The room was quiet.
Paris outside the window was relatively quiet as well.
Lio had been lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling for—he glanced at the broken watch on his wrist—for an amount of time he couldn’t determine, because his watch didn’t work.
He stared at the ceiling.
The ceiling wasn’t doing anything particularly interesting.
It was just a ceiling.
White.
Ordinary.
Without any useful information.
He sighed.
“Alright,” he said to himself in the tone of someone holding an official meeting with himself.
“Let’s review today.”
“I woke up in an alley.”
“That was a new and exciting experience I hadn’t planned for.”
And also…
“I discovered that my watch—the one I spent four years building, four years of my life, four years of late nights, equations, and components I bought with my allowance—has become temporarily useless junk.”
Good .
“I discovered that my body decided to become three years younger without consulting me.
Thank you very much, spatial storms, for this wonderful gift.”
He got out of bed, sat on the edge of the bed, and took out the watch.
He examined it in the faint light coming through the window.
The rings were motionless.
The golden points were barely visible, their glow extremely faint.
“You know this is all your fault,” he said to it in a completely neutral tone.
“I want you to know that.”
The watch didn’t respond.
“I know you protected me.
And I know that drained your energy.
And I’m grateful.”
“But I would be even more grateful if I weren’t in Paris right now.”
“Wait…
why should I even be grateful?
I’m the one who built you in the first place.
I’m the one who created the automatic defense system.”
He placed the watch on the table and began examining it with careful fingers in the darkness.
The internal system was intact—that much was clear from the way it felt.
The system hadn’t suffered any damage.
It was simply completely drained of energy, and the shields were destroyed.
The problem?
Recharging and repairing it required very specific components.
The components required money.
Money required a job.
A job required an identity.
An identity—
“Lio,” he said to himself calmly, “you’re in a country that isn’t yours, in a fifteen-year-old body, with no identity, no money, no phone, and you don’t speak French.”
This was really something.
“Excellent.
This is truly a wonderful situation.
I’m proud of myself.”
He lay back down on the bed.
The ceiling was still white, ordinary, and completely useless.
“The positive side,” he said in the tone of someone desperately trying to find a silver lining.
“The positive side is…”
He thought.
“The bread was genuinely good.”
He thought some more.
“And dinner was good too.”
He thought even harder.
“The room is clean.”
And…
well, that’s it.
“That’s all I’ve got.
Three positive things in a day where everything else was a disaster. New chapters come out on g.com first.
Excellent ratio.”
He closed his eyes.
He tried to sleep.
His brain refused to cooperate.
His brain—which hadn’t stopped working since he regained consciousness in the alley—decided that now was the perfect time to review every equation from the experiment and find the mistake that had brought him here.
“Not now,” he told his brain.
His brain didn’t listen.
Of course it didn’t.
After an unknown amount of time spent staring at the ceiling and thinking about equations that couldn’t solve anything right now—
He heard a strange, faint sound from outside the window.
He got up and walked to the window.
The street was almost empty at this late hour.
But above him—in the sky—something was moving incredibly fast between the buildings.
Something red and black.
It disappeared before he could see it clearly.
He quietly rubbed his eyes and said, “Maybe I should sleep.”
Then he returned to his bed.
He lay down.
He stared at the ceiling.
“Alright,” he said slowly.
“That…
was definitely my imagination.”
“Because, as far as I know, there is nothing supernatural on this planet.”
He said it with complete confidence.
And for the first time in hours, sleep slowly began to come.
The last thought that crossed his mind before he drifted off was:
I should have run a smaller test first.
End of Chapter Nine