001 - Prologue - The Lucky One
It was July 30.
Even indoors, the apartment stayed around eighty-six degrees, which meant the poor fan had no choice but to keep spinning for a fifth straight day and night.
Maybe it was tired too. At some point, it had started giving off a low, miserable whine. He could have sworn it had not sounded like that five days ago, back when he had just bought it and it had not yet learned how to complain.
"104 to 106 degrees..."
"104 to 105..."
"103 to 104..."
The woman on TV kept reciting one brutal heat record after another in that soft, professional voice of hers, giving the faint impression that Earth had decided to start turning into Mercury.
A roar burst through the window.
For an instant, it drowned out every thin little sound in the apartment and crashed straight into his ears.
He barely reacted. He just sat there on the sofa, staring blankly at the small slip of paper and the bank card on the coffee table in front of him.
It was just a plane taking off.
He knew the sound too well. He heard it once or twice almost every day. At first, he had complained about it. By now, he was completely used to it.
That was what happened when his neighborhood sat right beside the only airport in the city.
The apartment itself had a strange little story behind it.
The place was not big: two bedrooms, one living room, one bathroom, roughly seven hundred and fifty square feet in total. It was not a rental, either. It was his.
Yes. His name was on the deed.
But he had not bought it himself.
Honestly, he could not have afforded it. He was just an ordinary young man fresh out of college. How was someone like him supposed to buy an apartment?
His parents had not bought it for him, either.
He had spent his childhood in an orphanage, growing up alongside a lot of other kids. Life there had been decent. Aside from the dormitory setup, it had not been too different from anyone else's childhood.
He never had to worry about food or clothes, and he did not miss out on school. Because of that, he had no resentment toward the place that raised him.
That did not get in the way of his other great love.
Anime.
For him, and for a lot of the kids in that orphanage, anime had been something like both a mentor and a friend.
They had all come from different places, each carrying a sad story of their own in one way or another. Anime gave them a common language. It gave them something easy to talk about when everything else was hard.
Most of them had gone from strangers to friends because of those shows.
Actually, no. To them, they were teammates.
The favorite among the orphans had been an old ninja anime, mostly because the main character had been an orphan too.
But that was beside the point.
So no, the apartment he lived in now had not been bought with his money, and it had not been given to him by parents he did not have.
He had received it one year ago, right after graduating college, from an old man with white hair and surprisingly bright eyes.
The old man was over eighty. According to him, he had never married and had no children, so before he died, he wanted to leave everything he owned to someone who had crossed his path.
There had been one condition.
The young man had to see him through the end of his life, the way a son would.
Why had the old man chosen him? The old man had only looked at him with an expression he still did not know how to read and said, "You just felt right."
At first, he had not believed it.
He was a grown adult with normal common sense. His first reaction had been to suspect a scam.
But when his name legally appeared on the deed, and a little under sixty thousand really did show up in his bank account, he had no choice but to believe it.
After that, he spent five months living as the old man's son.
And he stayed by his side and cared for him until the old man's eyes closed for the last time.
The truth was, he could have broken the agreement the moment he got the apartment and the money.
He could have walked away.
He did not.
He could not do something that heartless. He had a conscience. He had a line he would not cross.
So for those five months, he did not go out looking for a job. He stayed home and kept the old man company every day, listening to stories about his years in the military.
If he did not know how to cook, he bought a cookbook and learned, doing his best to make meals the old man could actually enjoy.
If the old man wanted fruit, he went to the local market and tried to find the freshest fruit he could.
If the old man got bored, he stood up and sang whatever songs he knew, though most of them were anime openings. He knew the old man did not understand them, but the old man always listened carefully, smiling the whole time.
In the last two months, the old man could no longer get out of bed.
Even then, he refused to go to the hospital. He said it would waste money. He said there was no point.
So the young man made porridge every day and fed him one spoonful at a time. Sometimes it spilled from the old man's mouth, and he wiped it away carefully with a towel.
The hardest part, though, was the kind of care nobody liked to talk about.
The old man's condition had reached the point where he could not use the bathroom by himself. Sometimes he soiled himself without even realizing it.
At the time, the young man found it painfully difficult. More than once, he wanted to give up.
But every time he looked into the old man's cloudy eyes, he swallowed his discomfort and took care of everything without complaint.
Even now, he did not know whether he had done it because of what the old man had given him, or because somewhere along the way, he had truly started to think of him as a father.
He still did not understand how he had made it through.
That brought him back to the slip of paper and the bank card on the coffee table.
It was almost funny, really.
He had been sitting there all night.
The slip of paper was actually a check.
A check with a one followed by seven zeros.
Not that it was an inheritance from the old man.
He had earned it himself.
Yes, really.
And it had taken him less than forty-eight hours.
Impressive, right?
Not really.
Almost anyone could do it.
Just hit the jackpot.
Yes. The check came from the lottery commission.
The bank card was easier to explain. That eight-figure payout was sitting inside it now.
'What is wrong with my life?'
'How does something this ridiculous even happen?'
'I bought a random ticket and actually won?'
'Fine, I won. But the jackpot?'
'Fine, the jackpot. But they actually paid it out?'
That was the loop his brain had been trapped in all night: the same thoughts, spinning through his head in endless variations.
He could not believe his luck was that good.
"Huh?"
The plane's roar faded, and with it, he finally snapped back to himself. He glanced around the living room on instinct and muttered under his breath.
"Come to think of it... this apartment kind of came to me the same way..."
Yes, he had cared for the old man for five months.
But compared to the value of the apartment, what did that effort really amount to?
Luck this good was absurd.
"Am I the main character of this world or something?" he murmured. "Is ridiculous luck my superpower?"
Maybe he had watched too much anime. His thoughts kept drifting, and before he knew it, one strange sentence slipped out of his mouth.
"Then what if I wished for another world? Somewhere with superpowers, or something..."
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