The laughter came in fits—a dry, almost hysterical sound swallowed by the room's thin walls.
He kept laughing until the sound caught, stumbled, and died away, leaving only the hollow echo of his own breath. The apartment smelled faintly of old coffee and rain; a single lamp cast a weak pool of light across the table, painting his face with tired angles.
"Hehe…" he muttered again, more to feel the syllable than because anything in the world warranted a laugh.
He had read a thousand stories since the day he woke up in this other life. Novels that promised cruelty with syruped smiles, dramas that turned affection into currency and people into props.
At first he read to numb himself—an anesthetic against memory.
Then he read to understand. Then he read because the books had become the only place where his old life still made sense.
And now, in the lamplight, he was trying to reconcile two truths that should never have been neighbors: the life he had lost and the life he'd found—a life that treated his memories as nothing more than entertainment.
In that other world, the girl he loved had vanished from his ordinary days. She had been taken—not by a single moment of cruelty they could point to, but by a slow, meticulous erasure: rumors wrapped in laughter, nights she did not come home, and a face he no longer recognized in photographs.
The people who should have been shields had, piece by piece, become the cause of his wounds.
The woman who raised him, the one who had smelled of warm bread and bandaged skinned knees, had been dragged into the same rot.
Whatever had been done to them had also always been done in stories—the grotesque, casual betrayals that his new world trafficked in as plot devices.
He slammed the book shut. The cover thudded against his palm, loud as a verdict.
"I read it all," he told the empty apartment.
"Every sordid bit." His voice didn't carry accusation so much as an exhausted accounting. He had learned the patterns: how a man would be set up, how trust would be corrupted, and where the holes in the protagonists' armor had been left unattended.
He knew the bastard's strengths, the way he blurred truth and desire until victims looked like willing extras.
If knowledge were power, he thought, his palms would be full.
Instead, knowledge felt like sand—slipping through, useless unless held a certain way.
He walked to the window, toward the small balcony that overlooked the city.
Neon stabs and the soft hiss of distant traffic painted the skyline in restless motion.
People below lived ordinary betrayals—petty arguments, late texts, and doors that didn't open. In his other life, the betrayals had been larger, louder, and catastrophic.
Here they were just background noise, the static of a society that consumed scandal like candy.
"Maybe if I die, I can go back," the thought slipped out of him like a confession, half-sober, half-prayer. The idea was absurd and beautiful: an exit that led back to a scene he could rewrite.
He stepped up to the rail, feeling the cool metal under his fingertips.
For a moment he stood there like a man considering an expired ticket, the city's noise rising and falling around him.
The wound inside him was stupidly punctual—a place that snapped awake each time memory brushed it. He missed Mia's laugh the way a man misses the sun after months of fog.
He missed the warm certainty of the woman who raised him, the hand that had smoothed his hair when nightmares came. The books had only made him remember more clearly.
Then the world tilted.
A flash—not bright so much as definitive—and the air itself seemed to take a breath and hold it. For a suspended second, the neon stopped bleeding into the night.
The hum stuttered.
Everything that existed folded inward, like pages being turned.
A shape formed out of the stillness—thin, unremarkable, but impossibly present. A boy, no more than a teenager, floated a few inches above the rooftop.
He wore a plain jacket and a smirk that suggested he had been waiting at the margin of men's lives for a long time.
"Oh?" the boy said, his voice curiously soft, as if speaking over a radio. "You want to go back?"
The man had expected anything: silence, wind, the reek of stale sorrow. He had not expected the casualness, the way a cashier might ask if you want your receipt.
"I—" He swallowed. "If I go back, I'll accept any condition. Anything."
The boy's smirk widened. "Good. Conditions make things interesting." He folded a hand behind his back and the lamplight seemed to favor him. "I can do it. I can send you back. Better than that, I'll give you gifts. Skills. Advantages that those NTR protagonists never had."
The man's laugh this time had something like hope in it, filthy and small.
"What do you want?" The boy's eyes glinted with mischief and something older, like a game master choosing pieces on a board.
"I want you to change the stories," he said.
"Not just your own. Wherever those rotten plots spill into the world—the books, the tapes, the web of small betrayals—you will be the one to rewrite them. And with every alteration, you'll grow. Power. Influence. A way to break the cycle."
A terrible, ridiculous idea filled the man's mouth like a taste he had already tasted in his head: to take the role of the player instead of the pawn.
To punish the punishers, to make narratives bend the other way.
To pull the strings on every pathetic contrivance that had tormented him.
"So," he breathed, feeling a pulse of energy at the edge of his restraint, "you want me to NTR the NTR protagonists." The sentence tasted like apology and amusement both.
The boy chuckled, the sound bright and oddly cheerful. "Exactly. Turn the tables. Make the storytellers weep. It'll be fun."
Hope is a dangerous thing to accept when the cost is unknown. Still, the man found his mouth shaping agreement even before the thought of price fully formed.
Stone-cold resolve replaced the weak laughter.
He had been carried too long by other people's scripts; if this was his bargain to rewrite them, then so be it.
"Fine," he said. "I'll do it."
The boy inclined his head. "Good. We begin when you wake up."
A second flash.
The rooftop, the city, the boy—they dissolved like ink rinsed from a page. The lamp's light returned to normal.
The man stood alone on the balcony, palms empty. But in his chest something shifted: a small, iron certainty that he could not quite name. The books had been the map. Now someone had handed him the key.
'Ring...'
'Ring...'
The tone of the early morning alarm woke Andrew up.
Opening his eyes, the boy in his teens felt a tightness within his chest.
A silent tear dripped from the corner of his eye; seeing a nostalgic roof that was filled with thousands of memories and the touch of the soft mattress that he missed back on earth, Andrew knew that he was back.
'System...' He spoke within his mind, and a blue screen popped within his sight.
Yes! One of the abilities that records and has multi-functions, but all of them are related to the feeling meter.
With this ability, he will be able to see the condition of all the females that have more than 50% favorability of him.
And with a look, he found Mia name in the top 5 of them.
Except for MIa mother, his aunt, Mia, and two other girls from the class, all of the other feeling meters or favorability charts were around 50 to 60 % at best.
Touching at Mia name he saw a lot of information popping up.
Target Name: Mia.
Relationship: Childhood friend. [Secret Crush.]
Emotions/Favorability: 92 [Love.]
Anxious/Downcast/Trauma: Losing her virginity in that manner. She is on the verge of personality collapse and is being threatened by the protagonist.
Repulsion: Target: Mathew. She feels repulsed by the idea of having anything related to that guy but did not want to tell the host about what happened that day.
Affection: Is deeply in love with host. But a shadow of hesitation is starting to corrupt her current emotions and will get completely removed in a month. [System has started working; all the negative emotions will be removed in few hours.]
Not only can it track all the affection of the girls with higher favorability, but it will also help them grow up without Andrew working. Which is why it is one of the biggest cheats he asked for after seeing the list of the wishes he got.
'I still have time...' He thought, jumping down from his bed and walking out with changed clothes. When he found a familiar figure working in the kitchen, with her hair falling down.
And a beautiful look that is hard to find on earth, even though he had spent around 15 years back in that world.
"Oh! Good morning, Andy." Andrew smiled hearing the familiar nickname, but his smile this time was infatuated with great feeling, making Elena feel happy looking at her kid.
"Good morning, Mom." This feeling was something he definitely missed on earth. Being a single father as a family there, he worked hard; he worked hard in his business, and they rarely had much chance to eat and enjoy a normal family life.
Though it worked quite well for him, and he grew up working hard. But these kinds of normal days are also great, or so he thought.
"Breakfast will be ready soon." She spoke, making Andy a bit happy, as he decided to go and have a shower before breakfast.
"Oh, having a shower already, not going for a run." She asked, after all, his muscle-training junkie action today caught her by surprise.
"Yeah! Overwork is not good either. I'll hit the gym later." He spoke while entering the shower room, making Elena hmm in agreement, with a smile, thinking how her child was getting mature; after all, she also shared the same opinion but never spoke, damping his motivation.
While the moment her cooking was finished, Andy was already there for the breakfast that they both sat for.
"Say mom! Mia is not picking up the call. Did her mother say something about it?" He brought up the topic indirectly.
After all, that bastard would definitely target his mother and he knew it, so instead of bringing it up suddenly, it is a good idea to bring it up slowly like this, making his mother favorability of that bastard zero.
His ability's key point of activation is the other party toward his thought. Or a guilt in the consciousness.
Only then can he stop the time when they are alone, not letting other interfere and the girl would even lose control of her emotions and her body.
But Mia was a smart girl; she could tell that it was something he did instinctively, or else she would have mistaken it for some kind of feeling toward that guy.
But since she was in love with him, she could tell that the feeling she had at that moment was just an artificial feeling, not something she originally had toward Andrew.
"Hmm... I don't know. But she is also a girl; she had those times too, so I think she will be fine." Elena spoke with a small smile on her lips. "Or what? Is it making you worry?" A hint of mischievousness in her tone.
"Hmm! I know that it is not her period. So, why is she being this open? I just felt something was off and asked." He spoke, but this time with a sad look on his face, making Elena notice it, so she walked by his side and hugged his head. "I will call Mia later about it."
"And don't worry. Mia is a strong kid; I hardly believe there is something off. But I did not know that you knew of her period time too. That's surprising." AT first she spoke seriously, but later her words were targeting Andy, who laughed with a nostalgic feel to it. Thinking about how his mother really never changed.
"Yep! But I am thinking of going there later after breakfast. I wish to talk to Mia about the class she missed." He told Elena, who agreed; after all, Mia and her mother live just a floor below there, and Mia mother was also there today due to the weekend.