Aris Vale opened his eyes to the sound of silence. The ceiling above him was exactly as he remembered it, pale and unremarkable, yet he knew it had changed. Time had moved—or rather, reversed. The numbers in his head confirmed it. 03:17 AM. The exact same hour, two days ago. Two days, which had already been lived and failed.
He sat up, expression void, calculating. His room was empty. Everything that had mattered in the previous timeline—the chaos, the collapse, the deaths—had already happened. And yet here he was. The rules were intact, the world intact, but he was no longer bound by ignorance.
Aris stood, stretching as though he had never moved in his life. The familiar hum of the city outside crept through the window. Nothing unusual. But he knew better. In this world, nothing was as it should be.
He tested it first with the simplest metric. A newspaper on the desk. Yesterday's date? Correct. Today's? Correct. Headlines that should have shocked millions were normal. And yet, in the back of his mind, he remembered every fire, every scream, every collapse. He remembered exactly who would survive, who would die, and who would betray whom.
A faint smile tugged at the corner of his lips. Not out of joy. Out of calculation.
"I knew it," he whispered, voice almost dead, almost indifferent. "I told them the probability was negligible."
He moved to the window, scanning the city skyline. Everything appeared the same—trees swaying, lights flickering, cars moving—but it was all a stage he had already seen. His hand brushed over the edge of his desk, touching objects he had interacted with only moments ago—or was it lifetimes ago? Time was irrelevant. Knowledge was everything.
The system would soon appear. It always did. But this time, he knew it would be late. That delay was a vulnerability he intended to exploit. Aris didn't care for the rules it claimed to enforce. He cared for the outcomes, the probabilities, the leverage he could wield in a world that believed he was only another pawn.
He went to the mirror. His reflection stared back at him, calm, unbroken. Cold. Calculating. The expression of a man who had seen the end of the world—and had already planned its aftermath.
A soft chime from his phone caught his attention. A notification, meaningless to anyone else. But he saw the pattern. The anomaly. A minor event that would spiral into chaos if unchecked. And he knew exactly how it would unfold.
"Step one," he murmured, voice hollow, almost amused. "Step one is always the simplest. Everyone else will panic, scramble… fail."
He picked up his jacket, slipping into the familiar ritual of preparation. Survival wasn't enough this time. Survival had been trivial. Dominance was required. And dominance relied on memory, on foresight, on cold calculation.
As he stepped out of the room, the first light of dawn barely touching the horizon, he allowed a flicker of satisfaction to pass through him. Not a human emotion. A recognition of the path already set, of the inevitability of what was to come.
And then, as if on cue, a notification blinked on the corner of his vision—a warning he didn't need. A small crack in the world, signaling that reality itself was lagging behind his mind.
He paused, listening to the silence. No one could see it. No one could feel it. Only he remembered the collapse that would have happened if he hadn't acted.
And that was when the first thought struck him, cold and precise:
> "The world thinks this is a second chance. It's not. It's mine."