[Time Reversal to the Beginning: 4 Years Earlier] [Countdown: 7 Days (168 Hours) Before Hell's Convergence with Earth] 3:30 a.m.
The alarm on a smartphone with a cracked screen shrieked a lively mor lam country song straight into Bing's eardrums. It was the kind of beat that made ordinary people want to get up and dance, but to Bing—a nineteen-year-old who had only just collapsed into bed at eleven—the sound was no different from the trumpet announcing his execution.
Bing reached over and slapped the phone screen to shut it off. He let out a huge sigh that hollowed his chest, then hauled himself up from a flat mattress barely thicker than a sheet of vinyl flooring. He spent three seconds mourning his Grade 12 diploma, sprawled inside a plastic folder under the bed—the certificate the education system had haunted him with, claiming it was a ticket to a bright future. By now, it had proven less useful than knowing the difference between basil leaves and Thai sweet basil.
“Bing! How long are you planning to sleep the day away? The first mixed-in basil pork customer is coming at six this morning! Get up and light the stove right now!”
The booming voice of Mae Wilit—a stout, imperious woman who wielded absolute power over the curry-and-rice shop beside Bueng Kaen Nakhon—pierced the plywood wall. Bing didn’t answer. He simply pulled on a stretched-out T-shirt, grabbed a brown apron that had once been white, and staggered out to the back washing area.
Bing’s philosophy of life was simple. He clung fiercely to the principle that Ordinary is the highest ideal. He didn’t want to become a billionaire, dream of being a world-saving hero, or build a life-changing startup. All he wanted was to eat three square meals a day without worrying whether the money in his account would cover the electric bill at the end of the month, and to get a full night’s sleep without loan sharks pounding on his door… Yet in a country where inflation ran faster than the speed of light and the welfare state arrived later than the collapse of the universe, Bing’s perfectly “ordinary” dream had become the hardest thing to reach.
4:15 a.m.
The Zebra Brand kitchen knife struck the tamarind cutting board in a steady rhythm. Chop… chop… chop…
“Bing, slice that pork belly thinner! What, you think pork costs twenty baht a kilo? You cut it that thick because you’re planning to feed the municipal bureaucrats until they burst?” Mae Wilit snapped as she stirred braised pork in a wide wok.
“Mom…” Bing answered in a flat, utterly deadpan voice. His hand kept mincing the pork without looking at the cutting board. “If I slice it any thinner, this pork belly won’t count as a nutrient anymore. It’ll become an ‘abstract concept.’ The customer will scoop it into their mouth, and before it even touches their taste buds, it’ll sublime into vapor under atmospheric pressure.”
“Don’t use your high-school vocabulary to argue with me! Keep slicing! And don’t forget to scrape the burnt gunk off the bottom of the wok. If you don’t get it all, you’re not eating breakfast!”
Bing sighed heavily. He looked down at the kitchen knife in his hand, its tip chipped by two millimeters after colliding with a pork bone the week before. It was the weapon he’d used to fight grassroots capitalism for months, ever since graduating.
The cooking continued until five-thirty. More than twenty dishes were beautifully arranged in the front display case. The scents of braised pork, green curry, and spicy stir-fry curry paste filled the air. But this morning… those smells were being invaded by something abnormal.
Bing carried two plastic bags across the cracked asphalt road toward the side of Bueng Kaen Nakhon. One held discarded vegetable scraps and pork bones. The other contained “secret provisions”: rice scooped from the bottom of the pot and topped with a couple of prepared dishes.
The surface of Bueng Kaen Nakhon usually reflected the roadside lights and the Nine-Tiered Phra That. Today, it looked dark and murky. Tight ripples shivered across it, despite there not being the slightest breeze. The eastern sky, which should have been beginning to glow orange, was covered by dark purple-black clouds and mist slowly spiraling like a colossal bruise on the skin of the world.
But the most nauseating thing was the smell.
It wasn’t algae or the stench of the drainage pipes the municipality had left to ferment. It was the metallic tang of rust mixed with the faint odor of rotting flesh, drifting through the mist… a smell that made the fine hairs on the back of Bing’s neck rise on instinct.
“Guess another factory’s secretly dumping wastewater into the lake. They sure are hard at work at five in the morning.” Bing muttered to himself, brushed off the prickling sensation, and walked straight beneath a large rain tree.
There, amid tree roots that had buckled and cracked the concrete walkway, an old man with tangled hair lay curled up on a sheet of cardboard. Grandpa Phoeng, a homeless man with no history. His clothes were ragged and layered so many times that it was impossible to tell what color they had originally been.
Most people thought Grandpa Phoeng was a lunatic who liked sitting around talking to the wind. But to Bing… this homeless man was the only person within a five-kilometer radius who could understand Bing’s bullshit, world-class-level logic.
“Well, Grandpa… today’s sidewalk-side Michelin-star omakase course features ‘Chinese-herb-boiled pork bones with practically no meat left on them’ and ‘catfish stir-fried with curry paste, sterilized by reactor-level heat.’ Interested in eating to drive up your body-mass index?”
Bing dropped the bag of curry and rice into the old man’s lap, then sat down on the concrete curb beside him and propped up his feet, perfectly at ease.
Grandpa Phoeng, lying still as a corpse, slowly stirred and opened one eye. Crusty sleep clung to it, but failed to dull the sharp glint within, keen as a hawk’s. He snorted loudly through his nose, sending the reek of a homeless man into the air.
“You little bastard…” His voice rasped like sandpaper on wood. “You brought me biological garbage to eat again. If you didn’t keep lacing it with curry paste spicy enough to destroy my intestinal lining, I’d have died of malnutrition a long time ago.”
Though his mouth cursed, his callused blackened hands and overgrown nails tore open the plastic bag at lightning speed. He pulled out a broken plastic spoon and shoveled rice into his mouth, chewing noisily without a shred of dignity.
“Come on, Grandpa… in a country where universal health coverage still only covers acetaminophen, taking in high doses of sodium and MSG counts as stimulating the peripheral nervous system through folk wisdom. Consider it my contribution to saving the public-health budget.” Bing gave a quiet snort of laughter as he picked up a dry twig and poked at the dirt.
This was Bing’s morning routine: sitting around trading barbs and listening to the old man tear into the social structure. But today, Grandpa Phoeng stopped chewing halfway through a bite. The old man raised his head, sniffed the air, then turned and stared at Bing with eyes wide and cold enough to be terrifying.
“Can you smell it, kid…” Grandpa Phoeng pointed his plastic spoon into the sky above the pagoda. “Those creditors up above… they’ve started sending the stench down to collect soul taxes. The dimensions are about to split open.”
Bing looked up. “If they really are coming to collect soul taxes, tell them my soul’s already mortgaged to the rent on Mom’s shop and this month’s electric bill. There’s nothing left to seize. Even if they send me an invoice, I’ll throw it in their faces.”
“Go ahead and laugh…” Grandpa Phoeng reached into the collar of his foul-smelling shirt and pulled out a knife. It was an ancient ritual knife, its handle made of wood carved with faded Khmer script. The blade was pitch-black and caked with rust, as if it had been soaking in water for ten years.
The old man shoved the knife into Bing’s hand. The metal’s icy chill shot through his palm, making him flinch.
“Take it… iron from a broken pagoda finial, mixed with coffin nails, soaked in graveyard love-potion oil. I’ve kept it for a long time.” Grandpa Phoeng spoke with a seriousness he had never shown before. “Sharpen it, Bing… because in a few days, the punishment for refusing to bow to those above won’t be having your curry pots confiscated. It’ll be having your guts pulled out and hung in the sun.”
Bing looked down at the rust-covered knife in his hand, then back at Grandpa Phoeng, who had returned to shoveling rice into his mouth as if nothing had happened.
“Pagoda-finial iron, my ass…” Bing muttered. “With rust this thick, if I use it to slice cabbage, the cabbage will die of tetanus before the customer gets to eat it… But whatever. I can use it to scrape the gunk off Mom’s wok when my knife chips again. Thanks, Grandpa.”
Bing stood, brushed the dust off the seat of his jeans, and hastily tucked the ritual knife into his waistband beneath his apron. Then he turned and walked back to the shop, leaving the dark-purple ring of mist above the lake in his sights once more.
Seven days… The strange number the madman kept repeating drifted into his mind.
But… when Bing passed beyond the concrete fence line of Wat Na Bueng and stepped onto the back washing area of his own shop—
Whoosh!
The air around him suddenly warped. The fluorescent light behind the shop flickered on and off. The crickets and cicadas that had been buzzing loudly fell silent all at once, as though a powerful hand had pressed the mute button on the world.
In front of Bing, beside the municipal wet-waste bins… a rat was rummaging through food scraps. But it wasn’t an ordinary rat. It was as big as a Siberian husky, its fur falling out to reveal bruised-purple skin. Its eyes bulged blood-red, and every time it opened its mouth, thick black drool dripped onto the concrete with a splat… Hiss! The concrete floor corroded, sending up wisps of white smoke.
The giant rat whipped around to look at Bing. Its blood-red eyes reflected the image of a deadpan young man standing there with an empty garbage bag in his hand.
But just as it was about to roar, a shrill electronic sound exploded inside Bing’s brain, accompanied by a crystal-clear, blood-red holographic window that popped into the air and slammed into his vision!
[Ding!] [Compatible spiritual network detected… Installation of the ‘Corrupt Heavenly System’ complete.] [Overlapping Dimension Alert: The human world has entered the countdown to consumption.] [Time remaining: 167 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds] [Hero’s Initial Mission Begins: Show your courage!] - Objective: Slay the ‘Abyssal Slave Rat (Rank F)’ to prove your worth to the heavens. - Reward: 50 EXP / Player Status / Free Stat Points +5 - Penalty for refusal/escape: Soul will be sucked immediately into the 18th pit of Hell!
Bing stood perfectly still. He didn’t scream, collapse to his knees in fear of the supernatural creature, or panic at the fantasy-novel-style System Window that had appeared in front of him.
The young man’s eyes slowly shifted from the holographic screen… down to the concrete floor of his mother’s washing area, which the giant rat’s acidic saliva had now eaten through into a hole the size of a noodle bowl.
The vein in Bing’s temple throbbed. Atomic-level rage shot straight into his brain—not because he feared the demon, but because of the economic damage!
“Abyssal rat, my ass…” Bing muttered through clenched teeth, his voice flat but carrying an aura of utter murderousness. “You see how your drool put a hole in my mom’s concrete floor? Do you know a mason’s day rate is five hundred baht these days? And they’re harder to get than a taxi in the rain!”
Roar! The giant rat bared its fangs and prepared to charge.
Bing didn’t back away. Instead, he angrily pointed at the red System Window hovering in front of him.
“And you, you shitty System! What the hell am I supposed to do with fifty EXP? Can I exchange it for cash to pay for the concrete repairs? You operate by dumping all the risk on a subcontractor, and you don’t even provide third-party damage insurance! Did you learn management from a bunch of bloodsucking capitalists?”
Bing drew a deep breath. His right hand slid down to grip the handle of the ‘rust-covered ritual knife’ Grandpa Phoeng had just given him.
“I don’t give a damn about your 18th pit of Hell… because if Mom wakes up and sees this hole, she’ll be the one chopping me into pork patties before your System even has a chance to do its job!”