Chapter 1: The Secret Room
Chapter 1: The Secret Room
Damp yellow stains bleeding through the concrete ceiling. A dying lightbulb flickering overhead.
A threadbare blanket that hadn't been washed—hadn't been cared for at all—and a bed cobbled together from scrap wood with nothing soft about it.
Cramped, impossible to stretch my legs, but safe. That was my world.
"What a shitty dream."
My world was never this comfortable.
My hips sank deep into the mattress the moment I looked down. Plush, springy.
The bedding was clean—no damp stink of mildew, just a soft microfiber blanket tucked neatly over me. The pillow was well-maintained, impossibly fluffy.
The floor, the walls, the ceiling—all spotless, done up in a modern black-and-white design.
A bright white light filled the room with warmth.
And on the wall: a massive TV, a current-gen game console, a computer, a little fridge—
Traces of civilization I'd accepted I'd never see again after the nuclear war.
Hope for things you can't have is the cruelest thing there is. So why was I dreaming this?
I curled up helplessly in the bed, desperately wishing I wouldn't even remember this when I woke.
Until hunger forced me awake.
I thought I'd snap out of it once I slept, but the gnawing emptiness wouldn't leave me alone. That awful sensation—stomach quivering, guts burning raw.
Normally I'd crack open one of the cans I'd scavenged from outside, but since I wasn't waking up, I had no choice but to shuffle over to the little fridge.
"Fuck. This is way too detailed."
Muttering to nobody didn't wake me up either.
Was this even a dream?
Maybe I was just another radiation-rotted mutant, slowly losing my mind, watching my life flash before my eyes one last time.
I pulled out a clean, cold can of cola—beads of condensation running down the side—and a pack of frozen fried rice. Looking closer, I spotted a small microwave on the other side of the room, opposite the huge TV, and a trash bin for scraps.
Real food. First time in ten years.
I cracked the can. A sharp hiss of carbonation, and then the sweet smell hit me all at once. I jammed my mouth against the rim, desperate not to waste a single bubble, and the fizz burned hard down my throat. The sugary taste hit my tongue and erased every pathetic thought about whether this was a dream. I emptied the fridge.
Soda, fruit juice, frozen fried rice, frozen chicken, spaghetti—everything. I shoved it all in until I thought my stomach might burst.
Greasy vegetables and rice crushing between my teeth, cold sweet carbonation sliding down my throat.
Decades after nuclear war wiped out humanity, I'd believed there wasn't a single edible thing left in the world. The shock of cold soda and hot grease made me pray I'd never wake up.
Until, eventually, I did.
But the bed and the food were still there.
No rusted, crumbling concrete—just clean wallpaper glowing white under the electric light. The food scraps from my frantic binge had vanished too. The room sat before me pristine, as if untouched.
"What the hell is going on..."
My voice came out cracked. Nobody answered.
About fifteen years ago, give or take. That was when the remnants of our little community got wiped out and I sealed myself into this underground box of a room alone. That long.
I stretched my stiff back—must've dozed off with a full stomach—and scanned the walls. Nothing had changed. The TV and computer, the light and white wallpaper, the fridge and the bed: all waiting for me exactly as before.
Wait. One thing had changed. The big wall-mounted TV and the computer monitor were flickering now.
Talking to myself never got me an answer. I knew that bone-deep. So I walked toward the blinking screens.
The low hum of electronics sent a chill crawling up the back of my neck. Mechanical noise in a dead world never meant anything good. I'd heard rumors about a generator running in some distant megashelter, but I'd never made it there myself.
Both screens flickered white in the same rhythm.
I crept closer, and text scrolled across the display, addressing me.
[Greetings, last survivor.]
"Who are you?"
[I am the Guide.]
"Guide? Are you going to tell me where this place is?"
A real exchange—actual human conversation for the first time in forever. My voice cracked and my throat stung, but I was too startled to care. If this was someone's prank, they were probably watching me right now, laughing at how desperately I waited for the TV to answer.
If cameras even existed in a dead world where even the canned food had gone bad.
Truth was, one cold can of soda was enough. I was already ready to forgive whoever had kidnapped me and dragged me here.
In a world where a single bloated, rotten can of food could start a brawl that got people killed, fresh cold soda was literally worth more than a life.
[Yes. Please direct your attention to the screen.]
A short electronic chime—beep—and the blank white screen filled with a map.
It looked like a satellite image of blue-green land, then it plunged through the clouds and kept descending. Uncontaminated green forests, brilliant blue oceans, pure white snow. Raindrops that didn't melt human skin. A desert that didn't poison everything alive.
One thing was certain: this landmass was not Earth.
No matter how much time had passed, the general shape of the world map couldn't have changed that much. Earth's continents were not donut-shaped.
There were plenty of small islands scattered around, but the main continent was undeniably a ring. A massive lake sat in the center like an inland sea, and the land wrapped around it in a circle. The screen rotated slightly and revealed it wasn't even a round planet—just flat land, stretching out.
"This is where I am?"
I'd watched radiation turn people into monsters after the nukes fell. But waking up in another world on a flat plane of existence? That hadn't crossed my mind.
[This is a garden for all that could not bloom.]
"That's a little abstract. Can you be more specific?"
I never knew talking to something intelligent could feel this good. The conversation was nothing special, but I caught myself grinning anyway. My cheek muscles trembled—how long had it been since I'd smiled?
[I am speaking literally.]
[The inhabitants of this world, those beyond the screen, are unfortunate geniuses—gifted souls who died before their talents could ever bloom.]
[And those of you on this side, by contrast, are the final survivors. People with no special talents, but who endured to the very end.]
"So there are others. People like me."
[Not people. Beings.]
[This is a garden for every possibility.]
[What you must do from now on is quite simple.]
The chime rang again, and this time the computer monitor beside the TV filled with a dense list, lines of text scrolling down the screen.
I sat down awkwardly at the desk and nudged the mouse. The smooth plastic under my fingertips felt strange—almost uncomfortable.
- Incarnation Selection Ticket [0pt]
- Armament Summon Ticket [0pt]
- Rye Bread [1pt]
- Milk 500mL [1pt]
An endless list sorted by price. Exactly two things were free. Below them sat piles of odds and ends, and further down, past the groceries, were things I couldn't make sense of at all—items with names as straightforward as "Elixir of Strength" and others as abstract as "Dark-Moon Shadow" that defied understanding.
[You will nurture those who never had the chance to bloom.]
"So what you're saying is... I use this TV and this computer, pick someone on the other side, and help them grow. Like raising a game character?"
I scrolled further down the list. Items like "1.5x Experience Coupon" were being sold for points—that part was easy enough to grasp.
People with talent who died before they could bloom, and people with no talent who survived anyway. Pair up the survivors with the talented dead, and hope the arrangement lets those gifted souls endure longer.
A survival mentor. Something like that.
On the screen, a strange distortion rippled through space, and a grotesque creature crawled out of it. A lump of flesh erupted from the heat-haze shimmer in the air, slammed into a car, and collapsed. From beyond the buildings, people came swarming over the rooftops.
Women charging in with swords and spears. Men in the back, clutching staves and chanting incantations. Women hauling bizarre shields and herding civilians to safety.
Men and women, young and old—all fighting monsters like it was routine.
Something felt off.
"Hey, do talents change depending on sex here?"
[I cannot parse the exact meaning of your question.]
"No, I just—everyone doing the physical fighting is a woman. Can women here not use magic?"
More than ninety percent of the people charging in with cold steel instead of guns were women. Conversely, over eighty percent of the people hanging back with staves, supporting or evacuating civilians, were men.
Sure, dimensional travel meant this was some fantasy world where guns and bombs weren't the standard. But even accounting for that, what I was seeing was clearly strange.
Rotating the view across the battlefield didn't change anything. On top of a collapsed building, shabby women in loose tank tops were hauling debris. On a billboard attached to an intact building nearby, a man in a sharp suit held a microphone and delivered a news interview.
[This is a difficult question to understand.]
[Most beings gathered in the Garden developed their civilizations on a matriarchal basis, with women at the center of society.]
[The world on the screen, therefore, developed according to their social norms.]
[Do you find something unusual?]
"No. It's nothing."
A female-centered civilization built on matriarchal structures. Matriarchal society—I thought I'd heard our own world went through something similar back in primitive times. Or was it the other way around? Men hunted, women gathered, men did the heavy lifting... this world was different.
Well. Aliens who could pull the last survivor of a dead world across dimensions and lock him in a windowless box room—was a little gender-role reversal really the weird part? For all I knew, the voice on the other side of that screen belonged to some jellyfish-looking creature with fifty tentacles.
[Each month, you will receive a base allotment of points.]
[The amount you receive will increase in proportion to the potential you cultivate in them.]
[If you wish for a life of comfort and luxury, I encourage you to apply yourself diligently.]
With that final line, the flickering text vanished. All that remained was the screen: people hauling away monster corpses, citizens emerging from the shelter.
...First, I wanted to finish my drink and sleep a little more. Sleeping without fear—truly at ease—was something I'd never done before.