind the woman named Jade and threw a frantic gaze at the doctor and nurses as if they held the key to this confusion. Instead, the label on the medical chart holder snatched his attention.

Florence Villena.

When the physician had referred to him as 'Mr. Villena' earlier, he'd just assumed either there had been a mistake in the doctor's pronunciation or his disoriented brain had processed the word wrong.

"Miss Villena, it may be better to go with this slowly and give your brother some time to take in everything. He just came around after a long time, so he must still have been shocked," the doctor said in a kind but professional tone, before he addressed the nurses, telling them about the tests they would perform on the patient later.

He must have been shocked; an understatement of the millennia. Thoughts and emotions spiraled as Laurence tried to make a head or tail out of all he'd learned.

He might not have any memory of what had happened after the car accident, but he'd not forgotten his life before that. It might be possible he'd acquired a head injury that had affected his ability to remember properly. Still, it was not enough to mix up his whole identity.

He still knew who he was very well.

High school undergraduate. A twenty-eight-year-old who'd been working for a construction company for years.

He had two close friends, Kian and Grey.

No current lover.

No sister. Never had one.

No living immediate family member at all.

He knew none of his other relatives.

Some people called him Rence from his first name Laurence. His surname was Villegas, instead of Villena.

He shut his eyes once again, letting the fragmented images of his recent years play in his mind like a slideshow. His fingers slowly curled and formed into a fist. A dull pain swept over the muscles in his lower face as he gritted his teeth.

He didn't make any mistakes. There was no doubt he was Laurence Villegas.

So, this person Florence Villena, Laurence mused. Who in the hell is he?