Tokyo, Bunkyo Ward.
Past one in the morning, most of the apartment building had already gone dark.
Only one bedroom still held a stubborn pool of light.
A desk lamp shone over scattered notes, empty coffee cans, and a laptop screen filled with half-finished text.
The soft clatter of typing continued for a long while, then finally stopped.
The boy at the desk leaned back in his chair.
“One in the morning…” He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, his eyes sore from staring at the screen.
“My eighteenth birthday passed just like that, and I still haven’t finished the manuscript.”
He gave a tired laugh.
“What a disgrace to all my seniors.”
His name was Tachibana Hibiki.
Eighteen years old.
And also a transmigrator.
It had been eighteen years since he arrived in this world, a place almost identical to his previous life, yet subtly different in countless ways.
Unfortunately, despite possessing the supposedly glorious title of transmigrator, he had achieved nothing worthy of it.
No empire built from scratch.
No secret organization founded in the shadows.
No business monopoly.
No political ascent.
No shocking technological revolution.
The only thing barely worth mentioning was that, by relying on fragments of memories from his previous world, he had become a mildly successful high school author.
Mildly successful.
That phrase alone was enough to wound the soul.
Worse still, as he grew older, the stories he remembered from his previous life had begun to blur.
Plots he had once thought unforgettable now came apart in his head like wet paper.
Characters lost their edges.
Climaxes turned vague.
Famous lines became half-remembered ghosts.
Now, instead of conquering the literary world with otherworldly masterpieces, he spent every day wrestling with deadlines.
“In the end, I just don’t have the ability to perfectly reproduce the works from my previous life.” Hibiki picked up a can of coffee and took a bitter swallow.
“And even if I could, that wouldn’t guarantee success here.”
After all, this was a different world.
Trends, culture, timing, marketing, reader taste, luck—too many factors decided whether a work lived or died.
A novel that became a phenomenon in one world might sink without a ripple in another.
Success was never as simple as copying answers from a test paper.
He stared at the blinking cursor on the document.
“What the hell is wrong with this world?” he muttered.
“If I’m supposed to be the protagonist, where’s my Golden Finger?”
He tapped the side of his keyboard with one finger.
“Don’t tell me the memories from my past life were my transmigrator starter pack.
That garbage became useless after middle school.”
The more he thought about it, the more his expression twisted.
“Looking back now, I really shouldn’t have been so flashy as a kid…”
His childhood was, in hindsight, a spectacular self-inflicted disaster.
Back then, drunk on the superiority of having memories from another world, he had shown off far too much.
He learned things too quickly, spoke too maturely, and enjoyed the praise of adults with all the shameless vanity of a fake prodigy.
His parents had once proudly called him a genius.
A child prodigy.
The future of the Tachibana family.
Then academic pressure slowly increased, his early advantage evaporated, and his true level was exposed piece by piece.
By high school, his grades had collapsed.
The so-called prodigy had fallen from grace.
After a major fight with his family, he had ended up leaving home and living at his aunt’s place instead.
“A shitty world like this…” Hibiki sighed and lightly punched the keyboard.
“Sometimes I really wish it would just hurry up and end.”
He did not hit it hard.
This keyboard had been a gift from his older sister.
It was expensive enough that replacing it would cost him several months of manuscript fees.
He could insult the world, curse fate, and question the meaning of his second life, but he absolutely could not afford to break that keyboard.
Yet the moment his knuckles tapped the keys, the screen changed.
The white document interface flickered.
Then, from the edges of the screen, streams of deep purple data began to seep inward.
Pixel by pixel, the color spread like ink dropped into clear water.
The document vanished beneath it.
The browser, taskbar, icons—everything was swallowed by that strange purple glow.
“Huh?
What did I press?”
Hibiki jolted upright.
He grabbed the mouse and clicked frantically, trying to stop whatever had happened.
Nothing responded.
The purple pixels continued crawling across the screen, slow and certain, until they froze the entire display under a curtain of violet light.
“Even forcing a shutdown doesn’t work…” Hibiki’s face gradually went blank.
“A crash doesn’t go this far, right?
Is this a virus?”
His hand went limp on the mouse.
The manuscript.
The manuscript he had finally, painfully, desperately managed to write.
He had not saved it yet.
A hacker?
A hacker had chosen this exact moment to destroy his manuscript?
Japanese hackers were too damn rude.
At least give me a ransom screen first, you bastard.
Let me decide whether I’m poor enough to abandon the file with dignity!
Just as Hibiki slumped back in his chair and began losing the light in his eyes, the purple screen shifted again.
Words appeared.
[Found you, Mr.
Savior.]
Hibiki froze.
The cheerful line floated on the monitor, glowing softly against the violet background.
Then another appeared.
[Eighteen years of waiting must have been hard on you.]
[But don’t worry.]
[I’m here now.]
[Your Golden Finger.]
[Your System.]
For several seconds, Hibiki could only stare.
“What…?”
His identity as a transmigrator was the deepest secret he had.
He had never told anyone.
He had decided long ago that he would carry it silently to his grave.
And yet that secret was now being displayed on his computer screen as casually as a pop-up ad.
Cold sweat broke out across his palms.
[Now, now.
Please don’t be so nervous.
I have no hostile intentions.]
[Quite the opposite, actually.]
[I’m looking forward to our time together.]
[After all, you are my Master.]
The thing that had invaded his computer somehow seemed to know what he was thinking.
It even offered him comfort with a strange, almost playful warmth.
By that point, Hibiki’s initial panic began to fade.
“Golden Finger…
System?”
He stared at the screen, still tense, but no longer completely overwhelmed.
“You’re really not some hacker playing a nasty prank on me?”
A pause.
Then he frowned slightly.
“Also, for a system, aren’t you a little too lively?”
After forcing himself to calm down and think, Hibiki decided that this self-proclaimed System was at least somewhat credible.
His reasoning was simple.
He had nothing worth stealing.
At the moment, he barely had tens of thousands of yen to his name.
There was nothing about him that should attract the attention of some mysterious super-hacker, powerful entity, or secret organization.
Even a scammer would probably check his bank account, sigh, and move on to the next victim.
So, with the mentality of a man who had already fallen into the river and might as well learn whether he could swim, Hibiki chose to accept the situation.
Maybe this really was his transmigrator starter pack finally arriving eighteen years late.
Thinking about it that way, he even felt a little excited.
At last, he had caught up with his seniors.
[Eh?
Am I?
Ahaha…]
[Please don’t worry about minor details.]
[It’s my first time being a System too.]
[In short, I’ll be in your care from now on, Master.]
[Heroic Spirit Summoning System, at your service.]
[Would you like to open the newbie gift pack?]
The purple pixels gathered and scattered with each line, forming text that felt oddly alive.
This was not like the cold, mechanical systems Hibiki had read about in webnovels during his previous life.
It did not simply issue missions and rewards like a vending machine with delusions of divinity.
It had warmth.
Personality.
Possibly even a suspicious amount of smugness.
“Wait…
what genre am I in?” Hibiki muttered under his breath.
“A standard webnovel power fantasy?
A comedy gacha story?
Please don’t tell me I’m in one of those cursed survival genres.”
It was said that experienced transmigrators could identify which kind of story they had fallen into based on their first impression of the System.
Unfortunately, this was Hibiki’s first transmigration.
He had not yet mastered that miraculous survival skill.
Still, one phrase caught his attention more than anything else.
“Heroic Spirit Summoning System…”
His eyes sharpened.
“Actually, since you’re using Type-Moon terminology, I mostly believe you now.”
This world had no mushroom-like writer whose name must not be taken lightly.
Naturally, no Type-Moon works had ever been released here.
Fate, Tsukihime, Kara no Kyoukai, Fate/Grand Order—none of them existed.
If this thing could mention Heroic Spirits, then it was almost certainly connected to his previous world.
The alternative was too ridiculous.
What, another transmigrator from the same world had also arrived here, learned absurdly advanced hacking techniques, found him by sheer coincidence, and decided to mess with a fellow victim of dimensional relocation for fun?
Impossible.
Probably.
Hibiki took a breath.
“Open the newbie gift pack.”
[Understood!]
[Newbie gift pack opened!]
[Congratulations, Master.
You have obtained Saint Quartz x30.]
[Newbie summoning pool unlocked!]
[The first ten-pull is guaranteed to include a gold card!]
As soon as Hibiki gave the command, a gift box icon appeared on the computer screen and opened by itself.
A pile of shining Saint Quartz spilled out in a neat animation.
Then the interface changed.
A familiar summoning circle appeared in the center of the screen.
Beneath it were two buttons.
Single Summon.
Ten-Pull Summon.
Hibiki’s breath caught.
For a moment, he forgot the manuscript, the deadline, the virus scare, his miserable bank balance, and the fact that an unknown System had just invaded his computer.
The blood of a ten-year Fate/Grand Order veteran roared awake inside him.
His body moved before his brain finished thinking.
“Roll.
Roll.
Roll!”
He clicked the ten-pull button with the skill and decisiveness of a man who had once thrown away countless precious resources chasing limited banners.
White spiritron light gathered over the summoning circle.
Lightning flickered.
The card began to form.
Then gold light burst across the screen.
[Berserker]
[Ibaraki-Douji]
[★★★★]
The first pull.
Gold.
A demon from Mount Ooe of the Heian-kyo era.
A calamity that had once brought terror to Kyoto.
And at the same time…
A cute little blonde girl.