[WARNING BEFORE READING]
CHECK THE "READ THIS!!!" ON THE AUXILIARY CHAPTER TO INFORM YOU SO YOU WON'T GET DISAPOINT.
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Ring!
The alarm cut through the room and out the window, into a Tuesday that hadn't asked whether he was ready for it. Below, the city went on without him — a bus grinding through its gears, a delivery truck backing up in short electronic beeps.
Ring!
It went again. Longer this time, like it had something to prove.
Then silence, and the apartment settled back into what it actually was: three rooms of peeling wallpaper and secondhand furniture, a crack running the length of the bathroom mirror he'd meant to fix for two years and never had. Every piece of furniture in the place had been bought for what it cost, not what it looked like. Somewhere you survived, not somewhere you lived.
A door opened.
The man who stepped through it had the kind of face that came from three straight nights of five hours' sleep — dark under the eyes, skin gone slightly gray, an expression that had already decided the day owed him an apology it had no intention of giving.
He answered the phone before the third ring finished.
"Yes. Hello, this is the team leader of the marketing department. How can I help you."
Flat. The voice of a man dragged out of the one good hour of sleep he'd gotten all week, and not yet ready to forgive the world for it.
"Team leader! So sorry to bother you on your day off, but — we have a crisis. The marketing team, it's—" The voice on the other end came apart at the edges, panic dressed up as professionalism and losing badly.
"Ohh." A pause. Nothing behind it.
"That's an issue for you to handle. Not me."
He said it the way you'd note the weather, and hung up before anyone could argue. In the kitchen, he set a pot of water to boil for instant noodles — the kind of breakfast that asked nothing of him and gave back exactly as much.
The phone rang again while the water heated.
"Fine. I'll be there." He glanced at the clock, like it might reconsider its answer if he stared hard enough.
"Thank you, Team Leader Ling!" Click.
He ate standing at the counter, one slow slurp at a time. Washed the bowl. Showered. The suit went on the way it always did — tie straight, jacket smoothed, every wrinkle chased out before it had the chance to settle.
---
The taxi smelled like someone else's cologne. He didn't mind. He scrolled through the group chat instead — forty-three unread messages, the same emergency dressed up in a dozen different fonts — and let the city slide by without really looking at it.
At the station, an elderly woman was losing a fight with two overstuffed grocery bags.
He was already crossing toward her before the thought caught up with his legs. By the time he recognized her — Miss Chan, his neighbor of six years, the only person in the building who'd ever knocked on his door for a reason other than a noise complaint — his hand was already closing around one of the handles.
"Miss Chan. Let me take that."
She looked up, surprised, then pleased in the way she always was around him, like his existence was a small daily gift she'd stopped expecting and never quite gotten used to.
"Thank you, Ling Hao. Always so kind."
He gave her the smile he kept only for her — a little shy, entirely real — and the two of them walked to the platform together.
---
The train was half-empty. Miss Chan took the window seat and settled her bags at her feet. Ling Hao stood nearby, phone in hand, already halfway back to the fire waiting for him at the office.
The train lurched into motion. He caught the rail — and that was when the man came shoving down the aisle, big, sweating, looking for a fight before he'd even found a seat.
"Move, old hag. That's mine."
Miss Chan shrank back against the window.
"Something wrong with you?" someone muttered behind him. "She's sixty years older than you and you want her seat that bad?"
The man rounded on the voice, then on Ling Hao, arms crossed, chin lifted. "So let someone *young* sit down for once. What's the problem?"
"The problem," Ling Hao said, stepping in front of Miss Chan, "is you."
Something shifted behind the man's eyes. Not anger. Further gone than that.
"I've had a bad day," he said, to no one in particular, and drew a knife from his jacket. "Lost everything."
His gaze slid toward Miss Chan.
Ling Hao moved first — a hard kick to the gut that should have ended it right there. The knife skittered loose. Two passengers lunged for his arms.
For three full seconds, it looked like it was over.
Then the laughing started. Low. Wrong. The knife was back in his hand — nobody saw how — and his eyes swept the carriage like he was tallying exactly how much fear he could still squeeze out of it before someone made him stop.
Nobody made him stop.
Ling Hao looked down. His hand was already at his stomach. Already slick. Already dark. He hadn't felt it go in. He only felt it now — heat that didn't feel like his, spreading fast, and underneath it, the first cold edge of something that wasn't heat at all.
The carriage noise thinned into a hum. Faces blurred above him, mouths moving, saying things he could no longer sort into words.
So this is it, huh.
Was any of it worth it.
Guess I die with a unfulfilling life either way.
The light went out like someone had reached over and flipped the switch.
---
It came back on differently.
Stars — more of them than he'd ever seen at once, scattered edge to edge across a sky too dark and too clear to belong to any city he knew. He sat up slowly. Grass, damp under his palms. Trees on every side, tall enough to swallow whatever lay beyond them, leaves stirring in a breeze that carried nothing from the world he'd just left.
Somewhere in the dark, something made a sound he didn't recognize.
Where the hell am I.