# Chapter 1: The Weight of Regret and a Second Chance
The rain was the kind that didn't care about you.
Not the dramatic, cinematic rain that falls in sheets while the hero screams at the sky. This was the other kind — the cold, patient, Central Valley kind that gets into your socks and stays there, that turns the dirt paths behind Ripon Cemetery into something between mud and regret.
Michael Mueller was fifteen years old, and his father was dead, and he was pedaling a mountain bike through the worst of it because he didn't know what else to do with his body.
The funeral had been forty minutes ago. Forty minutes since the last handful of dirt. Forty minutes since Aunt Donna had squeezed his shoulder with both hands and said *we're here for you, sweetheart, we're always here* in a voice that meant it so completely that Michael had to leave before he broke apart in front of everyone. Uncle Garvey had just nodded — the kind of nod that carries more weight than a speech — and let him go.
They were good people. The best people. They'd take him in now, the way they'd always taken him in during the grey years before Dad got his life together, before the house in Ripon, before Stepmom Carrie and the smell of her lemon chicken on Thursday nights and the sound of Dad's laugh booming through the kitchen like a foghorn made of joy.
One year. He'd gotten one year of that.
One year of Dad showing him how to change a tire in the driveway, grease up to his elbows, grinning like the whole world was a carburetor he could fix. One year of Carrie leaving notes in his lunch bag — *Have a great day, kiddo!* with a smiley face that had too many eyelashes. One year of something that felt, for the first time in Michael's life, like a save point. Like the part of the game where the music changes and the world opens up and you think, *okay. Okay, I can do this.*
And then the save file corrupted.
A senseless attack. That's what the police called it. *Senseless.* As if the word explained anything. As if slapping a label on the worst thing that ever happened to you made it fit into a box you could carry.
Michael's bike hit a root and he nearly went over the handlebars. He caught himself, skidded, kept going. The forest path behind the cemetery was narrow and overgrown and he had no business being on it in the rain, but his legs wouldn't stop. His legs were the only part of him that still worked.
He reached the stream — the little hidden one that cut through the trees like a scar — and finally stopped. The bike clattered against a rock. Michael stood there, chest heaving, rain plastering his blond hair flat against his forehead, and looked up at the grey sky through the canopy.
"Why couldn't I have done something?"
His voice came out raw. Stripped. The voice of a kid who'd been pretending to be okay for three days straight and had finally run out of pretend.
"Why couldn't I have saved you, Dad? I just — I wish I could make things right. I wish I was *stronger.*"
The words weren't aimed at anyone. They weren't a prayer. They were just the sound a fifteen-year-old makes when the world takes the one good thing it gave him and doesn't even bother to explain why.
He hunched over, shivering, and the weight of it pressed down on him like a physical thing — like gravity had gotten personal.
And then the sky *screamed.*
The sound was wrong.
Not thunder. Thunder has manners — it rumbles, it rolls, it gives you a second to flinch. This was a guttural, tearing roar that shook the ground under Michael's feet and sent a flock of starlings exploding out of the trees like shrapnel.
Michael's head snapped up.
Something moved through the canopy — fast, impossibly fast, a dark shape trailing broken branches and a shimmer of purple smoke that hung in the air like a bruise. It was there and gone in less than a second, but the afterimage burned behind Michael's eyes: something jagged, something *wrong*, something that didn't belong in the same reality as mud and bicycles and funeral flowers.
A shriek echoed from the direction of town. Then a crash. Then another.
Michael's heart was slamming against his ribs so hard he could feel it in his teeth. Every survival instinct he had — which, admittedly, had been calibrated for pop quizzes and avoiding eye contact in gym class — was screaming at him to run.
He got on the bike.
He didn't know if he was riding toward safety or away from it. He just knew he had to *move.* Even if he was just an ordinary kid. Even if he was Level 1 in every stat that mattered.
The world twisted.
Not a sound. Not a flash. A lurch — like the moment at the top of a roller coaster when gravity forgets which direction it's supposed to pull. The rain vanished. The wind vanished. The metallic taste of grief that had lived on Michael's tongue for three days — gone.
Michael's eyes flew open.
He was lying in a bed.
Not his bed. A narrow, unfamiliar bed with sheets that smelled like old wood and something vaguely citrus. Warm morning sunlight filtered through a dusty window — *morning* sunlight, which was wrong because it had been late afternoon and raining and he'd been on a bike in a forest and his father was—
A small framed photo sat on the bedside table.
A man with kind eyes and grease-stained hands and a grin wide enough to park a truck in.
Dad.
Michael sat up so fast the bed frame groaned.
This was Dad's old room. The room in the Ripon house. The room Michael had woken up in on the very first morning of the year they'd had together — the year that started with hope and ended with a handful of cemetery dirt.
He was back.
He was *back.*
"What—"
The word came out as a whisper, because his brain was doing the thing it does when reality breaks — running diagnostics, checking connections, trying to reboot. He felt younger. Lighter. The bone-deep exhaustion of grief was gone, replaced by something electric and terrifying.
And then a blue screen appeared in front of his face.
It materialized like a pop-up ad from God — a shimmering, semi-transparent rectangle of light that floated in the air between Michael and the rest of the room. His eyes could focus through it to the wall beyond, but the text on it was sharp and clear and absolutely, certifiably impossible.
**[NAME: MICHAEL MUELLER]** **[AGE: 15]** **[LEVEL: 1]**
**[HP: 100/100]** **[MP: 50/50]**
**[STRENGTH: 5]** **[DEXTERITY: 6]** **[CONSTITUTION: 7]** **[INTELLIGENCE: 10]** **[WISDOM: 9]** **[LUCK: 3]**
**[SKILLS: (LOCKED)]** **[INVENTORY: (EMPTY)]**
Michael stared.
He blinked. He rubbed his eyes. He pinched his arm hard enough to leave a mark. The screen remained, hovering with the patient indifference of a loading screen that knows you have nowhere else to go.
*Stats. I have stats.*
*I have stats and my Intelligence is 10 and that's — that's average, isn't it. The game is literally telling me I'm average.*
*And my Luck is 3.*
*Three.*
The cold dread came first — the animal part of his brain screaming that this was a hallucination, a breakdown, the kind of thing that happens to people who ride bikes through rainstorms after burying their fathers.
But then the other thing came. The thing underneath the dread.
Hope.
Small and desperate and probably stupid, but *there* — lodged in his chest like a coal that refused to go out.
He was back. A year ago. The very first day. And something had changed. Something had heard the desperate, broken wish he'd screamed into the storm and answered it with — with *this.* With a game screen. With stats and levels and a Luck score that was honestly kind of insulting.
Michael's hands clenched into fists.
He didn't know how. He didn't know why. He didn't know if this was real or if he'd finally lost it. But he knew one thing with the absolute, bone-deep certainty of a kid who had just been given the cheat code to the only game that mattered:
He was going to save his father.
He was going to get stronger.
And he was going to need William.
Michael burst through the front door of the May house fifteen minutes later, still in yesterday's clothes, his blond hair sticking up in six directions, his eyes wild with the specific energy of a person who has either discovered the meaning of life or needs to be committed.
He didn't knock. He never knocked. The Mays had stopped expecting him to knock three years ago, around the same time William's mom had started buying the off-brand energy drinks Michael liked and keeping them in the basement fridge "just in case."
He took the basement stairs three at a time.
"Will! WILL! I need you! It's an emergency! A paradox! A whole-world-shattering—"
William May looked up from his handheld console with the expression of a man who has been interrupted at the final boss and is considering violence.
He was gangly in the way that fifteen-year-old boys are gangly when their bones have gotten the memo about puberty but their muscles haven't. Thick glasses. A t-shirt with a faded *Final Fantasy X* logo that he'd owned since sixth grade and refused to retire on sentimental grounds. He was sitting cross-legged on a beanbag chair surrounded by a fortress of empty soda cans, and he looked at Michael the way a cat looks at a vacuum cleaner.
"Dude. I'm at the final boss. Did your dad forget the cheddar again?"
Michael stopped.
The words caught in his throat like a fishhook.
*My dad is downstairs. Alive. Making breakfast. Alive.*
"My dad is—" He swallowed. "My dad is great. Look."
He focused, the way you focus on a word in a book when your eyes won't cooperate, and the blue screen flickered on — the impossible, hovering, *real* blue screen with his name and his stats and his Luck score of three.
William blinked. "Huh. You got something in your eye, Mike. Go splash some water on it."
"No, *look closely!*"
Michael leaned forward, angling the screen toward William's face. William squinted, his eyes darting between Michael's pupils, and then — slowly, like a sunrise happening behind his glasses — his eyes went wide.
"Whoa. Is that a contact lens projection? Did your dad get you the new Augmented Reality contacts? *Sick!*"
"It's not a contact! It's a *System Screen!*" Michael was whisper-shouting now, the way you whisper-shout when the thing you're saying is too insane for full volume but too important for actual whispering. "I'm back in time, Will! A year ago! And my life is now a *game!*"
William slowly put down his console.
He looked at Michael's face — the wild eyes, the earnest jaw, the complete and total absence of irony — and let out a long, slow breath through his nose.
"So you're saying that yesterday, you died, traveled back to the beginning of the plot, and now you have an *interface* that tells you your Intelligence is 10?"
"Exactly! Wait — how did you know my Intelligence was 10?"
William pointed to his own temple. "Dude. You've been talking about the stats for thirty seconds. It's literally floating right there."
Michael looked at the screen. **[INTELLIGENCE: 10].** He focused on the number, and a new window popped up with the enthusiasm of a tutorial that had been waiting its whole life for this moment.
**[INTELLIGENCE (INT): GOVERNS THE ABILITY TO PROCESS INFORMATION, MEMORIZE, AND COMPREHEND ABSTRACT CONCEPTS. VALUE 10 IS AVERAGE.]**
A long silence filled the basement.
William broke it with a grin that started slow and ended somewhere between Christmas morning and the discovery of fire.
"Average? Dude. You have a gaming cheat code for *real life*, and the first thing it tells you is that you're *basic.*"
Michael flushed. "It says *average!* And that's not the point! The point is, I can use this to get *stronger* and save my dad! And maybe everyone else! The attack that killed him — it was probably related to that weird purple smoke thing I saw right before I reset!"
William was already on his feet, pacing the basement with the manic energy of a man who has just been told that everything he's spent his life training for is real.
"Okay, okay, okay. This is a *LitRPG* setup. The game has begun. We need to figure out the *mechanics.*"
Michael was already trying to test his stats. He grabbed a nearby sofa cushion and tried to lift it one-handed with an intense grimace, channeling every ounce of heroic intent he could muster.
It was light as a feather. Because it was a cushion.
"Hmm. Feels... normal."
William rolled his eyes so hard his glasses shifted. "You don't need a System to lift a *pillow*, Mike. Try something logical. How do you gain EXP?"
Michael checked the **[LEVEL]** menu again.
**[CURRENT MISSION: LIVE A NORMAL LIFE. UNLOCK [SKILLS] AND GAIN 10 EXP TO REACH LEVEL 2.]**
"It says I need to unlock a skill and get 10 EXP."
"How do you unlock a skill?"
"I don't know!"
William pointed to a dusty, neglected weight bench in the corner of the basement — the one his dad had bought during a New Year's resolution that lasted exactly until January 4th. "In every RPG, gaining a skill requires *repetitive action* or a *Trainer NPC.* Start grinding!"
Michael, pumped by the anime logic, rushed to the bench and started doing bicep curls with the kind of focused intensity usually reserved for defusing bombs.
*One. Two. Three...*
After twenty shaky reps, he dropped the bar with a clatter. His arms burned. He looked at the screen.
**[STRENGTH: 5]** **[DEXTERITY: 6]**
Nothing. Not a single point. Not even a participation trophy.
"Maybe it's not physical strength yet," William mused, rubbing his chin with the gravity of a man solving the Riemann hypothesis. "You need to learn a *new concept.* Try to memorize something really hard. Find a book!"
Michael grabbed William's thick history textbook. He opened it to a random page about the Byzantine Empire and tried to read with total, desperate focus.
*...the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople established the Latin Empire...*
Five minutes of staring. Five minutes of his brain bouncing off the words like a tennis ball off a brick wall.
**[INTELLIGENCE: 10]**
Nothing.
"Aha!" William snapped his fingers. "Maybe it's not academic! The System is probably based on *intent.* You're a hero, Mike! You want to save people! Try doing a good deed, but with *intense heroic intent!*"
Michael nodded, his face deadly serious. He marched outside to the mailbox, where a few soggy flyers were jammed in the slot. With the fierce conviction of a protagonist saving the realm, he carefully pulled them out and placed them neatly on the front porch table so they wouldn't get wet.
He turned back to William, chest puffed out slightly. "There. Order restored. Was that enough?"
William checked the floating screen.
**[LUCK: 3]**
"Nope. Still a three. And it didn't even unlock **[CHORE BOY SKILL: LEVEL 1].**"
Michael deflated. He slumped onto the basement couch, running a hand through his damp hair, and for the first time since the screen appeared, the absurdity of the situation hit him full force.
He had been given a cheat code to save his father's life.
And the tutorial was *broken.*
"Okay, Will." Michael sat up, a new resolve settling into his voice — quieter now, steadier, the voice of a kid who was done panicking and ready to think. "We're doing this wrong. This is the first day of my second life. I'm going to go see my dad and stepmom, and then we're going to think like a *video game developer*, not a player. We need to find the starting quest marker."
William nodded, his eyes glowing behind his glasses. "A quest marker. Brilliant. Probably a person. Maybe a strange old man with a mystical artifact. Or a hot girl with a—"
"Or," Michael said, standing up, a sudden thought striking him like a critical hit, "it could be the only person who knows I have a System screen. Who also happened to be there when I got sent back."
He looked straight at William.
"*You.*"
William's jaw dropped.
"*Me?!* I'm the quest marker?!" A beat. Then, with dawning horror: "Wait. Does that mean I'm the *Non-Player Character?*"
Michael was already heading for the stairs, a grin breaking across his face for the first time in what felt like forever.
Behind him, William scrambled off the beanbag, scattering soda cans like bowling pins.
"Mike! MIKE! I am *not* an NPC! I am a *co-lead!* There is a *significant narrative difference!*"
The basement door slammed.
The game had begun.