Chapter 1: Picking Cards from the Trash
[Romance System Activated]
[Affection Level Check]
[Target: Kikawayu]
[Affection: 100 (Undying Devotion)]
"I think there's something seriously wrong with my card game system..."
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The cramped shack's ceiling fan rattled overhead, its wheezing drone only making the stifling heat more unbearable.
The three people inside paid no attention to the annoying noise.
Two guys and a girl huddled around a wooden table, locked in an intense match of the most popular card game ever created—the one that once swept the entire world and remained undefeated in player count.
Amano Rei: "Four of a kind plus a pair, one card left!"
Kikawayu: "Are you kidding me right now? What kind of teammate plays like that?"
Kikawayu, fellow peasant in this round, leaned forward across the table in disbelief.
The world's most popular card game: Poker.
Amano Rei's devastating play—four Aces with a pair of twos.
Just like that, he successfully led the peasant class straight to bankruptcy.
Amano Shio: "Yes! I win again!"
The beaming girl happily scattered her final hand across the table.
If you only looked at this single moment, Amano Shio seemed like any normal teenage girl. She had that age-appropriate innocence, that straightforward charm.
If only she wasn't playing cards from a wheelchair.
"Man, I just can't beat little Shio."
"Dude, quit the act."
Amano Rei—ten-time consecutive champion of the District New Year's Poker Tournament—possessed genuinely terrifying luck when it came to drawing cards.
Even with that advantage, he still had to deliberately throw games to his extremely sore-loser sister.
After glancing at the old wall clock, Amano Rei ripped the white paper strips off his face—penalty stickers from losing earlier rounds—finally revealing the handsome features he'd been hiding since the chapter began.
"Time's up. If I don't get to work, the foreman's gonna lose it."
"Oh!" Kikawayu's lips curved into a meaningful smile. "Big bro, you're leaving already? That means I finally get quality time alone with my future wife."
"In your dreams! You're not my brother-in-law, and you're definitely not staying alone with Shio. I'm stopping by the card shop anyway, so you're coming with me."
"But you don't even have money! Why go to a card shop?" Kikawayu started his fake tantrum routine. "Shio will get lonely!"
How exactly should Amano Rei describe his childhood friend?
They'd grown up together. Honest personality, kind heart—Amano could vouch for all that without hesitation.
If his wheelchair-bound sister ever needed someone to help with daily life, Kikawayu was genuinely the best choice.
Just... the appearance thing. That was where Amano struggled to agree.
Not because Kikawayu was ugly.
The exact opposite, actually—Kikawayu was way too pretty.
You look way too much like a girl, man!
Soft facial features with zero masculine edge, a delicate nose and bright, clear pale-blue eyes.
Even with short hair, a denim jacket and jeans, that naturally pink-tinted fringe made people mistake Kikawayu for a tomboy-type beauty.
Judging by looks alone, this childhood friend was leagues cuter than most actual girls.
If Amano hadn't grown up with Kikawayu since they were naked toddlers—hell, they'd even had peeing-distance contests—he'd seriously start wondering if some light novel plot twist was about to hit: "My Childhood Friend Is Actually a Beautiful Girl."
"It's okay, Yu-nii. I can watch competition recordings at home. Brother gets lonely easier than me anyway—he needs your company more."
Kikawayu wavered for a moment, then gave up his stubborn attempt to stay. "Alright, I'll set up the video for little Shio then."
Normally, District 32 at the bottom of Eden Tower couldn't receive TV signals from the upper levels.
But somehow, Kikawayu had gotten his hands on an ancient VHS tape, complete with an even more ancient player.
With practiced movements, he hooked everything up. The bulky CRT television—older than Amano Shio herself—gradually displayed a blurry image through the static snow.
"There we go. Watch this, little Shio. I'll be back after accompanying your brother."
"Stay safe at home. No wheelchair racing around the room," Amano reminded her before closing the door.
Even though Shio had watched this tape countless times, the moment the picture appeared, she tuned out everything else.
Her beautiful eyes sparkled as she gazed at the television, entranced by her idol's charismatic presence—impressive even through the grainy footage.
A black-haired woman in a long white coat stood in a magnificent arena before thousands of spectators, her slender fingers raising her signature card high, displaying her battle prowess to the entire world.
"With dragon souls as my guide, I shatter the nine abyss locks! Seven stars align, Dragon Abyss descends! Synchro Summon—Seven Star Dragon Abyss!"
The instant before Amano closed the door, the television erupted with the crowd's thunderous roar and a soul-shaking dragon's cry.
Outside, the street scene consisted of scrap piles and garbage heaps—the standard landscape of District 32.
Inside and outside. Two different worlds, split by a screen.
Amano's brow furrowed as he noticed the bold red characters someone had slapped on his door overnight.
[THREE DAY DEADLINE! If you don't pay up in three days, we're sending a duelist after you!]
A threat that seemed absurd—yet made perfect sense in this world.
Amano Rei was a transmigrator. More accurately, a reincarnator.
After dying in an accident in his previous life, he'd been reborn into this world.
Carrying memories from his past life, he'd been born in this world's slums—bottom-tier District 32.
Using his infant body, he'd gradually learned about this world he'd been reborn into, living a second life until age eighteen.
Different from his previous world, but not as radically different as those novels where people transmigrate to fantasy worlds with swords and magic, or cultivation realms with immortals.
More like transmigrating to some future point in his original world's timeline.
As far as Amano knew, the current year was 5026 CE.
Nearly 3,000 years separated him from his previous life's timeline.
Logically, 3,000 years should feel like an eternity. But Amano felt no sense of epochal displacement.
The slum's living conditions were actually more backward than his previous life.
The reason? Humanity in this world had been destroyed by war, with civilization broken for over a thousand years.
Massive warfare had nearly wiped out all surface life. Most environments were contaminated by nuclear radiation, making them uninhabitable.
The surviving humans could only scrape by inside one massive structure.
The most advanced AI life-form—the mainframe Eva—had constructed humanity's final utopia on the planet's largest continental plate.
Covering over a million square kilometers, shaped like an ancient Egyptian pyramid but far more magnificent and mechanized in appearance.
Historical records called it [Paradise - Eden], but people simply called it Eden Tower. It preserved humanity's last ember.
Inside Eden Tower, resources could self-circulate, external nuclear contamination was blocked out, and most importantly—there was no war within the Tower.
Humanity's final utopia seemed to exist under AI management, but Eva imposed no restrictions on humans.
Except for one mandatory rule to prevent humanity from repeating its mistakes: absolutely no warfare whatsoever.
Throughout human history, war had never stopped.
Yet inside Eden, different races and faiths gathered in one place without any friction.
That would be impossible, of course. Friction and conflict existed everywhere, constantly.
But to eliminate any seeds of warfare, mainframe Eva established rules to replace armed conflict.
Using an ancient card game long forgotten and lost to human history as the foundation, cards replaced guns and cannons to resolve friction and disputes.
Yu-Gi-Oh! - Duel Monsters
Card games replaced all violence. Anyone who refused to follow this rule would be immediately expelled from Eden.
Amano Rei had been reborn into exactly this kind of world—one where survival rules had been rewritten, where everyone had duelist brains.
He'd seen it on TV once: a man whose eyes bulged with rage after discovering his wife's affair, ready to literally tear apart the cheating couple.
The next second, he whipped out cards and a Duel Disk.
"Let's duel!"
Police chasing criminals would duel on motorcycles.
Mega-wealthy corporate conglomerates recruited powerful duelists as representatives.
School curriculums focused entirely on Yu-Gi-Oh! cards.
If you were good enough at dueling, you could reach Eden Tower's pinnacle.
In this world, everyone was forced to become duelist-brained.
Fortunately, before transmigrating, Amano had been a card game nerd himself, with decent understanding of Yu-Gi-Oh!.
At least compared to Tower inhabitants—where civilization had been broken for a thousand years, with no reference materials and not even Yu-Gi-Oh! anime to watch—Amano figured his understanding of dueling was more advanced.
Alright, so naturally people will ask:
Amano, hey Amano!
This world values dueling above all else, and you claim to understand dueling pretty well.
So why are you still stuck in Eden Tower's bottom-level slums after all these years?
Initially, Amano thought the same thing. As a transmigrator in this duelist-brain world, even if he couldn't reach life's pinnacle, surely he could make something of himself, right?
Turns out he was too naive.
Whether 3,000 years ago or 3,000 years later, society has one unchanging truth:
Poor people have a damn hard time climbing out of poverty.
Eden Tower's lowest level had 36 districts, ranked in order by economic status.
When Amano Rei—born in District 32—discovered he couldn't even afford a basic 40-card deck, reality finally hit him.
No wonder the bottom-tier slums weren't chaotic like movies from his previous life, but instead bizarrely harmonious.
Forget friction and disputes—people down here didn't even have the qualifications to duel.
No conflicts, no means to resolve conflicts. District 32 was forced into harmony. Life was inconvenient, sure, but at least you wouldn't starve.
Many bottom-level residents chose to muddle through life this way, never thinking about using duels to change anything.
But Amano Rei refused to accept that fate!
He was a transmigrator, reborn into a world full of duelist brains—how could he just drift through life?
And starting today, everything would change.
Amano had spent two years preparing for this day.
Two years ago, at age sixteen, Amano received his first District 32 job assignment—waste recovery and sorting.
A barely-acceptable job. The work involved sorting through waste disposal sites, organizing trash discarded by Tower residents, recycling items that could be reused.
However, when Amano accidentally dug a Duel Monsters card out of the filthy, reeking garbage heap, the nature of this job suddenly transformed.
Wealthy people from upper districts would naturally throw away useless cards.
Sure, those cards were weak enough for upper-class folks to toss in the trash—low-level monsters too pathetic to even bother summoning.
But in that card, Amano glimpsed something: a faint beam of light piercing down into the bottom-tier slums, shining on him once more.
If he could find cards in the garbage, then collecting 40 cards would make him a duelist!
Even if they were just weak monsters thrown in the trash, a famous Duelist King—the protagonist of Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's, Yusei Fudo—once said:
The weak have their own way of fighting!
Just like weak Amano's way of fighting against life itself.
But collecting cards didn't go as smoothly as Amano imagined. Not every trash-picking session yielded results.
Finding a complete competitive deck in the garbage like 5D's protagonist Yusei Fudo? Pure fantasy.
This picking went on for two years.
So besides unwanted weak Normal Monsters, did Amano find any other useful cards in those two years?
Hell yes he did!
Amano pulled his incomplete deck from his pocket, flipping to the top card.
This was probably the strongest monster he'd found so far.
Still just a low-level monster. Still a Normal Monster with no effects.
But the moment he found her, Amano knew this card was destined to be different.
That night, this card seemed to glow in the dim garbage heap, sparkling with starlight.
On the card face, a cute girl with long blue hair held a key-shaped staff as tall as herself, floating above brilliant flowing colors.
[Priestess Who Receives the Star Chalice] [2-Star WATER]
[Spellcaster] [ATK: 0] [DEF: 2100]