Chapter 2: Survival Notebook

  It was the middle of March. The sun burned at its hottest above the sky of Camaroes City.

  Resting against the windowsill, Bell once again observed the crowded streets below.

  Young and old, men and women, people going about their lives, unaware of the tragedy to come.

  Bell let out a quiet, regretful sigh.

  Toward the fate awaiting most of these people, he felt completely powerless.

  “If only this disaster could be stopped,” Bell muttered.

  But he knew it was already too late. The foundation of the abyssal invasion had already been laid and stabilized. Its arrival was now inevitable.

  Having joined the abyss in a previous life, though no longer fully himself at the time, Bell had retained fragments of memory.

  He knew that beneath the city’s surface normalcy, the abyss had already begun its incursion. Small-scale events were occurring everywhere. Strange, unsettling incidents.

  The kind of events that witnesses later dismissed as illusions,products of fatigue, stress, or extreme weather. Collective hallucinations, people said.

  It wasn’t limited to this city. It was happening across the world.

  Bell inhaled slowly, the warm air carrying the faint smell of dust and asphalt, and opened the notebook resting in his hands.

  He hadn’t gone out today—not out of laziness, but because his thoughts had tangled into something dense and unmanageable. There were too many things to do, and he couldn’t decide where to begin.

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  On one side of the page, he wrote:

  "What to do?"

  On the other:

  "How?"

  "Survive,"Bell wrote.

  After a moment, he added another word beside it.

  "Live."

  He didn’t want to merely exist. He wanted to survive as a human. Not as an Evildoer. Evildoers were stripped of free will, of original awareness. Broken shells, acting in service of something else.

  When it came to how, Bell felt less uncertain.

  The existence of the city within his mental domain confirmed something important: he had carried something back with him from his time as an Evildoer. And he was certain it wasn’t benign.

  Something had hidden itself within his mind. Poorly concealed, perhaps, but present. Something with the potential to transform him far earlier than it had in his previous life.

  "If I were to become the Sandman now," Bell thought,

  "or even a lesser version of it…"

  He didn’t finish the sentence aloud.

  The conclusion was obvious.

  At this point in time, humanity’s champions, the ones who had once sacrificed themselves to stop him, weren’t strong enough yet. Humanity wouldn’t survive a second version of him.

  Bell wrote another line.

  "Destroy the threat"

  He almost laughed.

  "It sounds easy when written like that"

  He crossed it out and replaced it.

  "Explore the threat" " Understand its rules" "Exploit them" "Neutralize it"

  Three years after the apocalypse, some of the greatest minds on Earth had begun to unravel the mechanisms of the abyss.

  As humanity’s worst traitor, Bell had devoured many of those minds. Along with them, he had absorbed fragments of their knowledge.

  He also possessed something they hadn’t: memory from inside the abyss itself.

  That alone gave him an advantage.

  He added another word.

  "Prepare"

  Preparation wasn’t just about planning.

  It meant resources, food, water, bases, weapons, people.

  Bell returned to the What to do column.

  "Save humanity"

  He crossed it out immediately.

  It was too grand. Too heavy. No single person could carry that burden. Humanity could only be saved by humanity itself,and humanity had an ugly side that emerged most clearly in times like these.

  He rewrote it.

  "Let humanity survive"

  Even that felt insufficient. But it would have to do.

  On the first night of the apocalypse,the First Sigh, countless people would transform into Evildoers.

  It had been proven that stronger willpower allowed better resistance, depending on the corruption’s intensity.

  But how many people truly possessed that kind of will?

  Those who transformed weren’t weak. Those who survived were simply fortunate.

  Under How, Bell wrote several short lines.

  "Monitor myself"

  "Help when possible"

  "Safely distribute information about meditation and willpower"

  Constant self-monitoring was essential. Not just for him, but for any human who wished to remain sane in the coming era.

  As for warning others, Bell knew the truth.

  If he announced the apocalypse now, no one would believe him.

  Worse, he would attract attention.

  And the wrong kind of attention would shatter everything before it even began.