The first thing Evan Brown saw was the number.
47:12:33
It glowed a dull, angry red. It floated in the darkness of his closed eyelids. He squeezed his eyes shut tighter, then opened them.
The number hung in the middle of his cramped dorm room. Just past the foot of his bed. It was still there.
32… 31… 30…
"What the hell?" he muttered. His voice was dry from sleep. He sat up, the cheap sheets pooling around his waist. He rubbed his eyes hard with his knuckles.
The timer remained. It wasn't on the wall. It was in his vision. When he looked at his cluttered desk, the timer superimposed over his economics textbook. When he looked at the dusty window, it floated in front of the gray morning sky.
47:11:59… 58… 57…
A cold feeling, sharp and thin, traced down his spine.
A voice spoke. It had no sound, but it filled his skull, flat and mechanical.
LOVE SURVIVAL SYSTEM ACTIVATED.
TARGET 1/51: ANNA CHEN.
OBJECTIVE: MAKE HER SMILE AT YOU.
TIME LIMIT: 48 HOURS.
FAILURE: INSTANT DEATH.
Evan stopped breathing.
For a full minute, he just sat there, staring at the descending numbers. This was it. The stress had finally cooked his brain. Finals. The empty bank account. The lonely, silent nights in this tiny room. It had all piled up and now he was having a psychotic break. That made sense. That was logical.
He needed water. He needed aspirin.
He swung his legs out of bed. The cold floorboards bit into his feet. The timer moved with his gaze, a constant, bloody headline to his reality. He walked to the sink in the corner, the numbers drifting over the cracked porcelain.
He splashed water on his face. The cold was real. He looked up, droplets falling from his chin.
The timer reflected back at him in the mirror.
47:01:12.
His breath hitched. Denial curdled into something else. Something raw and hot in his gut.
"No," he said to the empty room. "No, no, no. This is not happening."
He got dressed with frantic, clumsy movements. He shoved his books into his bag. Maybe outside, in the sunlight, with people around, it would go away. It had to go away.
The campus walkway was busy with the usual morning flow. Students trudged to early classes, faces blank with sleep. Evan walked with his head down, trying to look at the pavement, at his shoes, at anything but the empty space where the timer burned.
It didn't matter. It was always there, in the top center of everything he saw.
46:45:22.
He saw her near the science building.
Anna Chen.
She stood apart from the crowd, a textbook held to her chest like a shield. Her dark hair was perfectly straight. Her posture was a ruler. Everyone knew Anna Chen. Top of every class. Published undergraduate research. The kind of person who made you feel like you were wasting your life by comparison.
And no one, in the three years Evan had been at this university, had ever seen her smile.
The system's words echoed in his mind. TARGET 1/51.
This was a joke. A cruel, impossible joke.
But the timer ticked down.
46:44:01.
Desperation made his feet move. He walked toward her, his mind screaming that this was a bad idea. He had never spoken to her. He was Evan Brown, background character. She was Anna Chen, a monument of achievement.
He stopped in front of her. She looked up from her book. Her eyes were dark, intelligent, and completely devoid of warmth.
"Hi," Evan said. His voice cracked.
Anna said nothing. She just stared, waiting for him to state his business or disappear.
"I, uh… I'm Evan. From Economics 302?" He offered a weak, trembling smile.
"I know who you are," she said. Her voice was calm, clear, and colder than the morning air. "You asked a question about marginal utility last week that derailed the lecture for fifteen minutes."
"Right. Yeah." Evan's face heated up. "Listen, I was just wondering… what makes you happy?"
The moment the words left his mouth, he wanted to claw them back. They sounded stupid. Insane.
Anna's expression didn't change. If anything, it became more still. "Is this a prank? A survey? Are you recording this?"
"No! No, nothing like that. I just… everyone should smile more, you know?"
She looked at him the way a biologist looks at a strange, slightly disappointing specimen. "I have a lecture. Don't waste my time again."
She stepped around him and walked away, her steps precise and quick. The space where she had been felt even colder.
A new line of text scrolled under the timer in his vision.
[APPROACH FAILED. FAVORABILITY: ANNA CHEN -5.]
Evan stood frozen on the path, students flowing around him. The cold feeling in his spine spread through his whole body. It was real. It was all terrifyingly, impossibly real. The system was judging him. And he was failing.
The library computer smelled like dust and old plastic. Evan sat in a corner carrel, his knees bouncing under the desk. The timer was a constant distraction.
46:01:48.
He typed with shaking fingers.
Love system instant death
How to remove a system in my vision
Make someone smile magical contract
Anna Chen smile
The searches yielded nothing. Forum posts about video games. Psychology articles. A meme about resting bitch face. No ancient curses. No survival mechanics.
He slumped back in the chair. His head throbbed. He replayed the voice in his head. LOVE SURVIVAL SYSTEM ACTIVATED. Why? How?
Then he remembered.
Yesterday. After another rejection from a girl he'd liked from afar, after checking his bank balance and seeing the stark, single-digit number, he'd taken a long walk. He'd ended up at that little, forgotten temple on the edge of the city park. It was more of a shed, really, with a mossy statue of some forgotten god or spirit inside. He remembered the quiet, the smell of damp stone and incense.
He remembered the wave of self-pity that had washed over him. The bitter words he'd muttered at the stone figure.
"Even a rock could find love before me."
He'd even kicked the pedestal. Lightly. Just a frustrated tap of his worn-out sneaker.
A sick, heavy understanding began to form in his stomach.
He left the library at a run.
The temple looked different in the daylight. Smaller. Sad.
The wooden door was ajar. Evan pushed it open, the hinges whining.
The single room was empty.
Not empty of people. Empty of the statue.
The small stone pedestal in the center of the room was bare. A faint, clean circle in the dust showed where the statue had stood for who knows how long.
Evan's heart hammered against his ribs. He walked forward, staring at the empty spot.
"Looking for someone?"
Evan jumped. An old man sat in a shadowed corner on a stool, a worn broom across his knees. He had a kind, wrinkled face, but his eyes were sharp.
"The… the statue," Evan said, pointing at the pedestal. "Where is it?"
"Gone," the old man said simply.
"Where?"
The caretaker shrugged. "It left last night. After the last visitor." His eyes flicked down to Evan's shoes, then back to his face. "You have the same footprint. Mud from the park path. You were the last visitor."
Evan's mouth went dry. "Did you see where it went?"
"No." The old man leaned forward slightly. His voice dropped to a whisper. "But such things… they do not leave alone. They always leave with the one they curse."
The words hung in the still, dusty air.
Evan backed away, then turned and stumbled out of the temple, into the fading afternoon light. The caretaker's words repeated in his head, mixing with the silent, relentless countdown in his eyes.
45:30:00.
He stood on the temple steps, his world shattered. No hallucination. No breakdown. He had insulted a supernatural entity, and it had followed him home. It had moved in. And it was going to kill him in less than two days.
As he watched, the timer hit 45:00:00 exactly.
New text scrolled beneath it, crisp and final.
REWARD UPON SUCCESS: $500.
RESTRICTION: FUNDS CANNOT BE SPENT ON SELF.
VIOLATION: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT.
Evan let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. Money. He would get money. More money than he'd had in months. And he couldn't use a single cent of it to buy a meal, to pay his rent, to save his own life. He had to give it all away.
The system wasn't just cursed. It was a comedian.
He looked up at the darkening sky. The panic and terror were still there, swirling in his chest. But underneath them, something else was hardening. A grim, desperate resolve.
He had 45 hours to live.
He had to make Anna Chen smile.
And he had absolutely no idea how.