"Ok,
Let's do this one last time…"
Wait should I start from the beginning? But isn't this the start of my story….
See, every story has an origin. A place where you could say that's where it all started! That's where everything became so fucked up!
Well mine? My story's a bit messy… out of order if you would say.
Well fuck it. Let's start from the prologue…
…
I open my eyes… it's a classroom? It's quiet. No there's sounds of pages flipping, the rhythmic scratches of pens against paper… I think.
I look up. Rows of desks with students hunched over notebooks, calm and focused as if nothing in the world is amiss. No confusion or panic. Just intense, borderline obsessive dedication to note taking… perfect handwriting mind you.
Seriously? Did I miss a memo where overachieving became a competitive sport…
One guy's tapping equations like he's racing time itself. Another's nodding along to the lecture with the kind of focus usually reserved for bomb defusal. If effort burned calories, this place would qualify as a gym.
I slouch back in my chair. Apparently, while I was busy waking up with an existential crisis, everyone else decided today was "try way too hard" day.
Wait are they even looking at notebooks?
The classroom feels familiar, but distant, like a half-forgotten dream I woke up from years ago and never thought about again. I know what a classroom is. I know how this is supposed to work. But this one? This one's… off.
Like the future showed up early, didn't knock, and rearranged the furniture.
wtf. Where to even begin?
The front wall… should be a wall but a massive holoboard floats there, layers of light stacked on top of each other. Graphs rotating, formulas assembling themselves midair, diagrams politely ignoring gravity. Every time the instructor gestures, the board responds instantly, eager, like a well-trained dog.
Students nod along, completely unfazed. Of course they are. One kid's casually spinning a 3D molecular model with a flick of his finger, another's got data scrolling across his desk like one of those cheesy movie hackers.
Meanwhile, I'm just sitting here, trying not to look like the extra in a sci-fi movie who definitely gets vaporized first.
Tiny drones hum near the corners of the room, watching everything with the enthusiasm of hall monitors who take their job way too seriously.
Nobody cares. Nobody even blinks. Everyone's calm. Focused. Dialed in.
Which honestly makes this ten times worse.
Because if this is normal… if this is just another class— then why does it feel like I missed several software updates… and no one thought to warn me?
…
Not working? Is it late? I'll try again later.
…
After I'm done gawking at the classroom—floating screens, try-hard students, the whole welcome to the future package—I finally do the smart thing and look up at the board
Big mistake.
Is this… Calc II?
Oh no. No, no, no. Don't tell me. Don't tell me, I glance back at the holoboard just in time to see an integral unfold itself in midair, symbols stacking and looping like they're showing off.
Yeah. That's a series. That's a trig substitution. I almost relax.
Nested integrals. Convergence test stacked like an accusation. Okay, unpleasant but survivable.
…Oh. That's a power series expansion wrapped inside an improper integral. That's.. definitely personal.
I had to phase everything out. Blink once. Blink twice. Focus. Survive.
Yeah… survive. That's the mantra for today.
Then my mind wandered… recalled, not remembered, because it was all there.
Earth. Concrete sidewalks, bad pizza, and me, probably spilling coffee on myself while pretending I knew how to adult.
I am… impressive on paper. Or at least that's what everyone keeps telling me.
Orphaned early, which apparently makes you either bitter or brilliant. Lucky me, I took the genius route. Graduated high school at sixteen… yeah, barely old enough to drive legally, but apparently mature enough to crush trigonometry and AP Chem in the same semester.
By twenty, I had both a bachelor's and a master's. Not bragging. Well… maybe a little. Everyone else was still figuring out how to pay rent; I was knee-deep in fluid dynamics and reactor design.
Back on Earth, I wasn't evil. Far from it. But let's be honest. I was mostly me, and "me" tends to act in its own interest.
Missed homework? I'd charm my way out of it. Lab partner slacking? I'd let them flounder while I quietly got an A. Group project? I'd do the minimum required and somehow take the credit anyway. People called it clever. I called it efficient.
Money, opportunities, attention? They all went to whoever was fastest, sharpest, and least concerned with feelings. That was me. I wasn't cruel. I wasn't generous. I just… optimized for myself.
At twenty-three, I'm finishing a PhD in some advanced chemical engineering field that sounds like it was invented by a committee of mad scientists.
And yet… being an adult? Still ordering pizza at midnight like I have no responsibilities. Still slipping on my own shoes if I'm not paying attention. Still making sarcastic commentary in my own head about how bullshit the world is.
So yeah. Technically a prodigy. Functionally a sarcastic, alcoholic teen trapped in a PhD student's body.
And honestly… not a bad fucking life. A bit tragic, not miserable— just… functional.
So where the hell did it all go wrong? When did the cosmic system decide to glitch my account and spit me out into some bullshit futuristic reality.
One might expect I got hit by truck‑kun. You know, classic isekai rules. Big truck, screeching brakes, instant fade to black.
But no. Of course not.
I didn't die. Not even close. No dramatic accident, no heroic sacrifice, no last words echoing into eternity.
Hmm did I reincarnate? If I did I didn't earn reincarnation but I triggered reincarnation.
Apparently, it was because of a black kitten. Yeah. A fucking black kitten. Coming back from the bar one night— me, half-drunk, smoking a cigarette, muttering to myself, and the tiny furball staring up at me like it owned the street.
I glanced down at it. Tiny thing looked hungry, scraggly, and completely unconcerned about my very important cigarette-and-self-pity situation. Normally, I would've kept walking.
But… fuck it. I had a granola bar in my pocket— one of those shitty ones nobody eats. I tore off a piece, dropped it in front of the cat, and watched it nibble. Then, for reasons I can't fully explain, I pulled my hoodie around it like it was some miniature, accidental superhero.
Boom.
My karma shifted.
It had been barely hanging below zero, scraping the negatives, but one random act of kindness dragged it up to exactly nothing. Zero. Perfect balance.
Complete stillness. All because I did one tiny, drunk‑ass thing that wasn't entirely selfish.
And that's when the world rejected me.
Not metaphorically. Not emotionally. Physically. The system took one look at my karmic state and said, Nope. Because the world doesn't tolerate stillness. Everything is supposed to move— forward, backward, spiraling into chaos, whatever. Motion is law. Change is mandatory.
And me? I stopped.
Not dead. Not alive in any meaningful sense. Just… static. A contradiction. I went against the natural order without even trying. A human error code standing in a universe that refuses to pause.
So the world did what it always does with things that don't belong.
It pushed me out.
And that's when I realized my life was… royally fucked. Everything had been neat, efficient, self-serving, predictable. And then one random act of half-hearted kindness—feeding a black kitten a granola bar and giving it a makeshift blanket—sent the universe into a tantrum.
So instead of dying like a normal person, I got flagged. Processed. Reassigned.
Which honestly feels unfair.
Because if you're going to fuck up my life, at least have the decency to kill me first.
So basically… I didn't mean to break reality. It just sort of happened.
Oops. Should I panic?