Nine o’clock at night, Kieran stopped his car in front of Harsen Medical Center. He stepped out, briefly straightened his suit, and walked inside. Each of his footsteps sounded steady, yet behind his calm expression lay anticipation, hope, and a faint fear he had long buried.After all, ten years had passed without him being able to see his mother.As the automatic doors slid open, the sharp scent of antiseptic immediately hit him.In the quiet hospital corridor, his phone rang in his pocket. Nuca’s name appeared on the screen. Kieran answered at once.“Are you already at the hospital?” Nuca’s voice sounded tense, her breathing uneven. She did not even bother to greet him.Kieran stood in front of the elevator and pressed the button for the upper floor.“Yes.”While waiting for the doors to open, he felt a gaze on him. Whether from a surveillance camera or someone hiding behind a corner of the lobby, he could not tell. His shoulders remained straight, his expression unchanged.The ele

In despair, Kieran closed his eyes. He no longer tried to fight the exhaustion creeping through his body. There was no light, only dense darkness. He tried to accept the worst possibility, that perhaps this was the end.Then a voice was heard. It appeared just like that in his head, flat and emotionless, like a notification from a device he had never owned.[Kieran Viremont, do you want to keep living?]Kieran did not answer immediately. For a moment, his mind was blank. He was too tired to ask who was speaking or how the voice could be there. Yet the question stirred something in his chest.Want to live?He thought of the faces that laughed when he fell. The pain that still faintly lingered in his bones, and most strongly, the feeling of unwillingness to accept it.He was not finished. Not only because of resentment, but because he did not want to disappear just like that.“I do,” he murmured softly, though he was not sure his lips truly moved. “I still want to live.”His answer sou

The room returned to silence after the door closed. Kieran remained lying down, staring blankly at the window with its curtains half open. His aunt sat not far from him, occasionally checking her phone, occasionally looking at him with a gaze that still did not fully believe he was awake.But Kieran’s thoughts were not there. He slowly closed his eyes, trying to “feel” the existence of the spatial space again. He needed a test. Something small at first and inconspicuous.The water bottle on the bedside table? Or the plastic spoon from the meal tray?He could not recklessly experiment with trivial items like that. What if, after testing one object, the spatial space required a long recovery time? Wouldn’t he just be wasting it?Kieran drew a slow breath.Besides the storage function, what mattered more was the ability to double an object’s value. That meant whatever he put inside, if it worked according to the system’s explanation, would become an asset.He did not like uncertainty, s

The woman fell silent for a moment.“Just a small scrape. I accidentally fell in the kitchen yesterday.”Kieran stared at her without blinking. That was not a scrape. It was a grip mark. An uneven bruise, like the imprint of pressing fingers.From the original owner’s memories of this body, he remembered that his father often came home drunk, frequently asked his wife for money, and if there was none, he would beat her.The original owner of this body might have been afraid of his father due to childhood trauma, but the current Kieran was not. He even hated the old man, not much different from how he hated his father in his life before transmigrating.“That old man did this?” he asked flatly. He did not say the word father.His mother flinched slightly at his tone, then exhaled softly.“It’s nothing. Don’t think about unnecessary things. Just focus on recovering.”She finally managed to gently pull her hand away, then adjusted her sleeve again and tried to return to the original topic

The next morning, Kieran woke to a soft voice calling his name. He slowly opened his eyes. His mother was already standing beside the bed with a food container in her hand.“Wake up. Eat first, then we’ll take care of the administration and go home,” she said softly. Her tone tried to sound light, but the dark circles under her eyes were becoming more obvious.Kieran sat up slowly. He wanted to ask about the cost, how she had paid it, and where the money had come from. But when he saw her exhausted face and the faint, the question stopped in his throat. Even if he asked, he would not be helping anything right now.In the end, he simply accepted the bowl of soup and began eating quietly. This time, he finished it without leaving anything. His mother looked relieved to see that.Not long after that, the administrative process was completed. They walked out of the room toward the elevator. At the end of the corridor, several nurses and an administrative staff member were talking in some