Benedict Black remembered the moment of death clearly. The noise, the chaos, the burning sky above him as the world collapsed around him. One moment he was fighting to survive, the next everything simply… stopped. There was no pain, no darkness, only a strange silence that felt like floating between moments. When he opened his eyes again, he wasn't sure where he was. It felt like some kind of limbo, a quiet space between life and death where time itself seemed uncertain.
Then the world snapped back into focus.
He was standing on a familiar suburban street. The air smelled normal, the sky was calm, and birds chirped somewhere in the distance. Benedict slowly turned his head and froze when he saw the man stepping out of the house across the street. The rugged face, the tired posture, the unmistakable look of someone used to hard work. Joel Miller. The name came to him instantly. Benedict smiled faintly as the realization settled in his mind. If Joel was his neighbor, then there was only one place he could be.
Bending down, Benedict picked up the newspaper lying on the driveway. The date printed on the front page made his eyebrow rise slightly.
September 23, 2002.
He stared at the date for a moment before letting out a quiet breath.
"Hmm," he murmured.
"One year to prepare."
As he stood there thinking, something strange appeared in the corner of his vision. A faint interface, almost like an instinctive extension of his thoughts. With a simple mental command, he felt something open around him, not in the physical world but somewhere beyond it. A massive empty space stretched endlessly before him, a dimensional storage that only he could access. He instinctively understood its rules. Only non living things could be stored, and once something entered that space, time would stop for it completely.
Benedict focused deeper on the ability, feeling the strange connection between himself and the storage. The space inside was enormous, far larger than he expected. It felt like an entire city worth of empty ground waiting to be filled. By his rough estimation it was almost the size of New York City. He could sense every object he placed there, as if they were extensions of his own body.
"Interesting," Benedict whispered to himself.
With one year before the Cordyceps outbreak and an entire city sized storage space at his command, the game had just changed completely.
Four months had passed since the day Benedict opened his eyes in this new world. One thing had become clear to him almost immediately. He needed a safe place. When the infection spread, governments would panic. Some might even consider extreme measures like nuclear strikes on heavily infected cities. If that happened, survival would depend on preparation far beyond normal shelters. A bunker, supplies, security systems. All of that required money. A lot of money.
Unfortunately the body he now occupied belonged to a twenty two year old named Benedict Black, or simply Ben to most people. The young man's bank account contained exactly 1,200 dollars. His internship paid barely enough to cover food and rent. That kind of life would never allow the level of preparation Benedict needed.
So he used the only advantage he had.
His dimensional storage.
With it, moving goods across borders became almost effortless. Nothing could be detected, nothing could be confiscated. At first he started small, transporting expensive watches, jewelry, rare sculptures, and other valuables for wealthy clients who preferred avoiding taxes and customs inspections. But once word spread that deliveries always arrived safely, the work expanded. Soon the requests became darker. Drugs, restricted artifacts, sealed crates that nobody bothered explaining.
Benedict didn't care what was inside.
As long as the payment arrived.
Within a few months the numbers in his offshore accounts grew rapidly. Millions turned into hundreds of millions. Eventually the total crossed a number that would have seemed impossible before.
1.216 billion dollars.
He stared at the number once and simply nodded to himself.
That would be enough to begin.
Another advantage of his new life was the lack of attachments. The original Benedict Black was an orphan with no family responsibilities tying him down. No parents, no siblings, no one waiting for him to come home. That freedom allowed him to focus entirely on preparation.
Some people might wonder how he could think so coldly about everything he was doing.
The answer was simple.
Benedict had already lived one life before this one, and it had not been kind. Like Joel's past in the series, his own world had never been filled with sunshine and happiness. Violence had shaped most of his memories. In fact, according to psychology textbooks, people like him had a name.
Sociopath.
He did not experience emotions the same way others did. Fear rarely stopped him. Guilt rarely slowed him. His mind could step outside the usual boundaries of society, culture, and morality without hesitation.
And in a world that was about to collapse…
That mindset might be the greatest advantage he had....even greater than the ability he has.