Max turned off the alarm clock has he climbed out of bed, his feet padding softly on the cold wooden floor. Has he fumbled around in the darkness for his slippers, while his eyes slowly adjusting to the dim light.
He shuffled into the bathroom and turned on the light, while squinting as his eyes adjusted to the sudden brightness.
Has he stood in front of the mirror,max mummred something
max decides to splash cold water on his face, waking himself up. he saw his reflection ,showing how messy his hair was, while his eyes still puffy from sleep.
Max sighed and grabbed his toothbrush, the minty taste waking him up further. He rinsed his mouth and ran a hand through his hair, taming the wild strands into something more presentable.
Glancing at the clock, Max realized he needed to hurry. He dressed quickly, pulling on his pants and buttoning up his shirt, his fingers working efficiently. He checked himself in the mirror one last time, straightening his tie and smoothing down his hair. He grabbed his keys and wallet from the nightstand and headed for the door.
Stepping outside, the cool morning air hit him. He locked the door behind him and made his way to work.
Max's life was a goddamn grind. Day in and day out, the skinny 25-year-old Desk worker toiled away at CyberCorpTech - typing mindless data entries into Excel spreadsheets that made his eyes bleed.
"Another few hundred social security numbers for the machine," he'd mutter under his breath, hunched over his monitor in a dim, cheerless partitioned desk area that felt more like a cement cell.
His daily 9-to-whenever routine was a daily life of continuous stream, devoid of clear separation. All to support his small apartment in Tokyo plus caregiving costs for his paralyzed mom back in Mumbai.
"You're doing great, max," his mother would rasp over video calls, her frail body bedridden after a crippling stroke.
"Hard work? Ha!" Max's idea of hard work was grinding stupid-hard pay-to-win mobile RPGs during lunch breaks. At least his character could slay dragons and bang anime waifus on the side.
In reality, the coder's biggest accomplishments revolved around Power Level Combos at the nearby Ramen shop and setting the office high score on Minesweeper. What a stellar CV of life achievements
Despite wasting his 20-something years at a beige workstation, Max couldn't muster rage against the machine. Just numb exhaustion. Who had energy left to change realities after a 60-hour work week?
At least he had his boys the grime-stained, battle-hardened gamers of the CyberCorpTech IT department. Every Wednesday after-hours, Max would gather around weathered consoles with his fellow NEET compatriots, obliterating virtual enemies on Codewalker IV and devouring stale meatball subs like there was no tomorrow.
"Dude, Max, you need to get your scrawny ass out of this corporate maze more often," his thick-spectacled friend Victor would chide over headsets. "A few more months of this, and you'll be more vitamin-deficient than those Minecraft kids we saw on Reddit."
"Speak for yourself, man chunks," Max would belch back. "Last I checked, you spent two sick days getting kama-suplexed in Destiny Online by a tribe of Level 87 Night Elf Amazons."
Yup, that was the young professional's version of male bonding. Swapping hilarious horror stories of gaming all-nighters, Armageddon-tier Indian food burps, and the occasional shrieking about "screen-peeking n00btubers." Wholesome stuff.
Until one fateful night commute home, when Max's world took a dark, permanent sick day...
As usual, the night owl dragged his bony butt out of CyberCorp at 3 am, neck cramped from hours of data processing. His belly burbled from a horrific Curry-a-Rama Combo he had smashed, complete with an unapologetic tornado of chicken tikka, habanero sauce, and what he hoped was just mango chutney.
Head still buzzing from a heated Tekken argument with Victor, Max stumbled into a deserted intersection with headphones blasting Amapiano beats.
He barely registered the oncoming drunk driver's high beams before—
CRUNCH.
Max's body was steamrolled into a smoothie of mangled viscera and ripped H&M threads, his signature glasses comically bouncing off the truck's grille before shattering.
What a darkly hilarious end to an utterly average life.
But just as poor Max embraced the warm void of oblivion, a brilliant cosmic fracture ruptured the night sky.
Ethereal tendrils of shimmering force scooped up the remnants of his being and slurped them through the Crack - transporting his very essence into a whole new mortal form.
And just like that... Max's cosmic shift had begun.
When the disoriented speck of consciousness reconnected with physical form, he found himself uncomfortably compacted inside the tiny, frail body of a malnourished child dressed in tattered rags. Opening his new eyelids, Max was greeted with the bucolic hill vistas and rustic, ramshackle huts of what appeared to be some remote medieval village.
"W-where in the frack..?" the newly reincarnated kid wheezed in a squeaky voice. Max's head spun with vertigo as he tried to process the sudden, jarring in event and reality itself.
Suddenly, a piercing feminine cry rang out from a nearby hovel - shrill enough to burst his newly-acquired eardrums.
"Alexander! Oh, blessed goddess be praised!"
An emaciated peasant woman who could only have been the child's mother came scrambling out, scooping the bewildered boy into a backbreaking embrace.
"You're here! Oh thank the heavens... I thought those bandit pigs had snatched you."
Her eyes rimmed with grateful tears and decade-old worry lines, the frantic woman pulled back Max's scraggly mop of hair to plant kisses on his new cherubic forehead and cheeks.
"Don't you ever wander away from the sheep fields again, child, y'hear? This world's too cruel a place for a child!"
As the simpering villager rambled on, Max merely stared back in bug-eyed panic, trying to process this bizarre new lease on existence.
Reincarnated into the body of a scrawny 12-year-old peasant boy? In some backwater medieval dimension full of ramshackle huts, roving bandits, and (GULP)... no gaming consoles or hot pockets in sight?! Not to mention being saddled with what appeared to be a clingy frontier mama?
His tiny shoulders trembling, Max fought back the first in what would likely be an eternity of exasperated sighs. Looked like the former dreary existence within the office environment has now been elevated to an entirely new level of misery