NOVEL NEXT Chapter 1: One Bottle is Enough
Tokyo, 8:57 a.m. The shrill alarm clock went off.
Ichijō Mirai barely opens his eyes and quickly surveys his surroundings in intense dizziness and discomfort.
This was not a prison, not a hospital, not a morgue, but a strange bedroom.
The overall decor of the bedroom was blue and white, and the facilities were simple, with only a bed, bookshelf, desk and chair, and a door on the side which was approximately the bathroom.
There were no guards or machine weapons around, and the whole bedroom was quiet and harmless like an ordinary bedroom for an ordinary person, and indeed an ordinary bedroom for an ordinary person.
Ichijō Mirai lowered his head and reached out, and found that the fingers of this body were slender, the lines were crisp and clean, the muscles, bones, and blood vessels were all in place, and they were a pair of clean and healthy hands.
He judged: he died, but alive again.
Thanks to the gifts of nature.
The sound of an alarm clock was coming from the nightstand, the shrill ringing buzzing incessantly, shaking the nightstand slightly along with it.
There were some white pills scattered on the bedside table and the floor. A small white pill bottle was tilted in front of the vibrating alarm clock, pressing down on a piece of printing paper.
Four or five lines of words were printed on the printout, which was again scratched off layer by layer by a black ballpoint pen, only the thick Japanese title at the top was vaguely visible: [Posthumous Letter].
Oh, so it's... a suicide note?
Ichijō Mirai's pupils shook as he read the title, looked at the spilled white unidentified pill, and felt the raw discomfort spreading from his chest to his throat.
He immediately looked through the white pill bottle.
The drug was probably a Sanwu product1. It was all white. There was only a simple Japanese word "Sleeping Pill" on the bottle. There was no description of any side effects, and there was no original storage capacity. It was impossible to use addition and subtraction to determine how many sleeping pills the body had taken.
Can only judge: the medicine is very effective and of high quality. The original owner did not even vomit a drop of water and passed away cleanly and easily without pollution. It deserves a five-star rating and a hundred words of praise.
And the probability is that it remains in the stomach of this body and has not yet been digested.
Ichijō Mirai: "..."
He immediately flopped down on the edge of the bed, and without changing his face, he skillfully reached down and clasped his throat, pressed his fingers against the base of his tongue and clasped his tonsils, and after dry-heaving a few times to no avail, he decisively gave his stomach two more punches.
Amid the survivalist and frightening thumping sound, there were footsteps.
The footsteps were coming from downstairs, heavy, so heavy that one could tell on first hearing that the owner of the footsteps was in a state of rage and approaching.
It was followed by a tap on the door.
Ichijō Mirai immediately withdrew his hand to silence and looked up cautiously.
The visitor showed no consideration for their own hands, banged the door hard, and shouted in Japanese: "Wake up! Mirai! Wake up!"
By the sound of the voice, it was about a middle-aged woman in her thirties or forties, and by the address, it was about a relative of this body.
In the next second, the visitor identified herself, "If you don't open the door Auntie will come in!"
She twisted the doorknob a few times, opened the door aggressively, and walked in, froze as soon as she entered, "Are you awake?"
About the same age as the voice conveyed, she was a middle-aged woman in her mid-forties or so, chubby, wearing white clothing from the restaurant, a snowy hat, and white flour on her hands that hadn't been wiped off.
There was a nameplate on the right chest of the clothing: [Ishida Eiko].
It appears to be a chef.
The moment the door opens, Ichijō Mirai drops the quilt to cover the pills on the floor, and tugs on the quilt again, pretending that he accidentally kicked it off in his sleep and is pulling it.
Without saying much, he discreetly replied, "I just woke up, Auntie."
Ishida Eiko was still angry, her face was stiff and her manner not as friendly as normal relatives, "It's eight fifty-eight."
She stiffened, "The closed beta is going to start at nine, get up."
Closed beta?
Without waiting for Ichijō Mirai to discreetly test the waters, Ishida Eiko swept the bedding covering the floor and came striding over to her, frowning as she chanted, "The internal test starts at nine, make sure you're logged into the game on time, it's your last chance to do so, be careful."
She yanked Ichijō Mirai up as hard as she could and headed for the side door, "Hurry, hurry, hurry, log into the game."
"Don't be afraid, the game is all fake, it's real at best, you just follow the tutorial to minimize the pain."
"Be sure to pay more attention to pay attention to intelligence, the day before yesterday you just came to join me, I specifically inquired about the person who sent you here, who said that 'Second Life' is the first holographic game, and the same as a sci-fi movie, you play more, maybe by then you owe a debt will be able to pay it back."
Very informative.
Ichijō Mirai was tugged and stumbled along, quickly catching the gist of it: the original owner had come to join this relative only the day before and wasn't in a relationship with the relative where he had always lived, and odds were that he hadn't gotten acquainted enough to be a family member.
There are more important points in this information: closed beta, holographic game, and debt.
There was something familiar about this trope, it sounded very fictional.
He: "?"
The main character of the small, novel is actually myself?
Or is it a debt stream.
The room on the side is a bathroom, the inside is all white, and the bedroom is almost the same size, there are only some simple essential facilities, the brightest thing is that in the center of the room is a huge egg-shaped game pod.
The center of the room was a giant egg-shaped game pod. The pod was white, with an unknown blue pattern, and a fluorescent light floating silently.
Seeing the fluorescent light, Ishida Eiko immediately became anxious, and rushed to open the game pod, "Quickly, quickly, the beta test is about to start, quickly log in!"
Her strength was heavy, but she paid attention to her strength, gently and carefully pushing Ichijō Mirai in, urgently urging, "Remember to make money."
"You owe thirty million!"
Ichijō Mirai, who had already sat down obediently to recline, reacted to the words and almost stood up on the spot, "How much?"
How much is owed?
Ishida Eiko: "Thirty million!"
Ichijō Mirai: "???"
Huh? How did the original owner manage to owe thirty million? No wonder having a healthy body and freedom is still so cool to log out!
He immediately grabbed Ishida Eiko and urgently asked for the highlights, "Is it a loan shark?"
"A 30 million yen loan shark?"
If it was a loan shark whose interest had rolled up to thirty million yen, Ichijō Mirai would not need to pay it back.
He could have pushed Ishida Eiko away and just taken the medicine and killed himself, ending this 'gifted, but not fully gifted' by nature, a gift that could be called a gift to an assassin.
"Loan shark?" Ishida Eiko shook her head back and forth in surprise, "Of course not, how could you possibly take out a loan shark?"
"If it was loan shark, I wouldn't take you in."
She raised her hand to close the cabin, then naturally corrected herself, "Not yen, dollars."
"Thirty million dollars."
Oh, so it's not thirty billion yen loan sharks, it's thirty million US...US, US, US dollars?
Ichijō Mirai: "???"
Ichijō Mirai didn't understand but was greatly shocked.
What kind of status was the original owner to owe thirty million dollars?
What kind of status does this aunt have, to dare to take in a guy who owes thirty million dollars?
This is not a place to stay.
Ichijō Mirai decisively braced himself against the hatch and said stoically, "Wait a minute, auntie, I want to take a bottle of medicine first."
It's not much, one bottle is enough.