1.1 - An Ending and A Beginning, All in One Day

There was no phone alarm blaring the way it should have been, an hour ago and counting. No pile-up of notifications from a dozen apps, each one shoving for his attention. And certainly none of the clatter from his ancient mechanical keyboard — the sound that had been this cramped apartment's heartbeat for two straight years.

There was only the hum of an old refrigerator, its door propped shut with a water-gallon jug, and the sour smell of spilled coffee that hadn't been wiped up in who knew how long.

A blade of sunlight forced its way through the gap in curtains that never quite closed. Ronald woke on a thin foam mattress, sunk in at the center, his head feeling like it had cracked wide open. As if a thousand nails were being driven in from the inside. His mouth was dry as sandpaper.

It was hard to believe the man was only thirty-five. Black hair already greying at the temples. A patchy beard that hadn't met a razor in nearly a week. A wrinkled white shirt he'd once bought for his very first job interview. A black tie hanging crooked, slipping to one side. And beneath it all, a weathered face lined with the fine creases of permanent exhaustion — though today, it simply looked wrecked.

—

Two years.

Had it been an investment, or had it all been for nothing?

Two years ago, he'd been a computer engineer people took seriously. A salary with two commas. An air-conditioned office. A future that looked guaranteed. And then he'd walked away from all of it — for one reckless idea he believed could change lives.

HOPEWELL.

A microfinance app that would let stall or local shop owners and small business operators across this developing country borrow fairly, without ever having to crawl to a loan shark and choke on the interest.

He hadn't hesitated. He'd given up nearly everything. Traded a nice apartment for a cramped box of a unit on the fourth floor of a building with no elevator. Sold the car he loved. Stopped eating out, period. Split a single pack of instant noodles between lunch and dinner, five days a week. Even his own living room had been gutted into a makeshift server room — three secondhand monitors, cables spilling out like tree roots, and a whiteboard crowded with algorithms he'd rewritten a hundred times over.

Day and night. Day and night, for two years straight. Month after month slipped by. His back ached permanently now. His prescription had climbed two degrees stronger. Meanwhile his friends had gotten married, had kids, started paying down mortgages… And here he still was — still wrestling with code that never seemed to end.

But he hadn't been alone. There was Jimmy, his best friend since college. Ronald was the brain; Jimmy was the mouth. While Ronald kept refining the app, Jimmy handled the pitching, the courting of investors. And there was Sora, the woman who'd been sweetening his life for two and a half years now. In Ronald's eyes, she was beautiful and endlessly patient. He'd already begun planning to marry her, just as soon as HOPEWELL found its footing and landed real funding. He trusted her so completely that he'd handed her every card, every bank passbook, even the login to every mobile banking app he owned. "You handle it, Babe."

And last night, it had finally felt like all of it was about to pay off. Ronald had never once heard Jimmy's voice shake with that kind of joy. "WE GOT IT, RON!!! FROM SANCALA! TWO MILLION VALLOR! They want to meet tomorrow — ten in the morning!" The tears came before Ronald could stop them, right there in front of his laptop, the only witness to how hard he cried.

Two million Vallor was, admittedly, a modest opening figure for fintech investment. But start-ups that actually landed funding — especially from a technologically advanced country like Sancala — were rare enough to count on one hand before the list ran dry. And once converted into Ruvin, the currency of Katuvia, the developing nation Ronald called home, the number turned genuinely staggering. Enough to buy up an entire housing cluster in a promising neighborhood. Enough for five or six sports cars. Invested wisely, it might not run dry for seven generations.

Time to pay Jimmy and Sora back, Ronald thought to himself. The two people closest to him in the world right now. He'd already started running the numbers in his head — how much equity he'd carve out for each of them.

—

A nightclub, a few blocks from Ronald's cramped apartment.

"TO RONALD! THE GENIUS BEHIND IT ALL!" Jimmy bellowed from on top of a table, hoisting the most expensive bottle in the place. His voice, already loud, was nearly swallowed whole by music thudding hard enough to numb the ears. Sora, wrapped in a blazing red dress, clung tight to Ronald's arm. That night, a man who in thirty-five years had never once touched alcohol drank more than he should have — simply because two years of held breath had finally exploded into joy.

By the time his consciousness had sunk to its lowest point, his vision spinning in slow circles, Jimmy slid a blue folder in front of him. "Bro, it's just a formality. Sign here, here, and here. So it clears faster."

Sora rested her chin on Ronald's shoulder, whispering something as sweet as the wine on her breath. "Just sign it, babe. I'm sleepy — I just want to go home with you..."

Without a shred of suspicion, hands trembling from drink and from feeling, Ronald scrawled his signature. One page. Two. Three. He didn't read a single line — he wasn't capable of it anymore. Besides, how could he possibly suspect the two people he already considered family?

After that, everything went black.

—

9:40 in the morning.

A calendar alert rang out sharp and loud from his cracked phone screen: INVESTOR MEETING, 10 AM.

Ronald, still fighting the war raging inside his skull, jolted upright and sprinted for the small shophouse that served as their office. He couldn't get in — the steel shutter was sealed behind a brand-new padlock, still gleaming. Ronald pounded on it. "JIM!!! JIMMY! OPEN UP! WE'RE GONNA BE LATE!"

Silence.

Panicking, Ronald called Jimmy. The line rang once before dropping straight into voicemail. Confusion drained the color from his face. Jimmy had blocked him. But why? He tried Sora next. Number unreachable.

While the questions were still flooding his mind, his phone buzzed. An email from Jimmy:

Starting today, HOPEWELL's mine. You're out. Don't bother showing up again. Oh — Sora says hi. Thanks for the savings.

Breath caught in his throat, Ronald opened the attachment. A scanned copy of the documents he'd signed the night before.

Deed of 100% Rights Transfer.

Ronald sank onto the curb, right on top of a black storm-drain grate that reeked. For a moment, his legs forgot how to hold him up. His white shirt, already filthy, was now a color that defied naming. Fifteen minutes passed. An hour. Two hours. People kept moving around him — motorbike taxis, meatball cart vendors, schoolkids laughing their way somewhere. Everyone was in motion. The world kept turning. Only Ronald had stopped, drowning in something he couldn't even find the words for. Inside his head, a dark voice looped, taunting him.

You idiot, Ron. Two years — for what?

—

Two in the afternoon, the heat scorching.

He was still sitting in the same spot. Then, out of nowhere, one name surfaced in his mind: Sora. Maybe Sora could explain. His last hope, in the middle of despair.

Ronald pushed himself upright, swaying, legs numb beneath him, and walked a full hour under the two o'clock sun to reach Sora's boarding house. The future looked so bleak inside him now that he couldn't even bring himself to spend money on a motorbike taxi. Sweat poured down in sheets, plastering his ragged shirt to a body that already reeked.

When he spotted the neighborhood watch post across from the alley leading to Sora's place, he stopped. From there, her door was in clear view. Ronald settled in behind the post and watched.

Not even twenty minutes later, Sora emerged — still in last night's red dress, but her hair now styled, her makeup fresh. Laughing freely, her hand looped through the arm of a man in an expensive shirt, a showy oversized watch on his wrist, a white car waiting at the curb.

Just as she reached the car door, Sora happened to glance toward the watch post where Ronald sat hidden. Her eyes met his — his, wrecked and hollow. No shock crossed her face. No guilt, either. Just a flat, cold stare, followed by the faintest, cruelest curl of a smile. Then the car pulled away, leaving a trail of dust behind.

Ronald sat frozen. Was this the real Sora? While he'd been coding through days and nights, had the woman he adored been living an entirely different life — funded by his own card?

The legs that had already been forced through that long, punishing walk gave out on him all over again. Ronald simply sank into the plastic chair at the watch post, no idea how long he sat there. He'd stopped caring for himself.

The sky shifted to a grayish orange, then went dark. One by one, the streetlamps flickered on by themselves. The alley to Sora's place stayed empty. Sora never came back.

—

Eight at night. A light rain began to fall. Ronald was still there. Ragged. Alone. The street in front of the alley grew emptier, slick now with rain. The dim yellow glow of the streetlamp shimmered across the wet asphalt.

And it was in the middle of that drizzle that Ronald saw it.

From the dim far end of the alley, a large wooden cart emerged, piled high with secondhand books and covered by a plastic tarp torn through in several places. The cart creaked along slowly, its crooked wheels squealing against the wet pavement. Only once it reached the mouth of the alley, where it opened onto the main road, did the figure pushing it come into view.

An old man, bent nearly double, maybe somewhere in his seventies. His hair had gone fully white, a battered hat on his head, his trembling hands pushing the cart forward at a painful crawl. His feet dug into the ground, straining for every extra ounce of push he could give it. Now and then his feet slipped on the rain-slicked road. And now, the old man was fighting to haul his cart across the main road in front of the alley.

The cart had no light, not even a reflector. Its wood had long since gone black with age. In the drizzle and the dark of night, it was almost invisible — nothing more than a faint shape, a black shadow crawling along.

Ronald, who'd been staring blankly into nothing this whole time, suddenly snapped into focus. Because from the opposite direction, from a bend in the road some distance off, he caught the glare of headlights — blinding, and coming fast.

A massive truck. Barreling down the slick road. Almost certainly, its driver had no way of seeing the old man and his cart. No horn sounded — not once. The truck kept charging forward at full speed, rainwater kicking up in sheets from its tires.

The old man was already dead center in the road. The truck showed no sign of slowing. It kept closing the distance — only seconds left now.

Ronald's mind, trained for years to run through logic and probability, arrived at the answer in a fraction of a second: the old man was going to die. Crushed on impact.

There was no one else around. No one to scream a warning. Something inside Ronald — something that had been dead all day — suddenly flared back to life. Adrenaline surged through his entire body.

With no time left to think, without a shred of hesitation, and with every last desperate ounce of strength he had, Ronald screamed, "WATCH OUT, GRANDPA!!"

The old man turned, confused, his aging eyes not even registering the truck through the rain. Ronald ran — ran as hard as he could across the slick pavement, his bare feet already raw and blistered. As if he'd never once run in his entire life until this moment.

Three seconds before the truck slammed into the cart, Ronald reached him. With every remaining scrap of strength in his body, he shoved — not the cart, but the old man himself. The two of them went sprawling into the ditch at the roadside.

CRASH!!!

The sound of the collision was deafening.

The massive truck struck the old man's wooden cart head-on. The wood shattered into wreckage. Secondhand books — hundreds of them, at least — burst into the cold night air, scattering through the rain, soaked, torn, flung in every direction like dead birds falling from the sky.

The truck never even slowed. It vanished into the rain, perhaps never even realizing what it had just struck. All that remained was a thick, heavy silence, broken only by the drizzle falling softly onto the books scattered across the road.

Ronald lay in the ditch, in the mud, arms wrapped tight around the old man. His breath came in ragged gasps. For the first time all day, his heart was pounding hard — not from despair this time, but from pure adrenaline.

The old man shook violently in his arms, coughing — but alive.

And among the scattered, rain-soaked books lying in the road, under the yellow glow of the streetlamp, one book stood apart from the rest. Its cover was made of thick leather, embossed with a golden wolf that glimmered faintly even soaked through with rain.

The book lay open on the ground, its pages casting a faint golden shimmer across the puddle it rested in.

Ronald's gaze locked onto it. His breath still came ragged.

The night had only just begun.