By the time night settled in, the city's neon lights were flicking on one by one.
Ethan stepped out of the lottery shop.
The wind at the corner carried the smell of street food grease and the dampness unique to a summer night.
His pocket was heavier by only one thing—a slip of paper so thin it was almost nothing.
[Super Lotto Issue 4624]
[Bet Time: July 17th, 2128 – 19:36]
Eight numbers lay quietly on the ticket.
He felt no excitement.
No bubbles of "I'm going to be rich."
All he felt was—
A grounded, steady sense of finally getting his hand onto the gear teeth of fate.
He glanced at the time on his phone.
19:38.
"One year and one day," he murmured silently. "The countdown starts now."
He raised a hand and hailed a taxi.
"Back to the hotel."
The air conditioning in the business hotel lobby was a bit too strong.
The receptionist's smile was standardized corporate perfection.
"Welcome back, sir."
He nodded and took the elevator upstairs.
The door beeped open with a soft click.
He tossed the card onto the desk and leaned his back against the door, standing there quietly for a few seconds.
In one single day, he had done things he never managed to do in his previous life—not even before he died.
He'd divorced.
Cut out a rotten life.
Adjusted company cash flow.
Locked in the eight numbers of an eight-hundred-million jackpot.
But none of that was what truly made his heart race.
What really mattered was—
The vast, empty, endlessly expanding warehouse space in his mind.
He shrugged off his jacket and hung it over the back of the chair, then took a quick shower.
When the hot water hit his skin, his eyes closed on their own.
During the Great Freeze, water was a luxury.
During the Great Heat, even cold water felt like fire.
Then came the acid rain, the endless night, the virus, the demons…
Scenes of the apocalypse—compressed like a brutal highlight reel—flashed one after another in his mind.
He opened his eyes and forced it away.
"This isn't the time for flashbacks."
Right now, it was time to set the board.
He wrapped a towel around his waist, walked out, got dressed, and sat on the edge of the bed.
Outside, city lights slipped through the half-closed curtains, broken into blurred blocks on the carpet.
He drew in a deep breath.
"Let's begin."
The next second, his consciousness sank into the sea of his mind.
The warehouse lit up again.
A vast, white, endless space—no ceiling, no visible boundary.
The only recognizable object was the familiar floor-length mirror standing alone in the center.
He had already confirmed a few things:
This place could store any non-living object.
Time stopped here—things stayed fresh forever.
As of now, his perception range covered a two-kilometer radius around him; as long as his will locked onto something, he could pull it into storage.
The upper limit of the space was… unseen.
But up until now, all his tests were simple:
Put things in.
Take things out.
Like someone who just got a driver's license and only circled the training lot twice.
Now he wanted to know—
How fast this car could really go.
He opened his eyes. The hotel room came back into focus.
The bedside lamp.
The desk.
The chair.
The floor lamp.
The suitcase.
The coat hanger.
The trash bin…
Every object in his sight turned into something like a selectable "icon" in his awareness.
His will tightened around them.
The room went strangely, eerily quiet.
He exhaled slowly.
His consciousness sank back into the warehouse.
The moment he looked, he almost laughed out loud.
The once-empty white floor now held the entire hotel room, taken apart and laid out:
The mattress propped upright to one side.
The headboard, bedside tables, lamps, trash bin, round stool, spare pillows, towels, disposable slippers—
all neatly placed, even the hotel logo on the slipper bag clearly visible.
He couldn't help smiling.
"Room demolition ability—approved."
He didn't rush to restore anything.
Barefoot, he stepped across the now-empty carpet and walked to the window.
Outside, the city center was wide awake.
Streetlights, headlights, pedestrians, a convenience store at the intersection, and a chain supermarket diagonally across the street—all in full view.
He placed a hand on the window sill and closed his eyes.
This time, he deliberately pushed his awareness outward.
If his earlier perception of the two-kilometer range was just a rough, blurry "map", now he switched to fine detail mode.
The texture of the hallway carpet outside the room.
The mop, cleaning liquid, and tissue boxes in the janitor closet.
Suitcases, laptops, and clothes in other guest rooms.
The cold steel plates in the elevator.
Sofas, tables, decorative pieces, giant flower pots, and soil in the lobby.
Through the glass—rows of shelves in the convenience store across the street, stacked with bottled water, drinks, canned food, chips.
Further still, high racks in the 24-hour warehouse supermarket at the end of the main road—pallets loaded with bottled drinks, cooking oil, instant noodles…
All of it appeared in his "mental field of view" as densely packed points of light.
Every point represented something that could be locked and taken.
Something inside him trembled faintly.
"If I wanted to," he thought,
"I could strip this entire area clean right now."
The thought surprised even him for a second.
Then his lips quirked upward.
He wasn't actually planning to do something that stupid and instantly world-breaking…
but knowing the ability could do it made his heart beat faster.
He pulled his awareness away from the city and shrank it back to the hotel.
The hallway.
The janitor closet.
Some unremarkable items in the lobby.
He deliberately avoided guest rooms and areas directly under surveillance and instead targeted—
The old mop beside a fire extinguisher.
An unopened box of trash bags in a corner.
A stack of tissue packs behind the front desk.
A small utility cart no one was paying attention to in the lobby.
"Small scale first," he told himself.
His will tightened again.
—
Inside the warehouse, those items appeared instantly, like icons dragged into a folder:
The mop leaned against a wall.
The trash bags stacked in their box.
The tissues piled neatly.
The cart parked intact by the side.
"Good."
He opened his eyes.
In reality—
The utility cart was gone from the lobby corner, leaving a strangely empty patch of floor under the light.
The mop at the janitor closet entrance had vanished; the cleaner would probably swear about it later.
The box of trash bags was now simply an empty carton.
But it was late; the hallway was quiet, the receptionist was on her phone, and the cameras weren't perfectly angled.
All of this was still within the "won't be noticed immediately" safety zone.
"Range, precision, delay—no major issues," he murmured.
Excitement burned up his spine.
He dove back into the warehouse and watched the once-empty floor fill up:
A full hotel room's worth of furniture.
Cleaning supplies.
Several boxes of consumables.
Bits and pieces scattered around, chaotic but extremely real.
He traced shapes in the air, sketching a future layout.
"This area will be for daily necessities."
"This will be food."
"This is medicine."
"This is gear…"
The more he imagined, the hotter his blood ran.
"This isn't a warehouse," he whispered.
"This is an ark big enough to hold a city."
"And it can keep filling. Without limit."
His gaze chilled, then sharpened like a blade.
"When the apocalypse hits, I'll use what's stored here to decide who lives…"
"And who doesn't."
"In that future, I'll be God."
After riding the wave of exhilaration once, he forced himself to calm down.
He knew this kind of feeling was dangerous—
a normal man suddenly holding a cheat code could lose control easily.
He went back to the desk and picked up the hotel notepad, ready to write the first draft of his Warehouse Rules.
The pen had just touched the paper when his phone vibrated.
[Breaking News Alert]
[Multiple Central City Shops Report Mysterious Inventory Loss – No Suspects on Camera]
The headline was flashy.
His eyes narrowed. He tapped it open.
The report was cautious in tone:
Around 22:10, a clerk at a 24-hour convenience store discovered that about one-third of the bottled water, soft drinks, and canned foods on two shelves had "vanished into thin air" during a routine stock check.
Security footage from 21:00 to 22:00 showed only two customers entering the store, neither of whom had gone near those shelves.
Meanwhile, a warehouse-style supermarket less than a kilometer away reported a full pallet of drinks missing from the cold aisle—no one had touched it in the footage.
Shortly after that, a nearby courier distribution center reported that three boxes of goods had disappeared from a staging area.
Three incidents.
Similar timing, close distance.
Police had opened an investigation, initially suspecting system errors or internal mismanagement.
The comments were already exploding:
"This is creepy as hell."
"Supernatural event?"
"New high-tech theft?"
"A whole pallet went missing and they blame the computer?"
He finished reading and went quiet for a few seconds.
His eyelid twitched.
"Convenience store… warehouse supermarket… courier hub…"
He closed the article slowly.
In his mind, the earlier test replayed itself frame by frame:
Standing by the window.
Spreading his awareness across a two-kilometer radius.
Shelves, pallets, and stacked boxes lighting up in his mental vision.
At the time, he only wanted to see how far he could sense.
And out of habit—
He'd locked onto a few points and pulled.
"…"
He closed his eyes and dropped back into the warehouse.
There, next to the hotel items, stood a section that looked completely different in style:
Drink boxes printed with a chain supermarket logo.
Corrugated cartons with courier company barcodes.
Large snack bags printed with a convenience store's logo…
All piled together in a messy chunk, as if a piece of someone else's warehouse had been cut out and thrown in here.
He crouched, opened a box, and picked up a can of soda.
The ring-pull was intact.
Production date: within the last week.
The coldness in his palm was real.
"…So that's how it is."
No ghosts.
No invisible thieves.
No mysterious black tech.
It was him.
That one little test just now had casually ripped a few chunks of inventory from nearby stores and storage centers.
He stood up and looked at the messy pile.
The flush of excitement from earlier cooled, slowly but steadily.
It wasn't guilt.
It was a brutally clear sense of danger.
"If I keep doing this…"
He ran the chain of consequences in his mind:
"Police will tear through every frame of camera footage."
"Media will lock onto follow-ups."
"If similar incidents pile up, a special investigation unit will be formed."
"Warehouses, logistics hubs, chains—everyone will upgrade cameras and install new sensors."
"People's behavior and expectations will shift. They'll stock more. Panic earlier."
"And all of that…"
"All of that would change the rhythm of society over the next year."
His biggest advantage after rebirth was that he knew what the next year and one day would look like.
If he started shaking the timeline himself—
then all those "precise predictions" would become less precise.
"I can't do this kind of thing," he told himself firmly.
"Not because stealing is morally wrong."
"But because—"
"This would screw up my plan to rewrite fate."
On impulse, he tested something else—
could he reorganize the items inside the warehouse with his mind alone?
His will moved, and all the items shifted instantly according to the zones he'd imagined earlier.
He didn't need to count.
He didn't need to sort.
Everything inside the warehouse—type, quantity, location—existed in his awareness as clearly as an extension of his own body.
He pulled his consciousness back and opened his eyes.
The hotel room remained empty—the floor bare, the bed stripped.
His phone lit up again.
The news was still pinned at the top, updated with more photos.
Someone had posted a picture of the empty shelf gaps in the convenience store.
Neatly arranged products, with two awkward holes in the middle—ridiculous and eerie at the same time.
He flipped the phone face-down on the desk.
Then picked up the pen again and wrote on the notepad:
[Warehouse · Rules]
Do not casually strip public resources from the real world.
Especially not from highly visible, immediately noticeable civilian channels
(supermarkets, gas stations, logistics hubs, pharmacies).
All long-term supplies must be purchased with money.
Even if it costs more. Even if it requires extra steps.
As long as something is bought legally, it will never appear as a mysterious "inventory loss" in any system.
Only after "order collapses" may unowned goods and enemy supplies be taken without limits.
Especially weapons, ammunition, military gear, heavy equipment.
After writing the three main rules, he added a line at the bottom:
[Rules may be adjusted if necessary, but "keeping the ability hidden" is always the top priority.]
When he finished, he noticed his knuckles were a bit tight.
He slowly relaxed his hand, leaned back in the chair, closed his eyes, and repeated silently:
"Don't abuse it."
"Don't abuse it."
"Don't abuse it."
Only after the rules felt firmly imprinted in his mind did he take a fresh sheet of paper.
This one wasn't for listing mistakes.
It was for—
[Warehouse · Ark · Supply List V1.0]
His pen moved quickly.
Food: rice, flour, noodles, compressed biscuits, canned food, energy bars…
Water: bottled water, large water drums, filtration gear, filters…
Energy: diesel, gasoline, gas tanks, solar panels, portable generators, power banks, batteries…
Medical: basic meds, antibiotics, painkillers, fever reducers, bandages, disinfectants, suturing kits, basic instruments…
Protection: sleeping bags, cold-weather gear, waterproof outerwear, gas masks, goggles, gloves…
Tools: multitools, axes, saws, shovels, rope, carabiners, emergency lamps…
Construction: planks, steel pipes, insulation material, tarps, tents, modular housing units…
Information: paper maps, notebooks, stationery, backup electronics, offline data archives…
In his last life, he'd been dragged along by the apocalypse.
This life, he was going to stock for ten years of doomsday ahead of time.
Halfway down the list, he stopped and wrote a single line at the top:
[Goal: Build a base supply reserve capable of supporting a "nation-level" population on the ark.]
"Not a small stash for one family," he thought.
"But enough to feed people."
"Enough to negotiate terms."
"Enough to trade food, medicine, and energy for the right to reshape the future order."
He chuckled under his breath.
"So I don't need a few million. Or tens of millions."
"I need billions."
Tens of billions, if possible.
Enough to buy all of this legally in the last year before doomsday and quietly pack it into his warehouse.
When the Supply List V1.0 was done, he stored it together with his earlier "Errors & Opportunities List" in the warehouse.
Two sheets of paper sat quietly on the endless white floor.
Two freshly planted foundations of a future civilization.
He glanced at the vast, still mostly empty space again.
"Right now, this is all small-scale."
"When the eight hundred million comes in… that's when round one of stockpiling begins."
"Then round two. Round three…"
"Until one day—"
"This entire space will be filled with the bones of a world's survival."
—
He withdrew from the warehouse and stood, walking to the window.
Night had grown deeper.
Traffic in the city center had thinned to a trickle—just a few cars waiting at red lights.
The convenience store sign was still lit.
The supermarket's cold storage lights flickered faintly behind the building.
Those shelves and pallets, because of his "little misclick," had empty patches tonight.
Soon, staff would tidy them up, reorder inventory, and fill them again.
Life would go on as usual.
News feeds would move on to the next scandal or gossip.
Only he knew—
That the "missing" items weren't lost.
They had simply been loaded early… onto an ark no one else could see.
"Sorry about that," he thought calmly, watching the city.
"Let's call this my tuition fee."
"In the future, I'll use proper money and buy out your competitors instead."
He checked his phone.
The date on the screen had quietly rolled over.
[July 18th, 2128]
One year until the Great Freeze.
Two days until the lottery draw.
"From today on," he told himself,
"making money isn't about living like the rich."
"It's about building an ark for the end of the world."
He pulled the curtains fully shut.
The room sank into a soft, dim gloom.
The bed was still stripped bare. He didn't bother reconstructing everything.
He just pulled a single blanket out of the warehouse, spread it on the floor, and lay down.
The carpet was a bit hard.
The blanket was a bit thin.
But when he closed his eyes, he was more at ease than he had been in years.
Because he knew—
This time, he wasn't being dragged along by fate.
He had a timeline.
He had leverage.
He had an ark.
The real preparations were only just beginning.