Nicole Floyd jolted upright in bed, gasping. Sweat streamed down her forehead, her eyes unfocused and hollow.

The sight in front of her cut through the haze in her mind.

This was her old apartment, the one from before the apocalypse.

Ding, ding…

Text alerts kept chiming. She grabbed her phone from the nightstand.

September 14, 2029. 9:32 a.m.

Nicole had more than a dozen unread messages. All of them were warning about a super typhoon named Cleaver, projected to make landfall early on the 17th along the coast. There would be category-breaking winds and days of relentless rain.

Nicole stared at the screen, dazed.

Hadn’t she died? She remembered dying in that cannibal world devoid of light. Had her refusal to accept it dragged her into some dying hallucination?

Ding!

Another alert came in, updated at 9:37 a.m.

Nicole twisted her arm hard. Pain shot up her nerves, sharp and real.

This wasn’t a dream. She had been reborn, back to three days before the storm that cracked the world open.

No. To be exact, two and a half days.

Nicole didn’t feel happy. The exhaustion had settled deep in her bones.

Typhoons, floods, deep freeze, extreme heat, earthquakes. One hell after another. What was there worth reliving?

And yet, she was back.

Was she supposed to sit still and wait to die all over again?

Not a chance!

Nicole splashed cold water on her face. The mirror showed a younger version of herself with smooth skin and clear eyes, no hollowed-out desperation yet.

For a moment, everything looked fine.

Her gaze dropped to the crystal pendant at her neck.

She had been wearing it when she was abandoned at the hospital as a newborn. Later, Edward Austin had taken it from her and given it to the school’s beauty queen, Mary Cannon.

Three years into the apocalypse, Mary still looked flawless. Her clothes were clean, her skin rosy, as if the old world never ended for her.

Once, when Nicole collapsed from hunger, she saw Mary casually pull a vanilla ice cream bar out of that pendant and lick it, slow and unbothered.

Nicole’s breath hitched.

She grabbed a blade, sliced her fingertip, and let a drop of blood fall onto the pendant.

A blinding light exploded.

When her vision cleared, she stood inside an empty apartment with no front door. There was running water and electricity, but no furniture.

The place had two bedrooms and a living room, totaling about 860 square feet. The ceilings were nearly 10 feet high. Next to the balcony was a small garden, roughly 110 square feet, filled with dark soil.

A glowing timer floated in the living room.

01:56:13.

This was the storage space that let Mary live like royalty. Or rather, the one she had tricked out of Nicole’s hands.

When Nicole stepped out, the space stayed with her, embedded in her mind. The moment she focused, she could sense everything inside.

Nicole tested it with boiling water. Everywhere except the balcony and the garden kept things perfectly fresh.

She could store things using thought alone. When nobody entered physically, the timer froze. Once she stepped inside, it started counting down.

There wasn’t time to unravel how it worked.

She had a second life and a storage space. That was enough for her to change her gruesome fate last time.

In her past life, she had survived only three years. She had no idea what disasters came after.

With that in mind, Nicole searched online for types of natural disasters. When she looked at the results filling the screen, she nearly collapsed on the spot.

Gosh, staying alive was hard!

Pushing aside the extra emotions, she took out a pen and notebook and started listing supplies.

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