The last thing Xavier Guan remembered was the glare of his six-monitor setup and the explosion of pain in his chest.
In the year 2031, he had climbed the country's wealth ladder.
An AI Architect built from the ashes of his youth. But status was a veil for his agony underneath. At thirty-one, his hair was already withering with gray, his eyes were permanently etched with the veins of exhaustion, and his heart would occassionally hurt from the multitude of supplements and lakes of caffeine he ingests. He had everything he thought he wanted. A glass-walled condo in Bonifacio Global City, luxury cars, and "Abyss". The first local AI nearing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) status.
He had spent his first life chasing the ghost of his family's lost reputation, working himself to the brink of insanity to buy back the respect that had been stripped from the Guan name decades ago.
And yet, he was dying alone. The heart attack visited and stayed.
One moment, he was debugging a kernel-level optimization for Abyss. The next, his chest erupted in agony. He had slumped over his ergonomic keyboard, his last thought was a bitter realization
"I have the wealth now, but I won't even live to see the sunset"
Then came the void. Silent.
---------------
"Xavi? A-Ba, why are you crying?" The voice was a thunderclap.
Xavier's eyes snapped open. The air-conditioned chill of his condo was gone, replaced by a thick, humid soup that smelled of industrial machineries, and the faint sweet scent of flowers and fruits from a nearby altar. The floor beneath him was hard concrete that felt cool against his skin.
He tried to gasp, but his lungs felt small—impossibly small. His breath came in ragged, high-pitched hitches.
"Did you have a nightmare?"
Xavier's head snapped up. His vision was terrifyingly sharp. No digital blur. Standing over him was a man he hadn't seen in the flesh since 2015.
Arthur Guan.
His father looked... impossible. In the past life, Arthur had died a broken man in 2015. He had been a shell of himself, his back bent by the weight of a bankruptcy. His spirit crushed by the shame of a legacy turned to ash. But the man standing here was in the prime of his life. His hair was thick, jet-black, and swept back with a pragmatic dab of pomade. He wore a starch-stiff polo shirt with the Guan-Tech logo embroidered over the heart, the sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular forearms.
Xavier didn't think. He didn't analyze the physics of time travel or the possibility of a neurological hallucination. He scrambled up, his short, chubby legs nearly tangling as he lunged forward. He threw himself at Arthur's knees. His small hands clutching the rough fabric of his father's trousers with a desperate, white-knuckled grip.
"Pa! Papa!"
Xavier let out a howl of pure grief. It wasn't the cry of a child who had scraped his knee, it was the scream of a man who had carried the weight of a long gone father. It was the sound of a soul that had miraculously found its way back.
"Whoa! Xavi!"
Arthur laughed, though his voice was laced with genuine alarm. He dropped a stack of invoices onto a nearby desk and scooped the boy up.
"What's all this? Did the LEGO blocks bite you? Or did you dream about a giant cockroach again?"
Xavier couldn't speak. He buried his face in his father's neck, inhaling the scent of his childhood. A mixture of Bench and Tide detergent. He was warm. He was *alive*.
"He's really crying, Arthur" a soft voice said from the doorway.
Xavier's heart nearly stopped. He turned his tear-streaked face toward the sound.
Clara Guan. His mother stood there, her face framed by soft waves. She was wearing a simple floral duster, a tray with two glasses of iced calamansi juice in her hands. She looked so young, her skin smooth and glowing. Devoid of the lines of worry and the pallor of the illness that would eventually take her.
"Ma.." Xavier choked out, reaching for her with a trembling hand.
"Oh, my poor baby" she said, setting the tray down on a side table and rushing over.
For the next twenty minutes, Xavier was held by both of them. He wept until his throat was hoarse.
To his parents, it was a particularly vivid nightmare. Perhaps brought on by the pre-monsoon heat.
To Xavier, it was the erasure of decades of regret. He was seven years old again. It was June 2007. The world was still bright.
Finally, the explosive sobs subsided into rhythmic, wet hiccups. Arthur set him down on the office's old leather sofa. Its surface peeling and it grossly sticks to his skin. But to Xavier, it was more comfortable than his past designer chairs.
"Stay here and drink your juice, Xavi"
Clara said, brushing a damp lock of hair from his forehead.
"Your father and I have to finish the month-end reports. The workers need to be paid tomorrow, and the bank wants to see the quarterly growth"
Arthur sighed, the weight of the business momentarily dimming the smile on his face. He walked back to his heavy wooden desk. It was piled high with ledgers, receipts, and a bulky CRT monitor that hummed with a buzz. Xavier watched them. His mind finally settling from the shock.
He began to operate with the analytical precision of the old architect he had been. He looked around the office.
This was the headquarters of Guan-Tech Industrial. Outside the window, the sun beat down on the iron roofs of General Trias, Cavite. Below them, the factory floor was bustling. The rhythmic thump and clatters of the stamping machines was a steady heartbeat. Guan-Tech was a mid-sized operation. Forty employees, six production lines, and a reputation for reliable hardware parts that spanned the province.
He looked at the open ledger on his father's desk.
*Gross Revenue: PHP 4,240,000*
*Operating Expenses: PHP 3,120,000*
*Net Profit: PHP 1,120,000*
To a seven-year-old, these numbers were meaningless. To Arthur, they represented his success.
Xavier remembered this period. This was the calm before the storm. Guan-Tech was profitable but it was headed for a trap. In the world of 2007, the price of raw steel was on a relentless climb. Driven by the insatiable hunger of a booming global. Arthur was likely planning to reinvest every peso into more inventory, thinking the prices would never stop rising.
But Xavier knew better. He knew that by the middle of 2008, the bubble would burst. The global financial crisis would turn that expensive inventory into a millstone around their necks. Only worth a fraction of what they paid for it.
And then there was the accident in Line B.
Xavier felt a sudden, familiar weight in his pocket. His breath hitched as he reached into the pocket of his cargo shorts and pulled out a slab of dark glass.
It was his 2031 phone.
It looked like an alien artifact in this room of documents. There was no brand name on the phone. It was a custom build commissioned to house Abyss. He tapped the screen.
It lit up instantly. No signal but the battery has an infinity sign. And a minimalist text prompt appeared in the center of the screen.
"STANDING BY"
*Abyss* Xavier thought. His heart hammered against his ribs. A young healthy heart that hadn't yet been ravaged by caffeine.
He whispered the activation phrase under his breath, his voice a mere ghost of a sound.
"Echo into the void"
The screen flickered. A stream of data began to scroll, faster than a human eye could follow.
"TIME DISCREPANCY. CURRENT TIME: JUNE 14, 2007, 2:45 PM"
"ARCHIVES FULLY ACCESSIBLE. DATA SNAPSHOTS UP TO 2031-03-07"
Xavier gripped the phone so hard his knuckles turned white. It was real. He wasn't just back in time; he had brought the sum of his life's work with him.
He looked at the CRT monitor on his father's desk. It was running Windows XP, the blue Taskbar a relic of a bygone era. The "Abyss" was a localized super-intelligence capable of generating entire software ecosystems, predicting market fluctuations with 98% accuracy based on historical datasets, and writing that could move a nation to tears.
But there was a problem. A massive physical problem. He looked at the phone's proprietary 2031 induction interface. He looked at the IBM clone on the desk with its clunky USB 2.0 ports. There was no bridge. No way to "upload" the future into the past.
Everything he wanted to build, every line of code for the factory's optimization, every web novel that would fund his early ventures, every song that would become a global hit. He would need to retype it until he finds a better option. He need to use his fingers to bridge the gap between 2031 and 2007.
"Xavi? Are you okay?"
Arthur asked, looking up from his calculator.
"What's that in your hand? Is that a new game?"
Xavier quickly slipped the phone back into his pocket.
"It's just a black stone I found outside, Pa. I like the way it feels"
Arthur smiled. His expression tired and distracted. "A black stone, huh? Just don't throw it at the factory windows"
Xavier stood up, his legs feeling steadier now. The grief had been replaced by a burning purpose. He walked over to the desk and stood beside his father, peering at the ledger.
"Pa" Xavier's voice quiet but firm. "The stamping machine in Line B... it's making a weird sound"
Arthur paused, his pencil hovering over the paper. He looked at Xavier, amused.
"Line B? How would you know that? You've been up here all afternoon"
"I heard it through the floor" Xavier lied.
In reality, he remembered this day. He remembered the date June 14th. In exactly twelve days, the main axle of the Line B stamper would snap due to a micro-fracture that had been ignored for weeks. The resulting friction would ignite the hydraulic fluid, causing a flash fire that would consume the entire production wing and injure three workers.
That accident, combined with the later collapse of steel prices, was what had truly killed Guan-Tech.
"It sounds like the lubrication is dry" Xavier continued, his eyes locked on his father's. "If you don't fix it, the heat will break the metal. I learned it from the science book you gave me"
Arthur laughed, ruffling Xavier's hair. "Look at you, my little engineer. I'll have Bert check it later, okay? After we finish the payroll. Now go play with your 'black stone' in the breakroom. It's cooler there"
Xavier didn't move. He looked at the CRT monitor, then back at his father.
*Later won't be enough, Pa* he thought.
He walked out of the office, his small sneakers squeaking on the linoleum. He didn't go to the breakroom. He went to a small corner of the factory mezzanine, hidden behind stacks of empty crates of steel bolts. He pulled out the phone.
"Abyss" Xavier whispered.
"Give me the top three trending topics for English-language web novels in June 2007. And Abyss... prepare an outline for an SEO-optimized blog network"
The phone hummed in his palm.
"IDENTIFIED TOPICS: VAMPIRES (TWILIGHT ERA), LITRPG (EARLY STAGES), URBAN FANTASY"
"OUTLINE GENERATING.."
Xavier stared at the screen as the text began to flow. Thousands of words. A fortune in the making.
He looked at his small hands. They would have to type until it ached. He was seven years old with a mystical phone.
This time, the Guan family isn't going to wane. This time, he is going to ride the wave of the future until he owned the ocean.
"Let's get to work" he whispered.
He reached for a discarded notebook and a pencil. He couldn't retype it all yet. He could start by copying the first chapter of his plan by hand, hiding it in his school bag.
This was the first brick in an empire that would eventually span from the factories of General Trias, Cavite to the world's shipping lanes.
The sun outside began to dip with golden shadows across the factory floor. The machines continued their thumping.
Xavier Guan, the man from 2031 had arrived.