The first crab took his left foot. Leo Hart didn't scream. He'd spent the first hour screaming, and he'd learned that the noise only attracted more of them. The raft he'd built-spending his own time and every cent he had-rocked in the black water. The rain was coming down in sheets, cold and acidic, stinging the open cuts on his face. Somewhere in the fog, a motor coughed and then faded away. That was Trent's motor. Trent, the guy who had once shared a bottle of whiskey with Leo and sworn they were brothers until the end. The motor was carrying away every single bottle of water Leo owned. "Leo!" Sienna's voice drifted across the waves, sounding thin, sweet, and way too calm. "I'm sorry! You understand, right? You were always such a kind person!" Kind. A second crab hauled itself over the edge of the raft. Its shell was as big as a manhole cover, ridged with dark armor, and its claws clicked like heavy shears. A weird, pale light pulsed under its shell. The water had created these things-the same water that had swallowed the cities. Leo looked at the claws and had one final, clear thought. If I get one more chance, I am never being kind to anyone ever again. The claws snapped shut. Darkness. Then a sound-something soft and completely ordinary: a phone buzzing against a wooden table. Leo's eyes snapped open. Ceiling. White paint, with one brown water stain in the corner that looked vaguely like Italy. Sunlight-real, warm, yellow sunlight-was spilling through the blinds. He sat up so fast the room started to spin. He immediately grabbed his left foot with both hands. It was there. Toes, ankle, skin-everything. It was warm. "Hah," Leo breathed. His voice sounded cracked. "Hah. Hah." He was in his apartment. There was the cheap couch he'd struggled to drag up three flights of stairs. The coffee table with the ring stains. The cracked laptop. He scrambled to the window and ripped the blinds open. Blue sky. Cars driving down the avenue. A woman walking a corgi. A delivery guy running a red light on a scooter. No flood. No storm clouds. No acid rain. His phone buzzed again. He picked it up, his hand shaking uncontrollably. Sienna 💕: Babe, did you book the Maldives resort yet?? Trent and Mia are SO excited. Remember you promised you'd cover everything for us! 😘 Under the message, the date glowed in white numbers. Leo counted. Then he counted again. Forty-five days. Forty-five days until the Great Deluge. He had died on Day 31 of the flood. He had lived through it once, and he remembered every second of it. The ice caps vanishing overnight. The oceans climbing over the coastlines. The first mutants dragging themselves out of the surf. The way a single bottle of clean water became worth more than a human life. He remembered who he had been in that world: a soft-hearted idiot with a full bank account, handing out supplies to people who smiled at him. People who ate his food, drank his water, and then stole his raft. Leo stared at Sienna's message. Then he started to laugh. It was a quiet, ugly sound that didn't reach his eyes. "Cover everything," he whispered. "Sure. I'll cover everything." He set the phone face down on the table. Never again. (Ding!) Leo froze. The sound hadn't come from the phone. It had come from inside his head-crisp and clear, like a bell ringing in an empty cathedral. A translucent blue panel unfolded in the air in front of him, edged in thin white light. (Rebirth Anchor confirmed. Host: Leo Hart.) (Doomsday Ark System, binding... 37%... 68%... 100%.) (Binding complete. Welcome, Host.) Leo didn't move. In his last life, he'd read enough web novels on slow nights to know exactly what this was. He'd also never once believed they were actually real. "System," he said carefully. His voice was steady now. "Explain." (Golden Finger Module 1: Infinite Stasis Space.) (Current capacity: 10m x 10m x 10m.) (Time inside the space is completely frozen. Items stored within do not decay, cool, or change.) (Capacity expands by 10% for each Evolution Core consumed.) Leo's eyes narrowed. "Evolution Core. That's what the mutants dropped." (Correct. Cores will become the primary currency of the new world.) The panel flickered, and a second window slid open. (Golden Finger Module 2: The 10,000x Multiplier.) (Once every 24 hours, Host may select one stack of items in the Stasis Space and multiply it by 10,000.) (Cooldown: 23:59:58...) Leo stood perfectly still. The air in the apartment seemed to thin. Ten thousand times. His mind started racing. Money was useless in the world to come. Gold would sink. Paper would rot. But water, food, steel, ammo, fuel? Those would be worth more than kings. He had forty-five days. He had one multiplication every twenty-four hours. And he had a bank account that a certain soft-hearted idiot had spent years filling. "Test it," Leo muttered. He walked to the kitchen. On the counter sat a lukewarm cup of instant ramen he'd abandoned the night before; the noodles had gone soft and gray. He picked it up. Store. The cup vanished. Inside his mind, a pocket of pure darkness opened, ten meters in every direction, silent and still. The ramen floated in the center of it-a tiny paper cup in a vast, empty room. Leo reached for a fresh cup from the cupboard. He poured boiling water from the kettle, watched the steam curl, and thought: Store. The cup vanished again, the steam frozen mid-curl in the dark. He waited ten minutes. He paced the apartment. He drank a glass of water, brushed his teeth, and looked at his own face in the bathroom mirror for a long time. Younger. Softer around the eyes. He would fix that. Then he thought: Take out. The cup appeared in his hand. The steam was still rising, just as hot as the second he had stored it. Leo tilted the cup and took a sip of broth. It was perfect. He closed his eyes. For the first time since the claws, something in his chest eased. "Ten minutes," he said quietly. "Still boiling." He opened his eyes, and there was nothing gentle in them. "In a world with no fire and no sun, this is a god's feast." The phone buzzed again. Sienna 💕: Babe?? Why aren't you answering?? Don't be like that. I already told Mia you'd pay for the villa upgrade. 🥺 Leo picked up the phone. He looked at the message for exactly three seconds. He didn't feel anger. He didn't feel heartbreak. He felt something much colder and more useful. She costs more than she's worth. He typed one word. Leo: Sure. A string of delighted emojis came back instantly. He closed the chat and opened his banking app. The balance made his jaw tighten-not from joy, but from calculation. It was a lot. But it wasn't enough. "Loans," he said softly. "Credit lines. Every asset I can leverage." He pulled up his contacts and scrolled until he found a name: Marcus Webb, wholesale logistics. A man who owed him a favor, and who owned a warehouse district on the east side of the city. The system chimed again. (Quest Hint: The Great Deluge arrives in 45 days. Survivors will need water, calories, and weapons. Hosts who hoard will rule.) (Reminder: Multiplier cooldown resets in 23:41:12.) Leo looked at the timer. Twenty-three hours and forty-one minutes. Then he pulled up a notepad on his phone and began to write, fast and clean. 1. Water. Purification tablets, bottled, industrial tanks. 2. Food. Canned, MREs, hot meals. Fast food chains: bulk. 3. Metal. Steel. Titanium. Copper. 4. Weapons. Find a way. 5. A vehicle that floats. He stopped at the fifth line and underlined it twice. Outside, the corgi trotted past, and the scooter boy ran another red light, and the sun shone on a world that had forty-five days to live. Leo Hart picked up his keys. "Let it rain," he said.

"Mr. Hart, let's be real here." The loan officer straightened his tie and pushed the paperwork back across the desk. "You've already got a mortgage, a car loan, and two open credit lines. Now you're asking for a third secured loan against your entire investment portfolio, plus a business line of credit for a company that-from what I can tell-doesn't even exist." "It will," Leo replied. "For what, exactly?" To buy up every drop of clean water before the world drowns. "Wholesale import," Leo said instead. "Food and bottled goods. The margins are great." The officer stared at him. Leo didn't blink. He just sat there, hands folded, face completely blank. In his previous life, he would have started sweating, smiling nervously and over-explaining everything until the guy took pity on him. But that version of Leo was gone. He'd been eaten. The silence dragged on. The officer finally looked down, shuffled the papers, and let out a sigh. "Your credit score is perfect. I'll push it through." "Thanks." Leo stood up. "I'll need the funds today." "Today?" Leo didn't say anything. He just waited. The officer picked up the phone. --- By noon, Leo had three new accounts and a balance in his banking app that would make any sane person have a heart attack. But he wasn't nervous. He felt the way a guy feels when he pushes all his chips into the center of the table because he's already seen the dealer's cards. Debts don't matter in forty-five days. The banks will be underwater. So will everyone they lent money to. He took a taxi to the east side of the city, landing in a gray maze of storage yards and loading docks that smelled like diesel and damp cardboard. A faded sign overhead read: WEBB WHOLESALE LOGISTICS. Marcus Webb met him at the gate. He was a broad-shouldered man in his fifties with a gray crewcut and the squint of someone who had spent his entire career counting boxes. "Leo Hart!" Marcus grinned and slapped him on the shoulder. "Kid, I've been meaning to call you. Still owe you for that customs seizure mess." "You can pay me back today." Marcus's smile dipped at the cold tone. "Sure. What do you need?" "Bottled water. Everything you've got in stock." Leo walked past him into the warehouse. "Canned food. Instant noodles. Rice. Anything with a shelf life over two years. I'll pay full market price, cash transfer, right now." Marcus followed him, scratching his neck. "All of it? Kid, I've got six hundred pallets of water alone. What are you doing, building a doomsday bunker?" Leo stopped. He turned and looked at Marcus for two seconds. "Something like that," he said. Marcus started to laugh, but he stopped when he realized Leo wasn't joking. "Right," Marcus said. "Let me get the manifest." --- The deal took ninety minutes. Leo didn't waste time haggling over pennies. He haggled for speed, for delivery, and for priority access to Marcus's other contacts: a canned goods importer, a rice distributor, and a guy who sold steel by the ton. By the time he walked out of the warehouse, he owned four hundred and fifty pallets of water, six hundred cases of food, and a promise of more. And he owned one more thing: a single pallet of purified water bottles (500ml), wrapped in clear plastic, waiting for him in the back of a rented van. He climbed into the passenger seat. He didn't take the whole pallet yet. He just pressed his palm against the plastic. Store. The pallet vanished. Inside his mind, a dark pocket opened. A neat block of water bottles floated in the stillness: one hundred bottles that Leo had separated from the rest. Exactly fifty liters of water. He checked the timer. (Multiplier cooldown: 00:00:07...) Leo leaned back and listened to the diesel engine rattle along the highway. He let himself breathe. Six. Five. Four. His fingers curled against his knee. Three. Two. One. (Ding! The 10,000x Multiplier is ready.) (Please select a stack.) Leo's heart hammered once, hard, in his throat. He chose the hundred bottles. (Multiplying: Purified Water (500ml) x100 → x1,000,000.) (Confirm?) Confirm. For a second, nothing happened. Then the dark space in his mind roared. Bottles poured into existence. Not slowly, but in a silent flood of clear plastic, filling the void from the center out, stacking and tumbling into perfect lines. Row after row, wall after wall of crystal-clear water until half of the Stasis Space was gleaming blue-white. (Multiplication complete. Purified Water (500ml): 1,000,000 bottles.) (Stasis Space capacity: 50% occupied.) (Multiplier cooldown reset: 23:59:59.) Leo opened his eyes. His hand was shaking. He pressed it flat against his thigh until it stopped. One million bottles. Half a million liters. He remembered the first week of the flood in his old life. A man had offered his wedding ring for half a bottle of water. A woman had offered something even more desperate. Neither of them got it, because the owner of the bottle had already drunk it himself. Half a million liters. From just one hundred bottles. Leo started laughing. It wasn't a loud laugh. It was quiet, ragged, and sounded a bit wrong-like a lock turning in the wrong key. The delivery driver glanced over, frowned, and decided it wasn't his business. When he finished, Leo wiped his eyes and sat still. (Host Note: Stasis Space capacity is currently 1,000 cubic meters. Additional capacity requires Evolution Cores.) He looked at the half-filled space and frowned. Half full already. And I've only just started. The problem was obvious, and so was the solution. He couldn't store everything in the space yet. He would need to stage the bulk goods in a separate location-a warehouse he controlled-and only bring in the highest-value items to multiply. The multiplier doesn't care where the original stack is. It only cares that I'm touching it. His mind was already racing. Buy the stock. Stage it. Touch it. Multiply it. Move it. Water first. Then food. Then metal. His phone buzzed. Sienna 💕: Babe, you've been so quiet today!! Mia says the villa has a private infinity pool, you're going to LOVE it!! Don't forget to transfer the deposit by Friday, okay?? 😘😘 Leo read the message once. He didn't reply. Instead, he opened the notepad app and typed: Sienna: deposit by Friday. Ignore. Trent: ask about the "investment" he owes me. He underlined the second line twice. Outside, the sun was setting over the city in orange and gold, perfectly peaceful. The delivery driver hummed along with the radio. A child on a bicycle rode past the van, laughing. Leo watched the child until he vanished around a corner. Forty-four days. "Drive faster," he said. The driver looked at him. "Where to?" Leo pulled up a map on his phone and zoomed in on a cluster of abandoned industrial parks on the northern edge of the city. "Somewhere with a lot of empty space," he said. "And no questions."

The old cold-storage plant was sitting at the end of a crumbling access road. It was basically a giant gray concrete box the size of a football field, with shattered windows and weeds choking the loading bay. Leo stood in the doorway, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. Pigeons. Rust. That specific smell of old dampness and ancient machine oil. He looked out at forty meters of bare concrete under a steel roof that actually looked like it would hold up. "Fifteen thousand a month," the agent said behind him, jingling a set of keys. "Honestly, nobody wants the place. No heat, no staff, the roads are a mess. You sure you don't want something a bit nicer?" "I'll take it for a year," Leo said, not bothering to turn around. "Paid upfront. Cash." The jingling stopped. "Also," Leo added, "I want the locks changed today. No one comes here without my permission." "Of course, Mr. Hart. Absolutely." A year, Leo thought. He actually thinks I'm renting this for a year. In forty-four days, this road would be underwater and the agent would be dead-either drowned or starving. Leo didn't feel bad about it. He just felt a vague, practical regret that the man wouldn't be alive to spend the money. The agent left with the check. Leo waited until the sound of the car completely faded away. Then he walked to the middle of the empty floor and just stood there. Last night's test. The night before, back at his apartment, he had tried something he thought would work. He'd pressed his hand against a stack of water bottles in the kitchen and tried to multiply them without storing them first. (Error: Target not in Stasis Space.) He'd been wrong. The multiplier only worked on things already in the space. That meant everything he wanted to duplicate had to be stored first, and anything too big for the space was just dead weight until he cleared some room. Fine. I'll clear room. He closed his eyes and looked inward at the glittering wall of water bottles-one million of them, stacked in perfect, endless rows. Take them out. All of them. For a second, the warehouse was silent. Then the air shuddered. Bottles began pouring out of nowhere. They crashed onto the concrete in a massive, roaring cascade, tumbling and stacking into walls. Column after column of clear plastic rose toward the ceiling. The sound was like a landslide, then a waterfall, then a thousand people cheering at once. Leo stood in the center of the chaos and didn't blink. When the noise finally stopped, the floor was gone. In its place was a forest of blue-white plastic, towering in neat rows across the entire north half of the warehouse. Sunlight from the broken windows hit the bottles, scattering glittering fragments across the walls. (Ding! Stasis Space capacity: 0% occupied.) Leo let out a slow breath. One million bottles. Half a million liters. He walked down the nearest aisle, trailing his fingers over the cold plastic. Every bottle was identical. Every label was perfect. Every cap was sealed. In my last life, I saw men kill each other over a single one of these. He stopped. He turned slowly, surrounded by walls of water, and felt something strange settle in his chest. It wasn't joy or triumph. It was something colder than that, and it fit him much better. It was certainty. His phone rang. Trent 🍻 flashed across the screen. Leo let it ring three times before answering. "Yes." "Bro!" Trent's voice was loud and easy. "Where've you been? Sienna says you've been ghosting her. You okay? You sound weird." "I'm busy." "Busy? With what, work?" A short laugh. "Come on, man. Take a break. Listen, about the Maldives trip-I was thinking we upgrade to the overwater villa. It's like forty grand extra, but you've got the money, right? You can just put it on the card. We'll pay you back." Leo looked at a wall of bottled water. "When?" "When what?" "When will you pay me back?" There was a pause. Trent's laugh sounded thinner this time. "Oh, you know. Whenever. Come on, man, don't be weird about it. We're brothers." Brothers. "I'll think about it," Leo said. "Awesome! I knew you'd come through. Love you, man!" The call ended. Leo looked at the screen for a long moment. Then he opened his notes and added a line under Trent's name. Embezzlement? Check the shared business account. He had suspected it in his last life, in the days before the flood, when the numbers didn't add up and Trent always had an excuse. Back then, he had chosen not to look. This time I look. The cooldown timer ticked down in the corner of his vision. (Multiplier cooldown: 00:03:42...) Leo walked back to the loading bay, where a rented truck was idling. Marcus Webb's driver stood by the cab, rubbing the back of his neck. "That's the last pallet," the man said. "Sixty cases of military-grade MREs, like you asked. Surplus stock, still sealed. Boss said you'd sign." Leo signed. The driver climbed back into the cab and drove away without asking where all the water had come from. Leo suspected the man had seen the bottles through the open door and decided that was now his own private nightmare. Leo laid his palm on the nearest case. Store. The case vanished. So did the next. And the next. Sixty cases slid into the dark pocket, each holding twelve meals. Seven hundred and twenty meals. He frowned. Multiplied by ten thousand, that would be over seven million packages-far more than the space could hold. The system would choke on it, or worse, refuse. Smaller stack. Fit the output to the room. He pulled most of the cases back out onto the warehouse floor and left exactly sixty individual MREs inside the Stasis Space. (Multiplier cooldown: 00:00:09...) He waited, counting the seconds with his pulse. (Ding! The 10,000x Multiplier is ready.) Select stack: MRE, x60. (Multiplying: MRE x60 → x600,000.) (Confirm?) Confirm. The dark space in his mind erupted. Brown-wrapped packages poured out in a silent avalanche, packing themselves into the void, row on row, tier on tier, filling the vast darkness with the plain, unglamorous shape of pure calories. (Multiplication complete. MRE: 600,000.) (Stasis Space capacity: 88% occupied.) (Multiplier cooldown reset: 23:59:59.) Leo stood perfectly still. Six hundred thousand meals. He did the math without meaning to. A single person could survive on three MREs a day. Six hundred thousand meals meant two hundred thousand days of food for one man, or a thousand days for two hundred people. And I have forty-three more multiplications ahead of me. His lips curled into a cold smile. The wall of water bottles gleamed behind him in the afternoon light. He turned to the warehouse, to the vast empty floor beyond the aisles, and he pictured it full. Steel beams stacked to the ceiling. Crates of ammunition. Tanks of fuel. Pallets of canned food standing in rows like soldiers. The world is going to drown, he thought. And I'm going to be the only man in it who is never hungry, never thirsty, and never afraid. His phone buzzed. Sienna 💕: Babe, Trent said you're upgrading the villa!!! You're the BEST!!! I love you so much 😭😭💕 Leo looked at it for three seconds. Then he did something he had never done in his old life. He opened Sienna's contact, pressed his thumb on Block, and watched the screen turn gray. Not yet, he thought, and unblocked her again. She's still useful. I'll let her keep spending. The bigger she builds, the harder she falls. He slid the phone into his pocket and went to find a pen. There was a lot of work to do.