<H1>PROLOGUE</H1> <br/><p>The smell of spoiled venison satay sauce filled the dry, clean air. I was the only one who could smell it, and I hated venison satay.</p> <p>Everything was starting over again, and all I could think about were the words of that damn Oscar: “We made ourselves into devils. We created our own hell.”</p> <p>Life used to be so simple. Wake up. Eat breakfast. Go to work. Work. Eat lunch. Work. Go home. Eat dinner. Sleep in bed in the bedroom.</p> <p>The pattern fell apart on one of those endless trips to work, on a weekend I truly regretted, when I covered for my friend and handled his patients while he vacationed outside the Grand Malay Sultanate.</p> <p>A temporary patient handoff is standard practice among doctors, and you do it for someone else if you hope that someday a colleague will cover for you when you want to take a vacation. Otherwise, you have to pay a local doctor and risk getting complaints from your patients for months afterward. A covering doctor is still a covering doctor.</p> <p>You can't blame them, either. Patients generally prefer to be examined by a doctor they know. But if their doctor isn't available, they'd rather see another doctor of their own choosing than a temporary covering doctor. It makes sense. Discussing bladder complaints, bowel habits, and other medical issues isn't easy for anyone. Diarrhea, PMS or sexual dysfunction, and you get the picture. Saying, “Hi, this is me, and this is my disgusting, embarrassing problem,” to a stranger once in a lifetime is more than enough.</p> <p>So, to cover my friend's practice, I had to get to Taluk Kuantan as quickly as possible to visit several of his patients there. It should have been a short trip west to the congested international freeway, followed by another short trip to the hospital.</p> <p>This is where we have to insert the sound of a pileup. CRASH!</p> <p>Not just CRASH! But CRASH! DEADLY CRASH, DYING VICTIMS, COMA, BRAIN INJURIES, METAL FRAGMENTS PIERCING SKULLS.</p> <p>Everything changed. It all began with ... the smell of spoiled venison satay sauce …</p> <p>***</p> <p>A truly horrific pileup. The worst in the history of traffic in the Grand Malay Sultanate. Thirty-seven dead, one hundred seventeen injured.</p> <p>Fog was to blame, or at least the fog and a convoy of eighteen-wheelers.</p> <p>It was morning, and high-speed traffic was moving along the freeway toward Pekanbaru. Thick fog ran wild, lulling all of us who were still drowsy or carsick. And as usual, one mistake led to another, and... . I think you get the picture.</p> <p>I was one of the lucky ones—not dead, but not truly alive.</p> <p>I was in a coma. Peace and happiness under the influence of anesthetic flowed through my veins, calming my broken body.</p> <p>Appearances can be deceiving, but not in my case. It was the same before and after the crash. Or, at least, the peace I would feel from then on. Of course, I didn't know that at the time because I was in a coma. Like I said, peace… happiness…</p> <p>Life always sucks and then you die, but only if you're lucky.</p> <p>For me, the smell of spoiled venison satay sauce filled the air.</p> <p>All right. Here we go.</p> <p>Shaking like a seizure, my comatose world changed. The horrible smell of spoiled venison satay sauce lingered faintly, but nothing else was familiar.</p> <p>That was how it happened the first time, I theorized, and it was one of the several occurrences I couldn't remember well because of the coma. Even so, the beginning was always the same, and I could speculate that it was always the same while I was in a coma because it hadn't changed since then. At least not until the next fateful day I have to tell you about.</p> <p>This one truly changed everything. As I suspected, reliving the past is an absolutely terrible nightmare for most people.</p> <p>I doubt anyone is being honest when they say they want to go back and repeat parts of their life without being able to edit them as they crawl back through the seconds of time.</p> <p>Imagine my misery as I remember and tell you about a brief period from my past. Not exactly the best example of a good day in my life, at least. Now imagine even the best day of your own life… Take some time to picture that beautiful day, and then fill in the space left between the very brief moments you actually chose to remember.</p> <p>What do you think about besides the bad, miserable day you cling to in order to stay sane?</p> <p>Overall, as I said, life sucks, in case you haven't heard it before and truly admitted it to yourself.</p> <p>By the way, my name is Awang, Awang Dermawan. Doctor Awang Dermawan, as if anyone really cares right now. Welcome to my personal hell.</p> <p>Let's begin….</p> <p>The beginning of the dry season had arrived in the Grand Malay Sultanate, a season that was generally pleasant in the part of the country encompassing nearly every inch of land between Republik Minangkabau to the west, Persemakmuran Sriwijaya to the south, and Bangsa Aceh Darussalam to the north. The stretches of rice fields and fruit orchards could easily distract you, if your mind wasn't occupied by life's many cruelties.</p> <p>Unfortunately, those cruelties consumed most people, and few truly acknowledged the goodness inherent in their surroundings until they were destined to leave them. One foot in the grave, or something even more horrifying in some ways: a journey to the heart of the Grand Malay Sultanate, Pekanbaru. Whatever the problem, the Dermawan family had no plans to break the rules.</p> <p>The warm, sunny day carried them without hesitation to one of the most beautiful locations in the region, and they soon began climbing the steep slope toward Tesso Nilo.</p>