The notebook sat on his kitchen table like a confession waiting to happen.

  Reiji stared at the blank page. His hand trembled. The pen—a cheap ballpoint he'd bought at the convenience store—felt foreign in his palm, the plastic thin and hollow. Five years of holding digital UI elements had left his actual hands ignorant of ordinary objects. That was the thing about memories that spanned lifetimes: they stored the important information and discarded the texture. He could remember the exact position of the Goblin Archer camps outside the Tutorial dungeon. He couldn't remember if his handwriting had always been this shaky.

  He pressed the pen to paper.

  Spawn points. Day 1 of System Emergence.

  His handwriting was terrible. Each letter came out uneven, the first word lurching across the page like he was learning to write again. Which, in a way, he was. The person who had held a pen last was not the person holding it now. That Reiji had been a child with normal worries—school, girls, what career path made sense. This Reiji had memories of five years of death, resurrection, and a support class that made everyone else look good while he faded into the background.

  He forced the pen to keep moving.

  Tutorial Dungeon spawns in residential district. Lesser Wolves, Goblin Archers, possibly Centipede Swarm if luck is bad. Dungeon duration: 18 hours from spawn until collapse. Minimum two parties to clear optimal routes.

  The information spilled out of him, cramped and urgent. Each line was a piece of the dead timeline, precious because it was true and useless because the world had no obligation to repeat itself. He knew this dungeon existed because he had died in it twice. He knew the Goblin Archers spawned near the eastern wall because he had watched Tatsuya take an arrow through the shoulder learning that lesson. He knew that Lesser Wolves hunted in packs of six because he had counted them while healing, invisible and necessary.

  The notebook filled.

  Pages became small novels. Optimal build paths for the first two Ranks. Which merchants would appear in the first Settlement. Which NPCs would become quest-givers. The name of the girl from Class C who would unlock a rare Sub-class and accidentally create a cascade effect that destabilized the level 40 meta-game. The exact date Tatsuya Nakahara would appear in the city with his recruitment guild and his crooked smile and his dangerous habit of trusting people too easily.

  If Tatsuya were here, he would say the same thing he always said: "You're thinking about what you can't control."

  Reiji's pen paused. Tatsuya wasn't here. Tatsuya was currently asleep in some other part of the city, seventeen years old and ignorant of the fact that he would become the single most important person in Reiji's second half-life. Reiji had five years of memories with a man who didn't know he existed yet. The asymmetry was dizzying.

  He wrote Tatsuya's name anyway. It felt like summoning a ghost.

  The apartment was silent except for the scratch of pen on paper. Outside, the city went about its Tuesday evening. Cars moved through the streets. Restaurants filled with people eating dinner. Somewhere, someone was falling in love. Somewhere else, someone was dying. The System didn't care. The System had a schedule, and the schedule said Friday. Three days away. Seventy-two hours. The numbers felt both infinite and impossibly small.

  Reiji filled another page with monster types. Another with dungeon layouts. Another with the names of players he had known—players who would try and fail, who would die and not come back, who would break and rebuild themselves under a weight that the world before never prepared them for. He wrote Tomoe's name. Tomoe who had been a tank, who had protected him in fifteen different dungeons, who had finally stopped coming to raids after something broke in her eyes during the Tier 4 catastrophe. He didn't know what had happened to Tomoe in the original timeline after that. In this timeline, she was probably eating dinner somewhere. Probably thinking about work tomorrow. Probably had no idea that three days from now, her life would reorganize itself around Progression and Ranks and the constant pressure of becoming stronger.

  His handwriting deteriorated as he wrote. What had been shaky became slurred. The letters stopped pretending to follow the lines. By the time he got to the fourth page, his hand ached.

  Ten out of ten plan: remember things and don't die. Foolproof.

  That thought came with a bitter edge that surprised him. He set the pen down and flexed his fingers. They were cramping badly. Five years of not writing, his muscles said. Five years of not doing anything with hands except grip a controller or press keyboard buttons. The body kept its own timeline, indifferent to the fact that his mind had lived through apocalypse.

  He turned back to the notebook.

  What he had written looked insane. Pages of nonsensical information. Spawn points that meant nothing without context. Monster names that could have been invented. Build paths and skill synergies that wouldn't make sense to anyone but him. If someone found this notebook, they would assume he was either a delusional fantasy writer or someone deep in the grip of an elaborate delusion. They would not assume he was a man holding the literal future in his handwriting.

  The notebook sat on the table. Precious. Useless. True.

  Reiji closed it and stared at the blank cover. His hands were shaking again, but now he thought it might not be because they didn't remember how to write. It might be something else entirely.

  ---

  The convenience store was bright in a way that made Tuesday feel like the most ordinary day in the history of ordinary days.

  Reiji had made a list in his head, which was proving to be a mistake because mental lists had a way of fragmenting into random associations. He pushed a plastic basket through the aisles, grabbing water bottles. The store was maybe one-third full. A teenager was buying chips and energy drinks in the aisle behind him, headphones in, humming something. An older woman was comparing prices on instant ramen. A clerk stood at the counter, looking through her phone with the kind of glazed focus that suggested she had two more hours left on her shift and was thinking about nothing except those two hours ending.

  The water bottles multiplied. He grabbed as many as he could fit in the basket. Eight liters. Maybe nine. The plastic cut into his fingers. He paid for them with cash that he'd withdrawn from an ATM using his old PIN, surprised it still worked, surprised that his bank account still had money in it from the job he'd quit five years ago in his mind but never actually quit in reality. The System hadn't descended yet. His landlord was probably waiting for next month's rent with the same indifferent patience that the rest of the ordinary world possessed.

  He carried the water bottles home first. Then he went back out.

  The pharmacy was next. He moved through the aisles like he had a plan, which he didn't. Bandages. Pain relief. Antiseptic. A first aid kit, the kind sold for camping trips, assembled by people who assumed the worst-case scenario was a blister on a hiking trip. He bought antibiotic cream. He bought some kind of muscle relaxant. The pharmacist didn't ask what he was preparing for, which was fortunate, because Reiji had no answer that wouldn't sound insane. I'm buying first aid supplies because I remember dying, and I'd like to try not doing that this time.

  By the time he left the pharmacy, the teenager from the convenience store had passed him somehow, walking in the opposite direction with their bag of chips. They were probably a freshman in high school. Or maybe younger. The kid's face was completely ordinary—dark hair, typical school uniform, the kind of face you would forget five seconds after seeing it. And yet something in Reiji's memory twitched. He had known this person, or someone like them. In the original timeline, that kid had probably become a raid leader. Or died learning the hard way that Goblin Archers could headshot from three hundred meters. Or maybe nothing at all. Maybe this was just a kid buying chips, and Reiji's mind was making connections between a stranger and a ghost from another timeline.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  The mundanity was the horror. Everyone was going about their Tuesday with no understanding that Friday was the end of everything they knew. The girl at the coffee shop. The cyclist on the road. The man arguing with someone on his phone, probably about something work-related, something that would be completely irrelevant in seventy-two hours. They didn't know. They couldn't know. And Reiji couldn't tell them, couldn't warn them, because what would he say? The truth was unspeakable.

  The hardware store came next. Rope—he had no clear idea why he needed rope, but rope felt important. He had memories of rope being useful in tight situations, rope being the difference between getting out of a collapsed dungeon and getting trapped. He bought rope. He bought a flashlight. He bought batteries. He bought a multi-tool that cost more than he wanted to spend and then bought it anyway because carrying a multi-tool felt like he was actually preparing for something instead of just buying supplies at random.

  The clerk rang him up without comment. Nobody cared what you bought. Nobody cared what you prepared for. The world had perfect indifference to the weight of private knowledge.

  By the time Reiji made it home, the sun was setting. The bags had left indentations in his fingers where the plastic had pressed into the skin. He set them on the table next to the notebook, and for a moment, he just looked at what he had accumulated. Water bottles. Bandages. Rope. A flashlight. It looked like the supplies of someone who had no actual plan, just a vague sense that things might get bad.

  Ten out of ten preparation. Truly exceptional work.

  ---

  The reckoning came when he tried to organize everything.

  He had no system for organizing supplies. The water bottles went in a line along the far edge of the table. The first aid kit and bandages went in a pile. The rope went coiled on the floor, which seemed wrong, so he moved it to the corner. The flashlight and batteries and multi-tool went into a cloth bag that he found under the sink. By the time he was done, the apartment looked like someone had bought random supplies for a camping trip they weren't going to take.

  It looked pathetic.

  Reiji sat at the table and did math. He had maybe eight days of water if he rationed carefully. The instant rice and noodles he'd bought earlier could stretch for twice that, though eating nothing but instant rice for two weeks sounded like slow torture. He had no way to get more supplies after he spent what money remained in his account. He had no job. The job he'd walked away from five years ago in his mind—he checked his email on his computer, moved with the care of someone approaching a bomb—was still waiting for him. An email from three days ago asking when he planned to return from his "personal leave." They had given him six months. He had quit on day four, which meant he'd been missing from his job for almost five years in his head but actually for four months and twenty-seven days in the world's timeline.

  The email felt like a message from a different person addressed to someone who didn't exist anymore.

  He closed the laptop.

  What was he going to do? Return to the job? Tell his employer that he'd needed time off and then show up and pretend the last five years of personal experience were some kind of minor psychological episode? The System was going to descend. The world was going to restructure itself. His job in network management was going to become quaint, a memory of when humans had that particular kind of problem.

  Unless he was wrong. Unless he was completely wrong, and Friday came and went like every other day, and he was sitting in his apartment with rope and water bottles and a notebook full of information about a world that never happened. That was possible. That was actually the most likely explanation for his situation. He was insane. The notebook was insanity. The memories were false, implanted somehow by a psychiatric break, a psychotic episode that had convinced him he'd lived five years of elaborate fantasy.

  But he didn't believe that. The weight of the memories said differently. The muscle memory in his hands said differently. The pure certainty that had sat in his chest from the moment he woke up said that he had died in one world and returned to another, and nothing he did would change that.

  So he had seventy-two hours to figure out what to do with the foreknowledge of a world that nobody else believed was coming.

  He couldn't prepare for everything. That was the first truth. The dungeon spawns would be chaos. The System emergence would be chaos. Players would die. Strong people would become stronger. Weak people would become dead. The gap between preparation and actual events was not a gap you could bridge with water bottles and rope. He had lived through it once already. He knew how unprepared every single person had been, no matter how much they thought they were ready.

  What he could do was be strategic. He could preserve knowledge. He could identify key individuals who would matter later. He could position himself for the moment when the System settled and the Tutorial ended and people started choosing factions and joining guilds. That was where real power began. That was where foreknowledge would actually matter.

  And for that, he needed to survive the first seventy-two hours.

  The water bottles and rope and first aid supplies suddenly looked less pathetic. They were stage-one survival. Not optimal. Not enough. But something.

  Reiji stood up and moved to the window. Outside, the city lights were coming on. The night had arrived while he was inside. The night before the last Tuesday before the System. The night before the last Wednesday. Thursday would be the final day of the old world. He knew because he had lived through it once, even though it hadn't happened yet. The memories were concrete and useless. A map of a place that no longer existed drawn in a place that didn't exist yet.

  The notebook sat on the table behind him. He had filled seven pages with information that might or might not be relevant. If the world followed the old timeline's script, he had the advantage of knowing what was coming. If the world diverged—and it almost certainly would, because Reiji's presence in it was already a variable that didn't exist last time—then the notebook became a document of assumptions that wouldn't hold.

  I died across five years and forgot the one thing that actually mattered: real life has costs.

  That thought arrived with the weight of genuine revelation. Five years of memories in a fantasy world where death was a learning experience and levels were a currency and becoming stronger was the obvious path to survival. Five years of remembering that Tatsuya had enough money to buy potions. Five years of forgetting that in the real world, before the System came and restructured everything, a person had to pay for shelter and food and clothing with actual currency.

  He had maybe two months of rent remaining in his account. After that, what? He couldn't work a normal job and also prepare for the System apocalypse. Nobody could. The people who survived the original timeline were the people who had taken the leap and invested everything into the early stages of Progression, trusting that the System's promises of power and wealth were actually true.

  Reiji had been invisible for five years because that was what support players did. They made other people look good. They stabilized situations. They stayed in the background and made sure the party was protected enough to succeed. Invisibility was the job description. But invisibility was also what had killed him when his guild had collapsed. Nobody had remembered that he existed. Nobody had been there to catch him when everything fell apart.

  This time would be different. This time he would—

  The thought caught and stuck. This time he would what? He had no way to change the fundamental reality of his position. He was one person with five years of memories and a current body that was twenty-two years old and weak. The System would give him access to power, but so would it give that to everyone else. The advantage he had was knowledge, not strength. And knowledge was only powerful if he could leverage it into something that mattered.

  He needed to think about this differently. Not as someone trying to save the world or even trying to save himself. But as someone trying to identify the exact moment when being invisible would become a liability and then not being invisible at that moment.

  The water bottles sat on the table like a joke. He had five years of memories and a two-day supply of water. The rope was for the Tutorial dungeon. The first aid supplies were optimistic. The flashlight was a guess. The notebook was his only real asset, and it was written in handwriting so bad that he could barely read it himself.

  Ten out of ten preparation. No notes.

  Reiji left the supplies where they were and moved to his bedroom. He still had one night before the supply run, before the nervous energy that was currently propelling him forward turned into something else. Tomorrow he would think about what came next. Tomorrow he would figure out if there was a way to be something other than invisible.

  Tonight, he would try to sleep and fail, because Friday was coming, and he could already hear the distant sound of a world preparing to die and be reborn.

  Outside his window, the city continued its ordinary Tuesday night. Unaware. Unprepared. Three days away from the end of everything.

  And in those three days, Reiji Kazuki had to decide what kind of person he would be in the world that came after.