Chapter 1: Prologue

Inside a certain penthouse, a television was broadcasting a chart that displayed a red arrow with a sharp decline. On the couch opposite, a man was gazing at the screen with red eyes, a bottle of Scotch firmly clenched in his hand. His pupils were trained on the flatscreen as tears began welling in his eyes, as if the graph were the most moving scene he had ever witnessed. The redness around his face indicated that this was not the first time he had experienced such a reaction in recent times. Suddenly his little pity party was interrupted by a sharp chime; it was his phone's ringtone.

He pulled the device out of his pocket, his finger hovering over the "ignore" button, but as he was about to hit the button, he changed his mind when he noticed the caller ID. His eyes gleamed with hope as he answered the call, but the tone of the voice on the other side caused that hope to shatter and the light behind his eyes to be snuffed out.

"Eric, I'm sorry, but I can't save you this time," the woman said in exasperation before going on a diatribe. The man didn't listen to what the woman was saying and returned to his dazed state while watching the screen idly again, only tuning back into the conversation at the last second when the woman told him she was "retiring" due to stress.

Eric stared blankly into space as the phone beeped to remind him the call was over. His vacant expression was immediately replaced with one of pure rage, and he threw the phone towards the wall opposite. He didn't bother to observe the parts flying all over the room and retreated back into his own thoughts.

The caller was his ex-secretary, and she had just delivered some extremely bad news.

"It was obviously a fucking scam!" The man furiously shouted as his desk fell over, scattering paperwork everywhere after a swift kick. Eric sat down and leaned against the smashed desk before mumbling, "We're ruined."

He took another swig of booze, looking not dissimilar from the average bum. It was shocking to learn that this man was the CEO of a once-thriving delivery service. He was on top of the world.

So how did everything go so wrong?

Well It all started with a report he got: an employee at one of the branches hit a kid with a company truck. This may sound severe, but in actuality, it wasn't all that unusual. You see, there's a common scam where someone jumps into a moving vehicle and then claims that the driver hit them before cashing out on the insurance money.

There were simple ways of dealing with this issue: financial compensation, interviews, or maybe he could donate to charity. This kind of incident would rarely cause much reputational damage, and you could easily bounce back.

The real issue began when the employee relayed a nonsensical story to his division manager, referring to the victim as a "psycho" and claiming he grabbed a stranger and ran in front of the truck with them. Not only that, but he apparently pushed the stranger back onto the sidewalk and gave the truck driver a creepy stare. The man was unable to stop the truck in time and wound up hitting the victim.

None of this story made sense, and the manager chalked it all up to an insurance scam.

But then came the blindside: news broke that the employee who caused the accident was under the influence of alcohol.

Now that was a problem.

Everything went into a downward spiral: activists and reporters, the ongoing lawsuit with the parents—it had turned into a huge debacle! This kind of press would usually only happen if the victim was a minority and it got spun into some hate crime narrative, but the guy was white! Why did people care? He wasn't a minority!

There was even an attempt to find the person who was allegedly pushed into the street by the victim, but the manager eventually realized that it was pointless. Even if the story was real, it didn't negate the fact that the employee was operating company property while under the influence.

To the passionate crowd, it didn't matter.

They didn't care what the story was; they just wanted to vent their rage towards his company. It was doubtful that any of these people cared about the victim, only the idea of fucking with a successful corporate entity.

The only way he could turn this case around was if the kid woke up from his coma. The kid, who was perfectly healthy despite being in a comatose state...well as healthy as one could be after being hit by a truck. Anyway, his insiders could gather that the chances of him waking up were fairly high.

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Eric prayed that the dude would wake up, otherwise the government would get involved due to the publicity that he had unwittingly generated. He was sure that with the crowd's encouragement, the officials would find the various stains on his early career path.

stains such as covered-up sexual harassment cases, mishandling of assets, and, of course, the most heinous of all: tax evasion.

"It's okay; everything will be fine as long as the kid wakes up," the man repeats like a mantra, as if hoping that with each repetition, the chances of it being true increase. He closes his eyes for a bit before lifting the bottle up to his mouth to numb himself again from the worries.

***

I am utterly confused.

This is nothing like the reincarnation the animes, mangas, and webnovels promised me. Where is the fantasy world? The monster girls? the fantastical, crazy adventure?

None of these things are present; it's just been pure darkness, a depressing void I've been wandering through...

I don't know how long. The only thing keeping me sane are these thoughts, which allow me to know that my consciousness is still with me and my memories are still intact. But with this lack of setting, this lack of intrigue, and this lack of anything at all, I can't help but ask myself what went wrong.

I set it up perfectly, filling all of the criteria I could think of: being a virgin, being average-looking, and being hit by the almighty Truck-kun.

I even sacrificed myself to save someone; surely that must increase the chances of gaining heaven's favor. How could such a noble deed be repaid with nothing in return?! How could the goddess see this and not be overwhelmed by his heroism? How could she not whisk him away to another world after seeing such an act deserving of a reward?

This should have guaranteed my reincarnation into a fantasy world. These were the fundamental laws of Isekai, Goddammit! Was my research mistaken? Could I have forgotten an important aspect of transmigration? Is there some hidden trait that I don't possess that has caused this denial of my rightful main character treatment?

As I was mourning the loss of my potential harem, I noticed some kind of spatial anomaly in the distance. I couldn't help but relate this occurrence to something I found quite familiar, something I had read about in quite a variety of fiction, though mainly in webnovels. This staple of Xianxia—aka cultivation novels—was known as a "spatial tear," and it was left behind whenever high-level cultivators traveled using the void. These powerful, self-made superheroes would literally rip a hole through space and travel through it by taking advantage of their extremely powerful physical bodies to handle the gravitational distortion inside the turbulent void.

Now that I think about it, this place is kind of like that void, so it's entirely possible this anomaly is my ticket out of here. There's just one thing wigging me out: It looks similar to what I previously described, but something about it is off. It looks less like a crack and more like a lightning bolt suspended in motion. The lightning bolt was pitch black while somehow still emitting bright white light. It's a strange sight; I guess you can't expect those pieces of fiction to get all the details correct.

The main thing is that the Isekai goddess hasn't left me high and dry after all. This spatial tear must be the method of transport she has planned for me.

***

With that in mind, the spirit confidently floated towards the spatial anomaly.

Thus, Dylan Grayson was declared brain dead, and Eric's day just got a lot worse.

But that's a story for another time.

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