Chapter 1

Ray Morley sat bolt upright in bed, lungs working hard, cold sweat running down his forehead. He had just woken from the most vivid dream he could remember.

In the dream, hail fell across the globe in one ceaseless storm. The stones were the size of ping-pong balls; ordinary window glass shattered as if it were tissue, car windows included.

A thick fog settled everywhere, keeping people indoors. The temperature plunged—not enough to turn people into ice sculptures, but down enough to freeze them to the bone. It was Summer.

By the fourth day, the power grid collapsed. Overnight, many froze to death. The hail itself was worse than a nuisance: it was poisonous.

When the hail melted, the liquid killed plants on contact and contaminated water. A sip would bring violent vomiting and diarrhea; a gulp could kill you outright.

Everyone was trapped, eating through their supplies, and when food and clean water ran out, the most terrible thing happened: people turned on one another.

But Ray never would have expected the end to come like this—he was ambushed by his wife's family, ripped apart alive. The pain of being dismembered was so precise, so unbearable, he could still feel it now.

This was not a dream. Holding his head, he replayed the fifteen days of the apocalypse in his mind. They were too concrete, down to every second—especially the last moments. There was only one possibility.

"I… I've been reborn."

He fumbled for his phone. The date on the screen read March 1.

The apocalypse had happened on June 1—he remembered it exactly because he had planned to take his son to an amusement park that day. They'd just stepped outside when the hail began; one ball hit him and the pain had made him question his life.

It seemed there were three months before the apocalypse.

He sat very still and made a decision. He had to get money, gather enough food and supplies to last him a lifetime, and build a doomsday shelter that could withstand the hail and keep out anyone who might try to seize what he had.

How to make money?

Simple. He had returned with precise knowledge of the stock market for the next three months—his hobby had always been market analysis—and he also knew the winning numbers of the next lottery.

He remembered buying a cheap two-dollar ticket once and matching five numbers; that memory was etched in his mind. The jackpot had swelled to 50 million dollars. By buying 50 tickets, he could guarantee the win.

With that initial capital and his foreknowledge of the market, making money would not be difficult.

But the first thing, he thought, was divorce.

Ray's eyes went dark. In his previous life, not only had his wife's family eaten him, his wife had revealed a cruel secret on his deathbed: the son he'd raised for three years wasn't his.

He had died furious inside. "Bitch," he said to himself, clenching his fists. He wanted revenge—nothing less than that. He swore he would not let them die easily, but he would make them pay.

He had been an orphan, earned a university place through his own effort, and landed a decent job. It was through someone else that he'd met Lauren Gantt, a nurse with a sweet face.

Her parents had just retired and had a small pension. She had a younger brother still in college. They dated for a time, things warmed quickly, and at her urging, Ray agreed to marry into the family—he became a live-in son-in-law.

An orphan didn't care much about continuing a family line; he wanted warmth. After marriage, Lauren grew distant, and her parents and brother treated him poorly, but when she quickly became pregnant, he focused on the joy of having a child and looked the other way.

After the son was born, he worked without complaint—changing diapers at night, making formula—everything fell to him.

To the Gantts, he was a son-in-law in name but a servant in practice. Worse, he handed over his entire salary to them and got only 100 dollars pocket money each month.

Lauren's younger brother, Max Gantt, had always spent lavishly during school and after graduation, bouncing between short jobs while dating and eating out. Now Ray knew whose money he'd been using.

The final humiliation was the worst. The son he had raised and poured his care into for three years was not biologically his. He had been a pitiful, laughable backup—just a replacement.

"Not one cent of what I earn will you touch," he vowed. "Not one crumb of the supplies I stockpile will I give you. I will kill you in the cruelest way."

He rose from the bed and, as he went to put on his shoes, froze. He felt a strange connection—his mind reached into a vast space, boundless and silent.

'This… a different dimension?' he thought.

He concentrated. The phone in his hand vanished.

Through thought, he could perceive it clearly: the phone sat inside that other space. He willed it back and the phone reappeared in his palm. His mouth fell open.

"Not only have I been reborn, I have a special ability now."

He felt a jolt of giddy calculation. With this, how much could he store? He wouldn't need to dedicate a whole room to supplies or worry about refrigeration the same way; temperature and humidity control would be simpler if he could tuck goods into that space.

The presence of the power proved the dream had been more than a dream.

His expression hardened. He packed the essentials and walked to the door. He swung it wide.

"You're just getting up? What time do you think it is?" Josh Gantt, his father-in-law, snarled. He was on the edge of hurling the teacup he held at Ray. "Get to the dishes and cooking."

Ray had called in sick with a headache and asked for the morning off; he'd told Lauren. Standing there, hearing Josh's tone brought him back to the moment before he died—Josh with a cleaver, dismantling him piece by piece.

He looked at Josh and felt murderousness rise, but he held himself back. Killing now would cost him his life; and to chop Josh with a single blade would be letting him off too easy.

His gaze alone cowed Josh; the old man's arrogance faltered. He felt something in the room shift, as if Ray might grab a knife and finish him.

The disrespect was too much for Josh. His face flushed with fury, and he hammered his hand on the table. "I can't believe this! You've got some nerve, glaring at me like that, you little shit!"

Ray closed the distance and slapped Josh hard across the face. The blow carried all his anger; Josh fell forward onto the table.

At that moment, Josh's wife, Daisy Muller, stepped out holding the baby. She screamed at the sight and the child began to wail.

Ray, who used to love his son the most, now saw only disgust and fury. The child did not resemble him; he had never suspected—he'd assumed his wife's genetics were strong and that the child resembled her. Now he realized he had been cuckolded.

An angry, honest man is dangerous. Ray walked over, clipped a lock of the boy's hair with a pair of scissors, smiled coldly, and slammed the door behind him.

Ten minutes later, the phone rang. He answered.

Lauren's voice roared down the line. "Ray, you hit my dad? Are you nuts?"

"We're getting a divorce," Ray said, and nothing more.