Chapter 66: Sync

Ethan was walking with his eyes on his phone.

He wasn’t looking at the road. He was replying to a comment under a video explaining the theory of "real isekai" — why heroes always die in stupid ways, and how that itself proved the universe chose who deserved a second chance.

He typed: "If it happens to me, I’m 100% ready."

He pressed send.

He looked up for one second. He was in the middle of the street.

The horn was the last thing he heard clearly.

He didn’t feel pain like he expected from every movie he had watched. He felt a shove. Then the ground disappeared from under him. Then there was no ground at all.

He thought, with strange clarity: This is funny. This is really funny.

He wasn’t afraid. He just didn’t believe it.

Me? Like this? A regular car on a regular street while I’m replying to a YouTube video?

He tried to think of a last line that fit the situation. Something he could say, or remember, that would be worth putting in the first Chapter if someone told his story later. He found nothing. His mind was still stuck on this is really funny.

The darkness that came after wasn’t like sleep. It was like someone closing an app without saving.

---

He opened his eyes to a ceiling that wasn’t his.

Old wood, cracks letting gray light through. The smell of dampness and wet stone.

He sat up fast. His head spun. His pulse beat in his ears.

Still dead? What is this?

He looked at his hands. Same hands. Same watch on his wrist. Same frayed cuff from the day he fought with the bus door.

So I still have my stuff?

He stood on his feet, swayed a little. The room was empty. One door, closed. One window, part of it broken.

He felt something vibrate in his chest. Not pain. Something closer to a phone buzzing in a pocket.

A transparent blue light appeared in front of him in the air. A small square with writing forming by itself.

```

[STATUS WINDOW]

[NAME: ETHAN ---]

[CLASS: UNASSIGNED]

[WORLD SYNC: 4%]

```

Ethan stood silent for two seconds.

Then he laughed.

A short laugh. Hoarse. It came out before he decided whether to laugh or scream.

"No, no way," he said out loud to no one. "I don’t believe this."

He reached for the air in front of him, tried to touch the blue screen. His finger passed through it.

"Okay. Okay. So I really did die. This is real. And this—" he pointed at the screen — "this is a real Status Window. Exactly like the novels."

He went quiet for a moment, hearing himself talking out loud to himself in a strange room.

"Why am I not happy?" he asked himself.

He didn’t get a quick answer. The joy he had imagined for years, the joy of finally it happened, didn’t come. What came instead was a different feeling. Heavier. Something closer to the dizziness that comes after standing up from a long sleep when you don’t know what time it is.

He walked to the broken window and looked through it.

A city under a completely gray sky. No sun. No clouds. Ordinary buildings, ordinary streets, but every single thing was missing one color.

No. Not missing one color. Missing all of them. The city was painted in gray. Every wall, every car, every door. Only the sky was a slightly lighter gray.

"Okay," Ethan said, his voice steadying. "If this is the world I’m going to live in, I need to understand its rules fast."

He looked at the blue screen again.

```

[WORLD SYNC: 4%]

[SYNC REQUIRED FOR: SKILL ACCESS]

[MINIMUM SYNC REQUIRED: 40%]

```

"Forty percent?" He frowned. "That’s a lot. In the novels, it’s usually ten."

He tapped the screen, tried to open another menu. It appeared.

```

[QUEST LOG: EMPTY]

[SUGGESTION: FIND YOUR FIRST NPC]

[NOTE: THIS IS NOT A NOVEL.]

```

Ethan stared at the last line.

He read it again.

He read it a third time.

"That’s not funny," he said.

The screen didn’t change.

"Okay," he said, breathing out. "So the system has a sense of humor. Or the system is reading my mind. Or the system is a person."

He considered that for a second. Then he dismissed it. Too early to guess.

He walked to the door. It was heavy, dark wood, with a metal handle. He pushed it. It didn’t move.

He pushed harder. The wood groaned.

He put his shoulder into it. It gave a little.

He stepped back, looked at the door. Then at the window. The window was broken at the bottom. Small enough for a person to squeeze through. He looked down. Three floors to the street.

"No."

He tried the door again. This time, he found the trick. The handle was loose. You had to lift it up before pushing. The door swung open.

"See," he said to himself. "Rules. There are always rules."

The hallway beyond was narrow. Wood floor. One dim bulb overhead. Doors on both sides. Every door had a number painted on it. He was in room 4.

The door across from him, room 3, was open a crack.

He heard something.

Not movement. Not footsteps.

Breathing.

Slow. Heavy. Wrong.

Ethan didn’t move. He stood in his doorway and listened. The breathing continued. In, out, in, out. But the rhythm was off. The pauses were too long. The breaths were too deep.

He thought about the novels. In the novels, this was the moment the protagonist made a mistake. He opened the door. He looked inside. He saw something he shouldn’t have. Then he ran for his life.

Ethan didn’t open the door.

He closed his own.

He stood in his room with his back against the wood, and he listened to the breathing across the hall, and he waited.

He counted his own breaths. Four seconds in. Four seconds out. He kept them steady on purpose.

The breathing across the hall went on for two more minutes.

Then it stopped.

Ethan waited another minute. Then he opened his door again.

Room 3 was still open a crack. The hallway was empty.

He stepped out.

He walked past room 3 without looking inside. He walked past room 5, 6, 7. He reached the end of the hallway. There was a staircase going down. Old, wooden, dangerous.

He went down.

On the first floor, the building opened into a lobby. Empty. Dust. A desk with no one behind it. A front door, closed, with a lock that had rusted in place.

He tried the lock. It wouldn’t turn.

He stepped back, looked at the door. Then at the lobby around him. On the wall above the desk, a clock hung crooked.

The clock said 12:00.

The hands weren’t moving.

He took out his phone. 47% battery. No signal. No Wi-Fi. The time on his phone said 12:00 too.

He put the phone back.

He looked at the front door again. Then at the door of the building’s inner hallway. Then at the staircase behind him.

He thought about the breathing across the hall.

He thought about the clock.

He thought about the gray sky.

"Okay," he said out loud. "First rule: I’m not alone in this building. Second rule: something in this building doesn’t want me to know what it is. Third rule—"

He looked at the blue screen. It was still there. Small, floating, patient.

```

[SUGGESTION: FIND YOUR FIRST NPC]

```

"Third rule," he continued. "If the system says find a person, then the person I find first tells me something about the world."

He looked at the front door. Locked. He looked at the inner door. Closed.

He walked to the inner door and opened it.

The hallway beyond was longer than the building should have been. Doors on both sides. Stairs going down again. A smell of wet earth.

He stepped inside.

The door closed behind him on its own.

He looked back. Then forward. Then at the blue screen.

```

[WORLD SYNC: 5%]

```

"One percent," he said. "So walking counts."

He kept walking.

The hallway bent to the left. Then to the right. Then it opened into a room.

The room was a kitchen.

An actual kitchen. With a stove, a sink, a table, two chairs. A window over the sink, gray light coming through. On the table, a cup of tea, still steaming.

Ethan stopped at the doorway.

He looked at the tea. At the steam. At the emptiness of the kitchen.

There was no one there.

He walked to the table. The tea was hot. He touched the cup. Warm.

He looked around. The kitchen had one door on the far side, closed.

He walked to the door. Before he touched it, he heard something behind him.

A chair moving.

He turned.

The chair at the table had moved. It was pulled back from the table, the way someone pulls out a chair before sitting down.

Ethan didn’t move.

He stood in the kitchen and looked at the chair, and the chair sat there, pulled back, empty, waiting.

He waited.

The chair didn’t move again.

He walked to the table and sat in the other chair. He looked at the tea, then at the door, then at the blue screen.

```

[WORLD SYNC: 5%]

[QUEST UPDATE: FIRST CONTACT]

[WAIT.]

```

"Wait," Ethan said out loud. "Okay. I can wait."

He sat in the kitchen and waited.

After ten minutes, the far door opened.

A woman walked in. She was maybe thirty. Pale skin. Dark hair, short. She wore a gray coat that matched the sky. She didn’t look at Ethan. She walked to the stove, put on a kettle, and stood there with her back turned.

Ethan watched her.

She didn’t say anything.

He didn’t say anything.

The kettle began to hum.

She turned, looked at him for the first time, and said:

"You’re the one from room 4."

"Yes."

"You’re not supposed to be here."

"I know."

She studied him. Then she said:

"The system picked you up by mistake. There’s a flaw in the city. It happens once every few years. Someone dies in another world, and the city pulls them in. Most of them don’t last a week."

"And the ones who last?"

She turned back to the stove.

"They find out what the city wants."

She poured the water into a second cup. She set it on the table in front of Ethan. Then she sat in the chair across from him.

"The system called me an NPC," she said. "It’s wrong. I’m a person. There are a lot of people here. The system just doesn’t know how to count us yet."

Ethan looked at the cup. Then at her.

"What’s your name?"

"Lena."

"Ethan."

"I know." She pointed at the blue screen. "It’s on your status."

Ethan looked at the screen.

```

[NAME: ETHAN ---]

[CLASS: UNASSIGNED]

[WORLD SYNC: 5%]

[STATUS UPDATE: FIRST NPC CONTACT — LENA]

```

"That’s not a name," Ethan said. "That’s a category."

"It’s what the system calls me."

"It’s wrong."

"Yes."

Ethan picked up the tea. Took a sip. It was bitter. He set it back down.

"What does the city want?" he asked.

Lena didn’t answer right away.

Then she said, "It wants to make sure the flaw doesn’t grow."

"The flaw."

"You."

Ethan looked at the blue screen again.

The screen flickered.

```

[WORLD SYNC: 6%]

[WARNING: EXTERNAL INTERFERENCE DETECTED]

[SUBJECT: KAEL MERCER]

```

Ethan blinked.

The screen cleared. The line was gone.

He looked at Lena. She hadn’t seen it. She was looking at her own tea, stirring it slowly with a small spoon.

Ethan set his cup down.

"Kael Mercer," he said.

Lena looked up.

"What?"

"Nothing," Ethan said.

He looked at the window. At the gray sky. At the city beyond.

The first name. The first foreign name. The first thing that didn’t belong to him.

Ethan drank the rest of his tea. It was still bitter.