The world snapped back into place with a clean breath and no pain to warn her.

  Elira stood in the middle of what used to be her street, boots on broken concrete, lungs full of air that tasted almost like yesterday. Warm on the tongue, salt on the edge, eucalyptus underneath. It should’ve been comforting. It wasn’t. The houses around her weren’t houses anymore. Rooflines had collapsed into themselves, walls split open and spilling plaster and timber, and the road had a shallow twist running through it as if someone had grabbed the earth and wrung it. A fence post leaned at the wrong angle. A mailbox lay on its side, half buried in sand that didn’t belong this far inland. It was still home in the way a face could still be familiar after a beating.

  She turned slowly and took stock the way the tutorial had trained into her bones. No bodies. No blood. No fresh damage on anyone. People were appearing in flashes up and down the street, standing where they’d been pulled from. A man she recognised from the corner shop blinked at his hands, then at the ruins, mouth opening and closing with nothing coming out. Two teenagers spun in circles calling names that didn’t answer. A woman in a dressing gown appeared on a pile of bricks, caught herself on the stump of a wall, and stood there shaking. Everyone was whole.

  That part was wrong in a way that made the rest of it worse. The System had put them back like pieces on a board, cleaned and reset, fully healed. Hell, it seemed even body parts were replaced.

  Elira’s hand went to her belt out of habit and closed on something solid. The familiar weight was there, gear sitting where it should, and she forced her breathing to slow down before her head tried to sprint ahead of her body. She scanned for faces that mattered, the ones who could move when she spoke, the ones who didn’t melt the moment the world stopped pretending to be stable, and she caught a few pairs of eyes turning her way already. It wasn’t worship. It was need. She’d seen it in the camps, the moment people realised she didn’t freeze when something tried to kill them, and that wasn’t a compliment. It was a responsibility that could crush you if you let it.

  A pressure smoothed into being around her, uniform and planet-wide. Her skin prickled, and the air felt briefly heavy, as if the world itself had paused to listen.

  [GLOBAL ANNOUNCEMENT: WORLD POPULATION QUEST INITIATED.]

  Elira’s eyes lifted. Around her, people flinched at words that weren’t sound and still landed in their bones.

  [Earth is now under Population Continuity Parameters. Population loss will impact world stability and future System thresholds. The Leader has claimed his Territory.]

  Her stomach tightened on the word Leader, and the feeling that followed wasn’t pride or jealousy. It was certainty settling in like a stone. She’d seen the leaderboards. Everyone had. Kaizer Harth had been unavoidable, his name sitting at the top like a dare, and now the System had just told the whole planet he’d taken land before anyone else could even work out where they’d been dropped.

  The announcement continued.

  [Territory Tokens and Dominion Expansion Tokens may be acquired through Dungeon Clears and “Home” Beasts.]

  [“Home” Beasts: Dominion-linked elites.]

  The pressure eased and left people with nothing but their own voices, and the street filled with sound immediately. Questions tangled into each other, anger and fear and the thin edge of hope all fighting for space. Elira let the noise wash around her while she pulled meaning out of what mattered. Population quest meant bodies were a resource now, whether anyone liked it or not. Tokens meant land had become currency. Dominion-linked elites meant the world was already divided into places that could be taken and places that would kill you for trying.

  Kaizer’s name sat in her head again, heavier this time, because it wasn’t just a scoreboard line anymore. It was a claim.

  She didn’t feel a compass spin in her chest. She didn’t hear a voice or see an arrow. The sensation that came was quieter than that, faint enough that she could’ve missed it if she’d been drowning in the crowd, a subtle tension at the edge of her awareness that angled in one direction and refused to go away. South. Down the coast. She didn’t understand how she knew. She just knew it, and the certainty made her throat tighten because certainty without proof was dangerous.

  She swallowed, forced her face neutral, and lifted her voice.

  “Alright,” Elira said, loud enough to cut through the closest cluster without turning it into a shout. “Listen up.”

  A few heads turned. A few more followed when they saw others turning. People wanted direction and hated themselves for it, and she wasn’t going to pretend that wasn’t useful.

  “We’re not staying here,” she continued, stepping onto a slab of concrete that used to be someone’s driveway. “There’s nothing to defend and nothing to build with right now. We gather who we can, we move to the meeting point, and we find Aaron. If you don’t know where that is, you follow someone who does. If you’re alone, you don’t stay alone.”

  A man in a hi-vis vest pushed forward, face pale. “Meeting point? What meeting point?”

  “Elira and I set it,” a familiar voice called from further down the street, and relief hit her so hard it almost hurt.

  Dalen stepped around a collapsed fence section, moving with the calm of someone who’d already accepted the world was broken and the only thing left was what you did next. He looked different without the camp walls and the constant threat, but the same steadiness was there in his shoulders, the same readiness in his eyes. He scanned the street once, took in the crowd, then nodded to Elira as if he’d been waiting for her to speak first.

  “We agreed on the old oval,” he said, loud enough for the nearest cluster. “South side. Open ground. Easy to see who’s coming.”

  Some people murmured. Others looked blank. A few nodded sharply, recognition lighting up their faces. Elira held Dalen’s gaze for a beat and saw the unspoken question there, the one he didn’t ask because he’d learnt she didn’t like being handled. Are we doing this now? Are we moving before the panic turns into something worse?

  “We go,” Elira said. “Now.”

  She didn’t dress it up. She didn’t promise safety. She started walking, because the longer you stood in the wreckage of your own life, the easier it was to become part of it.

  Dalen fell into step beside her without trying to take over, which was one of the reasons she didn’t mind him. He had presence, not ego. People started to follow. Some trusted her. Some trusted the idea of trusting someone. Some moved because everyone else was moving and they didn’t want to be the only ones left behind when something came out of the ruins.

  The walk to the oval wasn’t long, but it felt longer because the streets weren’t straight anymore. Old landmarks were there in pieces. The servo sign was half snapped and leaning into a tree that hadn’t been there last week. A brick shopfront sat split down the middle, the two halves separated by a strip of dirt as if the world had shifted and forgotten to close the gap. The sky was the same blue, the sun sat where it should, and the air had that coastal warmth creeping in as the morning went on. Everything read as normal until you looked at it properly, and then nothing lined up.

  Elira kept her breathing steady. Every time her eyes snagged on something too familiar, she forced herself to keep moving. A child’s bike crushed under debris. A set of wind chimes still hanging from a porch beam, tinkling softly in the breeze even though there was no porch anymore. A garden gnome face-down in dirt. Little hooks that tried to drag her into grief when she couldn’t afford it yet.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  By the time they reached the oval, there were more people than she’d expected. Groups were already arriving from other streets, drawn by the same instinct for open space and visibility. Some were familiar faces from the camps, the ones who’d been integrated in the same region. Others were strangers, looking around with that tight, hungry fear that said they’d survived the tutorial by the skin of their teeth and they didn’t know who to trust now that the System wasn’t guiding the rules inside a confined arena.

  Elira stepped out onto the grass and felt the air open up around her, and the faint tug returned, sharper for a moment, as if the direction was easier to feel without rubble and walls closing in. South. Down the coast. She kept her face blank and her shoulders relaxed, because if she let even a flicker of strange confidence show, people would cling to it and call it faith, and faith was how mobs formed. Dalen watched her anyway, reading her the way he always did when something changed in the air, but he didn’t ask what she’d felt. He just waited.

  They didn’t stand around and stare at each other. Elira started organising. She sent people to the edges in pairs, told them to keep eyes up, told them to stay in small clusters so nobody drifted off alone when panic hit. She didn’t soothe. She didn’t baby. She gave tasks because tasks kept hands busy and mouths shut.

  It was close to midday when Aaron arrived.

  He came in from the north side with a mixed group, boots on grass, pace steady, moving like he’d been walking toward this point since the moment the tutorial ended. He looked sharp in the posture and tired behind the eyes, the way people did when survival stopped being an emergency and started being a job. Behind him were faces Elira knew and faces she didn’t, and right near the front was a woman with greying hair pulled back hard, expression set in a line that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with refusal.

  Beside her walked a taller man in his twenties, shoulders broad, jaw clenched, eyes scanning the crowd like he was expecting someone to take a shot even in open daylight.

  Elira’s breath caught. Kaizer’s mum. Kaizer’s brother.

  Aaron spotted Elira and lifted a hand, then closed the distance quickly. “You alright?” he asked, voice rough, Aussie bluntness under it like he couldn’t be bothered sanding the edges down. “You look like you’ve been punched.”

  “I’m fine,” Elira said, and then she looked past him again because her eyes kept snapping back to the two Harths like they were proof the world hadn’t taken everything. “Is that…”

  “Yeah,” Aaron said, turning slightly. “Found ’em on the way. System’s spat people out in weird spots. Some in our area, some not. Bit of a stitch-up, hey.”

  The woman stepped forward before anyone could formalise introductions. She looked Elira up and down in a way that felt more protective than suspicious. “You’re Elira,” she said, statement not question.

  Elira nodded. “Yes.”

  “I’m Deb,” the woman said. Simple name, steel edge. “Kaizer’s mum.”

  The brother’s gaze flicked to Elira, then to Dalen, then back to Aaron, measuring. “Callum,” he said, curt. “Don’t waste time. We’re going after him.”

  The warmth that flared in Elira’s chest was messy, part relief, part vindication, part something sharper she didn’t want to name. “Yeah,” she said, and heard how immediate it was. “We are.”

  Deb’s eyes softened for half a second, like she’d heard something in Elira’s tone that mattered. “Aaron said you’ve got a feel for where he is.”

  Elira hesitated because it sounded cooked out loud. “I’ve got a direction,” she admitted. “It’s faint. It’s… him.”

  Callum let out a sharp breath through his nose. “He’d go south,” he said, like it was obvious. “Jervis Bay way. He always talked about it. Said if he ever had money he’d buy a place down there and never leave.”

  Deb’s mouth twitched, almost a smile. “He used to say it was the only place he could actually relax. That and the movies. The idiot.”

  Elira didn’t smile. The word idiot landed with too much affection to be an insult, and it stabbed at her because she didn’t know how much affection was left in the world. “The System called him the Leader,” she said. “Everyone saw his name on the boards. If he’s claimed a Territory, people are going to come looking.”

  “I saw it,” Deb said, eyes hardening again. “And I know what that means. Some decent people will come. Plenty won’t. We get there early enough, we don’t end up begging.”

  Dalen stepped in calmly, joining without cutting anyone off. “We move now,” he said. “If we wait, more groups form and it gets messy. We’ve got an advantage while people are still trying to work out what they’re doing.”

  Aaron nodded. “Agreed. We’ve got supplies, not heaps. We’ve got fighters and we’ve got people who can’t fight. I picked up a couple of familiar faces too.”

  He turned and gestured, and Elira’s eyes caught Derek the blacksmith moving with a heavy pack slung over one shoulder, hands flexing like he still expected to be holding a hammer. Next to him was the tailor, the same bloke who’d been sewing patchwork repairs by firelight in the camps, now carrying a roll of cloth tucked under one arm like it was the last normal thing he owned.

  Dalen’s head tilted slightly when he saw them. “Good. We’ll need skills that aren’t just killing.”

  “And you’ll need someone who can actually organise people,” a new voice added, dry and familiar.

  Elira turned and saw Tala pushing through the crowd, hair tied back, eyes sharp, expression unimpressed in the way it always was when other people tried to fall apart around her. She didn’t look injured. Nobody did. Reintegration had cleaned them. That didn’t mean the fear hadn’t left marks in the way they held themselves.

  “Tala,” Elira said, and the relief in her voice surprised her.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Tala replied, waving it off. “I heard Kaizer’s name and figured you lot would do something reckless. Thought I’d better show up before you got half the suburb killed.”

  Aaron snorted. “Good to see you too.”

  More people filtered in behind them, familiar faces from camp clusters, a few strangers who’d latched onto Aaron’s group because it looked organised, and a handful who kept their distance, watching as if waiting to see whether joining them was a good deal or a dumb one. Elira watched those ones carefully. Fear made people cling. Fear also made people take.

  She climbed onto the low concrete lip near the oval’s edge and raised her voice again. The noise dipped, not fully, but enough.

  “We’re moving south,” Elira said. “We’re heading for Kaizer.”

  That got immediate reactions. Murmurs. A few nods. A few sceptical looks. A few faces lighting with hope they tried to hide.

  “Kaizer Harth claimed the first Territory,” she continued. “The System called him the Leader. That means his location becomes a target, and it also means it becomes a refuge if we get there early enough to help build it instead of turning up later with our hands out.”

  A man near the back scoffed. “And why would he let any of us in?”

  Deb’s head snapped toward the voice, cold enough to cut. “Because he’s not a bastard,” she said. “And because he’s my son.”

  That shut the scoff down quick.

  Elira kept going, voice steady. “I can feel a direction. It’s faint, but it’s there. Callum and Deb know where he’d choose if he had a choice. Jervis Bay way. We move smart, we move together, and we don’t break into little groups that get picked off. If you want to come, you follow instructions. If you don’t, do what you want. Just don’t drag others into stupid.”

  Dalen stepped up beside her and spoke without raising his voice much, but it carried anyway. “We set a walking order. Fighters on the outside, non-fighters inside. We rotate. We stop before dark. If you can’t keep pace, say so early. We don’t leave people behind without making the call as a group.”

  Aaron pointed toward the road that used to lead out of the suburb, now cracked and half swallowed by growth. “We’ll follow the old routes as much as we can. Roads still exist, mostly. If they twist, we adjust. If they dead-end, we go around. Keep your eyes up. Don’t wander off to check ruins on your own. I’m not fishing you out.”

  A few people laughed, thin and nervous, but it helped. Elira felt the group tighten, scattered panic condensing into something usable.

  She jumped down and walked over to Deb and Callum while the last of the murmuring settled. The tug in her awareness pulled again, and she hated how much it steadied her at the same time, because it felt like a hand on her spine guiding her forward. It wasn’t Kaizer speaking to her. It wasn’t the System spoon-feeding her. It was something she couldn’t explain, something tied to him and to the way she’d been changing since the tutorial started, and she didn’t know whether to be grateful or terrified.

  Deb studied her for a moment, then spoke quietly. “You care about him.”

  Elira didn’t flinch. “Yeah.”

  Callum’s mouth tightened. “Just don’t get him killed with it.”

  Elira met his gaze and let him see the truth. “I’m trying to stop that.”

  He held her eyes for a beat longer, then nodded once. It wasn’t approval. It was acceptance.

  They moved out within the hour.

  The suburb fell behind them in broken rooftops and twisted fences, the familiar turning into background noise. The road out of town ran in the right direction, but it didn’t run straight anymore, bending in long subtle arcs that made it feel like the land was trying to nudge them off course. Elira kept checking the pull inside her awareness, and every time it tugged she adjusted their path slightly without even thinking about it, which scared her more than the ruins did because it meant the feeling was real.

  They passed pockets of the old world as they went, the kind that made people go quiet without noticing. A rusted sign that still had half its letters. A playground swallowed by scrub. A line of cars piled against each other where the road buckled and dropped. The air stayed warm, the breeze stayed coastal, and birds still called, but there was an undertone to the sound that didn’t belong, a faint weight behind it that made Elira feel as if something was always listening from just beyond sight.

  By late afternoon she found herself near the front with Aaron, Dalen, and the Harths, and she realised the group had already started forming around anchors. Not walls. Not structures. People. The ones who looked ahead instead of down. The ones who didn’t pretend the world was going to fix itself while they waited.

  Elira swallowed, eyes forward, and let the tug guide her without showing it on her face.

  South.

  Toward Kaizer.

  Toward the first hearth anyone had claimed in a world that wanted to chew them up and spit out bones.

  by Yu Kei

  “The Life After Death” follows Arther Valentine, a cold and calculating crime lord from a futuristic world, who dies and is reincarnated into a realm of magic and monsters as a newborn named Emrys Valenhart. But instead of power, all he wants now is something he never had. Love, family, and peace. Haunted by his past and tested by a violent world, Emrys begins a journey of rediscovery, facing monsters, betrayal, and the weight of his own actions as he learns that every bond comes with a cost.

  What to expect:

  - Reincarnation & Growth

  - Deep Worldbuilding

  - Emotional Bonds

  - Dark Fantasy Tone

  - Slow-Burn Romance

  - Epic Progression

  Release Schedule:

  - Two chapters weekly - Wednesday and Friday

  Notes:

  Please check out my for up to an additional 12 unreleased chapters. (Tier dependent)

  Cover was commissioned and rights are reserved to myself and the artist only.