The world ended at exactly 3:17 p.m. I knew the exact second because that was when the jaws of a Rank-S Behemoth finally closed around my torso, snuffing out twelve years of desperate survival in a single, bone-crushing snap.
The lights didn't go out all at once; they dimmed slowly—a haunting detail that remained clearer in my mind than the screams of the dying or the sight of gates tearing open the sky like jagged wounds. I watched as the city beneath us burned in layers, towers splitting open and gates yawning wide to vomit forth monsters like an infection that had finally found its host.
I had endured twelve years of this nightmare, a decade defined by predatory contracts, brutal raids, and the bitter taste of learning the rules far too late. I was twenty-two when the Awakening first hit; I was thirty-four when the Behemoth's shadow finally swallowed me whole.
Pain flared once, sharp and absolute, followed by a silence so heavy it felt physical. Then, a sound cut through the dark—not the thunder of an explosion, but the clinical chime of a notification.
Ding.
[Temporal Regression Detected]
I inhaled deeply, my lungs expanding with air that felt impossibly clean and warm. It was wrong—a jarring contrast to the thick scent of ash and decay that had been my only reality for over a decade. My eyes snapped open to find a white ceiling and fluorescent lights, accompanied by the steady, low hum of an air conditioner that hadn't yet been stripped for its copper parts. The air smelled of cheap lavender cleaner and the slightly burnt aroma of office coffee.
An office. My office.
I jerked upright, my chair rolling back and striking the cubicle wall with a sharp thud. I stared at my hands; they were clean, devoid of the jagged scars, hardened knuckles, and missing fingers I had grown used to. A calendar on my desk confirmed the impossible: June 11. My phone buzzed, the screen displaying 2:41 p.m. I had nearly a month before the Great Awakening would tear the world apart.
As my breathing steadied, I looked around the room. Distant memories replayed in my mind—these were the good old days, back when my biggest stresses were budget reviews, printer errors, and complaints about unpaid overtime. None of us had known then that the red sky we'd see in a few weeks wasn't a marketing stunt or a projection, but the beginning of the end. In the last timeline, I had laughed along with them until the first gate opened inside a subway station and gravity itself stopped agreeing with reality.
But this time, I knew the secret they didn't. I knew about the System, and more importantly, I knew about the Shadow Archivist.
It wasn't the flashy combat class everyone would soon covet; it was something else entirely—a class I had only stumbled upon near the end, buried in the records of a collapsed gate beneath an abandoned museum. Back then, I was too broken and hunted to make use of it. Now, it was my first priority.
I stood and walked toward the restroom, catching my reflection in the mirror. Kay Blackwell: twenty-two, lean from long commutes, with sharp eyes that always seemed half a second ahead of the room. My skin was clear, my hair unstyled. I looked like a civilian, a nobody.
"No mistakes this time," I whispered to the glass.
I quit my job that afternoon with a short email and an empty desk. Money and status were fleeting illusions that would burn along with the currency markets in less than thirty days. I needed three things to survive what was coming: a base, supplies, and silence.
Exploiting the fact that credit systems hadn't yet collapsed, I spent the next forty-eight hours applying for loans. By the second night, I had secured a windowless concrete warehouse on the city's edge. It was thick-walled, easy to defend, and most importantly, located near the site of a future gate I remembered from the first timeline.
Over the following week, I moved in silence. I stocked the warehouse with bottled water, medical kits, and a variety of mundane tools that would soon become priceless: crowbars, tactical vests, and a knife that felt far too natural in my hand.
Sitting in the dim light of my new base, I mapped out the "Thin Zones"—places where reality was already beginning to fray. These weren't random; gates formed where the world was "tired"—alleyways where shadows bent unnaturally or basements where sound carried wrong. While the public ignored these electrical failures and structural anomalies, I spent my nights visiting them, letting my body absorb the mounting pressure.
The System was watching. I wasn't just hunting gates; I was qualifying for a class that rewarded awareness over recklessness.
On the seventh night, standing beneath a roaring, unfinished overpass, it finally happened. My phone buzzed, and the air seemed to crystallize into a translucent blue box.
[Pre-Awakening Phase Detected]
[Legacy Points Allocated: 3]
[Options: Strength Boost, Mana Sensitivity, Physical Reinforcement]
In the last timeline, people had jumped at these early prompts, eager for a head start. They didn't realize it was a trap—immediate power at the cost of a permanent growth ceiling. I let my finger hover, then pulled back, ignoring the screen entirely. I was waiting for something deeper.
The blue box darkened, the light draining from its edges as the text began to scroll with a cold, unforgiving clarity.
[Hidden Origin Traits Detected]
[Observer Type: Unregistered]
[Task 1: Identify future gate convergence zones (3/3) — Complete]
[Task 2: Maintain cognitive stability — Stable]
[Task 3: Reject premature power acquisition — Met]
[Trial Condition Met]
[System Role Candidate: Archivist-Variant]
[Shadow Archivist]
[Rank: ???]
[Description: Records anomalies beyond standard System parameters]
I reached out and selected it. Pain flared behind my eyes as a framework—not just power, but a new way of seeing the world—pressed into my skull. A timer appeared in the corner of my vision, counting down the days remaining until the Great Awakening.
[Time remaining until Great Awakening: 20 Days, 23 Hours]
With my own path finally secured, I turned my attention toward the ghosts of my past—the allies I had lost in the previous timeline who were, for now, still breathing and oblivious. I began reaching out to them carefully, one by one, haunted by the memory of how they had each met their ends.
There was Marcus Addai, a man built for logistics and leadership, standing tall with broad shoulders and a clean-shaven face that rarely betrayed the pressure he felt. In the last life, he had been the one watching the exits, a pillar of calm who eventually died alone in a dark hospital stairwell during the height of the panic. Then there was Lena Ashford, an average-height woman from Compliance with pale skin and dark eyes that missed nothing, her hair always pulled so tight it seemed to sharpen her already formidable memory.
I couldn't forget Fiifi Cole, the restless freelance IT specialist whose fingers were always in motion, as if he were constantly coding in the air. He was lean and brilliant, but his downfall had been his heart; he trusted the wrong people and perished in the third year of the collapse. And finally, there was Salasi Reed, a quiet man with a solid build who worked night security. He had always been a man of few words who missed nothing—a trait that allowed him to survive longer than most. I even sent a single, cryptic warning to a distant cousin, though I knew better than to expect a reply.
I didn't tell them the world was ending; instead, I arranged a meeting in a rented conference room where the mundane setting masked the gravity of my words. I told them to pay attention to the world in a way they never had before. I gave them specific instructions on where to stand when the air began to feel "wrong."
"When the Awakening finally hits, your first instinct will be to run, but you must resist it," I told them, the words feeling heavy with the weight of the future I had already seen. "If a blue interface appears, treat it like a legal contract—read every single word, but don't even think about touching it."
"These aren't upgrades or gifts from a benevolent god," I added, watching their uneasy smiles as they tried to process my intensity in a world that still felt safe. "They're contracts. Predatory ones. And in this new world, you have to remember the first rule before you sign anything: nothing is ever truly owned."
They laughed, the sound brittle and nervous, but they listened. Information wasn't ownership, and for now, that knowledge was the only thing I could give them to ensure they wouldn't become ghosts a second time.
A faint pulse thrummed through the air as the System acknowledged my message with a clinical prompt: [Information Dissemination Logged]. I couldn't tell if the notification was a sign of digital approval or merely a neutral recording of data for the Archive, but at this stage, it didn't truly matter. Outside the warehouse, the city's facade was finally beginning to crumble under the mounting pressure.
In the days that followed, I continued to visit the "Thin Zones" where reality had already begun to fray at the edges. Standing in the center of that mounting pressure, I forced myself to calibrate my senses to the Shadow Archivist class until the "wrongness" of the world began to feel like the only truth I could trust.
During this period, emergency broadcasts began to flicker across every screen, interrupting the mundane rhythm of daily life as stock markets froze in a digital panic and flights were grounded across the globe without explanation. While the world outside dissolved into a chorus of frantic confusion, I sought the only refuge that remained.
I sat on the cold warehouse floor with my back against the concrete, the lights extinguished to let my eyes adjust to the coming dark. This was the final twenty-four hours of humanity pretending that its old rules still mattered—a fleeting margin of time before the world's "pretending" was stripped away forever. Then, with a silent, heavy finality, the System locked its presence into my soul.
[Shadow Archivist]
[Status: Fully Activated]
[Archive Access: Conditional]
The oppressive pressure that had been building in the room suddenly eased, replaced by a cold, sharpened sense of readiness. The world remained oblivious to the shift, still clutching at the remnants of a peaceful afternoon, but deep within the quiet of the warehouse, the Shadow Archivist was finally awake.