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Note: Chapters 19–21 are real-world chapters. Jump to Chapter 22 to continue the game storyline.
"Uh—"
"Ugh—"
"Eh—"
"Oh—"
"Kimi no namae wa~"
After a stretch of silence that had cycled through several distinct phases, a memory surfaced.
Max did know her. Or rather — the previous owner of this body had known her, and the memory was clear enough that it felt like his own. A summer, years ago. His parents had just passed. He'd taken their savings and gotten on a train with no destination in mind, needing to be somewhere that wasn't home. A bad map had taken him deep into the countryside, into a mountain valley that didn't appear in any travel guide.
That was where he'd met her.
Her name at the time had been something else entirely — the kind of name that announced, the moment you heard it, exactly what her family had expected from her life. Her parents had been planning to sell her to pay for her younger brother's future. She'd run. She'd ended up in the same remote valley as a very lost, recently-orphaned college student, and a sequence of police officers and social services workers had eventually resolved the situation.
Max had given her money before leaving. Twenty thousand dollars — a meaningful sum for a college student who'd just inherited his parents' savings and hadn't yet developed instincts about what responsible looked like. She'd refused anything more. She'd said he'd already done enough, that she needed to build something herself, that she didn't want to be a burden on someone else's sympathy.
He'd believed her. He'd gone home. Eight years had passed in the interim, during which he had completely and genuinely forgotten she existed.
He was now staring at a woman who was, by any reasonable metric, enormous.
Not the word he would normally reach for, but the only accurate one. She was clearing six feet without the boots, and the boots added another inch. The black t-shirt she wore was doing significant structural work containing a physique that had clearly been built through years of serious physical effort — eight-pack abs, visible. Arms that looked like they had opinions about things. Short black hair, practical and neat. Military-green cargo pants, loose but somehow highlighting the legs they were covering.
She looked like someone had taken Koko Hekmatyar and turned the dial up.
The personality coming off her, though — the directness, the cheerful lack of hesitation in calling his name across a public street — that part was identical to the girl he half-remembered. Everything physical was completely unrecognizable.
If the memory hadn't surfaced at the exact moment she spoke, he would have walked past her without a second look.
"Jasmine?" he said carefully.
"Obviously. Who else?" She looked at him with the frank, unfiltered assessment of someone who did not feel any social obligation to soften her observations. "What happened to your hair? Please don't tell me that's dyed."
"It's not dyed."
"You're twenty-one. People don't go white at twenty-one."
"A lot happened," Max said. "I'll explain."
She looked at him for another moment — cataloguing, he realized, in the same direct way he'd expect from someone who'd spent years in an environment where quick reads of people were practical rather than social. Whatever she concluded, she shelved it.
"You look terrible," she said, "but also different. Something's changed." She pulled out the chair across from him without asking. "Sit. Tell me."
The boss arrived with a complimentary iced cola. Max took a long pull of it.
"It's a long story," he said.
"Then make it short."
He made it short — the development sprint, the sleepless weeks, the burnout that had apparently shown up in his hair color. He left out the system, the transmigration, the template, and all the parts that would have required more than a short story. The white hair he attributed to extreme overwork, which was at least partially true.
Jasmine listened without interrupting. When he finished, she nodded once.
"And the game?" she said. "Is it actually good?"
"It's doing well."
"How well?"
Max considered the 47 million downloads. The front page. The 178 million Emotion Points.
"Pretty well," he said.
She looked at him with the expression of someone who recognized an understatement in the wild and was choosing to let it go.
"I'll look it up," she said. "Now tell me about this sun — it's really something today."
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