“Okay, Eat it!”

  Zoe said flatly, pushing a shivering book with the image of a burning Earth on the front cover into June’s hands.

  June looked down at the frightened book. It was trembling like a wet cat, and then back up at her face, utterly confused. “Eat it? Why? I’m not a rat!”

  Zoe rolled her eyes. “Omg, because it’s the fastest way to digest a book. Or are you really planning to waste days reading through hundreds of them one by one? There’s a difference between casual reading and actual understanding, you know - which doesn’t come just from flipping pages unless you’ve really studied and processed the meaning.”

  “So how would eating paper solve the problem?” June asked, still baffled, eyebrows knit tight.

  “Stupiiiid,” Zoe groaned, stretching the word out as she threw her arms into the air. “The books can eat you and trap you inside, remember? So, the opposite is also true. If you eat them instead, you gain their contents. Directly. It’s like… a reverse trap.”

  “Ohhh.” June’s eyes lit up with sudden realization. “You should’ve said that first. How was I supposed to know what you meant?”

  “Thickhead,” she muttered, under her breath. Then she glanced at him sideways. “Be honest, how many dungeons have you found or cleared so far? Do you have any experience or not?”

  June puckered his lips, slightly insulted. He wasn’t a fan of being called stupid for no reason and it invoked some very unpleasant memories which he didn't want to remember. Then he shook his head, “Not many. Two dead, and one alive. This is my fourth dungeon.”

  “Hmm.” Zoe nodded thoughtfully. “It’s surprising you were even able to find an active one. Most are either long dead or completely harvested by the people earlier.”

  She drifted into a thoughtful silence, her arms folding loosely across her lap. “As far as I remember… you know, our world was already spiraling long before things truly collapsed. The rich capitalist bastards bled it dry, and the so-called world leaders weren’t far behind. There wasn’t much left to squeeze out of people. A lot of them, those who could, had already started leaving Earth. Others went into hiding. Honestly, it’s all a blur now. Protests were breaking out everywhere, countries were at each other’s throats. It was chaos.”

  She rubbed her temple and sighed. “I don’t even know how long it’s been now. Twenty years? Maybe more.”

  “Hold on,” June raised his hand to interrupt, genuinely puzzled. “If it’s been twenty years or more, what have you been doing this whole time? Alone? Wouldn’t that drive anyone insane?”

  “Of course I was sleeping,” Zoe said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “What do you think I was doing, dancing ballet up and down the shelves? I only woke up when you entered. That’s how echoes work sometimes. We just… exist in stasis until something wakes us.”

  “Oh.” June nodded slowly, taking that in. “Got it. Continue, then.”

  “Don’t interrupt me again,” Zoe warned, shooting him a glare. “I won’t repeat myself or tell you anything else.”

  June sulked quietly and sat back down.

  “Anyway,” she continued, softer now, “one day, I think the planet just… had enough. Like, really enough. All the wars, the destruction, the pollution, we were strangling the world. And then, one day, it strangled back.”

  She looked out toward the empty parking lot, her eyes losing focus.

  “It happened in minutes. Civilization crumbled. I was working late like usual, checking in inventory for a new shipment, when suddenly the sky turned gray and the sun went red like blood. I remember thinking it looked like the gates of hell had opened right above us.”

  Her voice grew quieter.

  “The first plane fell out of the sky somewhere near the center of town. Then earthquakes hit. One after another. Solar flares, I guess next because the mobiles stopped working first. Then other electronics. Just dead. And for the ones that didn’t shut off…”

  She trailed off for a second, her eyes darkening.

  “I watched people walk out of shops, out of the mall, and then get eaten by things in their bags. Their electronics. Their cars. I saw someone get swallowed whole by the driver seat.”

  She touched the back of her head gently, as if remembering the pain and her voice dropped to whisper . “Something hit me. I don’t even know what. A flying shelf maybe. Or a falling beam. I blacked out and fell against the table over there. Next thing I knew… I was outside my body. Just staring at it. I couldn’t leave. Couldn’t scream. Just stuck here.”

  June took a second to digest all in, but his intelligence turned into an epithet thinker, creating a great deal of thoughts for him to ponder over: like, previously he was thinking it must be some kind of trauma that formed echo, but now he wasn’t so sure.

  “So what happened after,” He asked slowly.

  “See you don’t even care about how i died,” Zoe pulled a sulken face.

  June felt embarrassed, but he had no idea how to console others. No one has ever consoled him for him to imitate the action back.

  Meanwhile Zoe continued, “Well, the same night, many people began to hear a second voice in their head, telling them to do things.” She stopped to look at him, “Do you also hear a voice?”

  “Hmm,” June nodded, “What about you?”

  Zoe shook her head, “I think echoes can’t.”

  “Anyway,” Zoe continued, stretching her legs out on the steps, “it was around that time people started realizing something weird—if they fought back and killed the animated things, they gained these... numbers. Like games. Like RPG stuff. And they started developing powers, too. Real superpowers. I literally saw people fly, or shoot lightning out of their hands. The sky would light up at night with battles - not stars or fireworks, but people hurling attacks at each other over territory or resources."

  She laughed bitterly and ran a hand through her ghostly bangs. “And then, for a while, it was just madness. Everyone running around trying to kill anything that moved. If it twitched, it died. Didn’t matter what it was. Everyday the ground would shake from those with earth powers trying to collapse buildings for the EXP inside. It had gotten pretty bad”

  She hugged her knees, “I stayed hidden, obviously. Echoes were prime targets - we gave more EXP than most basic hostile entities." She let out a self-deprecating laugh. "Hehehe, being dead made me valuable for once."

  June didn’t say anything, just listened, still sitting quietly with the book on his lap.

  “Later on, once there were fewer things to kill,” she went on, “people started thinking again. Or pretending to. Trying to pull society back together or whatever was left of it. Small groups, little communities, sometimes a whole building full of survivors. Other times, just three people huddled together in a garage.” She shrugged. “It didn’t last long. The military tried to take control. So did what was left of the government. They'd roll through in tanks or armored vehicles, claiming territory 'in the name of restoration,' but really just hoarding resources and conscripting survivors.”

  “And sometimes people from other towns or cities would attack randomly to level up. Raiding parties with matching symbols painted on their clothes would sweep through, killing everything animate they could find, then vanishing before the local powered-up residents could organize a defense."

  "This whole level-up system was super fucked up in my opinion. I mean, it was good to have superpowers, but how was that helpful in surviving an apocalypse?"

  She raised an eyebrow at him in question. June had no answer.

  "Obviously, these powers couldn't fill people's hungry stomachs or purify polluted water. The reservoir east of town turned black within weeks - some kind of corruption that spread through the water system. People with water powers tried to clean it, but just got infected themselves. Sure, some more people got lucky and rolled farming skills or purification stuff, but those were so rare. And the ones who had them, let’s just say they didn’t stay free for long.”

  Her voice turned flat again. "But in the upcoming six months to a year or so, a lot of people, despite being powerful, started dying anyway. Hunger. Thirst. Disease. Poisoned water. You name it. For all their powers, they couldn’t stop being human. Couldn’t stop needing the basics. I literally watched a man who could generate fire from his fingertips, roast his own flesh and collapse from starvation right outside. His body stayed there for weeks before something dragged it away."

  Zoe looked away, eyes landing on the glass wall facing the empty parking lot. The sky beyond had turned slightly orange, the beginning edge of twilight settling into the world.

  “To be honest,” she muttered, voice low, “I’d only ever read about this side of humanity in books. The worst parts. The stuff you think is too exaggerated to be true. But it wasn’t. It was real. I saw people cannibalizing each other. Literally tearing apart their own friends, their family members. Just to survive. Raping women and girls on sight, with no law to punish the people on power trips. Basically, the strong literally feeding on the weak. Winter was the worst - no power, no heat, and those without fire abilities started disappearing. You'd see people dragging others into buildings, and fewer people would come out."

  “And the worst part? All of this, everything I’m telling you, this is just what I saw from here, in the parking lot outside. This one little corner of the world. I never even stepped out. Who knows what was going on out there?”

  Then her expression shifted, and she glared sharply at June, her eyes narrowing.

  “But I did make many good friends,” she added pointedly, “people who actually tried to protect me. From the lunatics who came by, hoping to kill an echo for some XP. So if you’re having any bright ideas—”

  “I’m not,” June cut in quickly, raising both hands. “Not even a little.”

  She held the glare for another second. Then it faded.

  “Good,” she said, relaxing back against the step railing. “Just making sure.”

  …

  Finally, June gathered enough courage to do it. The book cried like a newborn child in his hand, making it worse, he couldn't bring himself to just bite it, not while it cried like that. He suspected that burning their brothers might not have been enough for the books to surrender, and Zoe likely had some control over their ability to attack. She was probably suppressing them using some of her control over the dungeon.

  Ultimately, he took the easy way out. He activated Stasis Lock, freezing the book mid-sob. It was only a magazine, just for a test. He bit into it and then ripped a page. It tasted absolutely awful - dry, fibrous, chemical, almost bitter - like chewing chalk and glue at the same time. His throat tightened reflexively, but then something strange happened. Words started rising inside his head like bubbles in boiling water, fragments of sentences, headlines, facts, and by the time he forced himself to take a second bite, despite every part of him resisting, more complete thoughts formed behind his eyes.

  Zoe handed him his water bottle. “Here,” she said, grinning. “Makes it go down easier.”

  He took a long gulp, barely managing to suppress the gag, and over the next fifteen minutes, with grim determination, he finished the entire thing.

  When he finally swallowed the last soggy mouthful, Zoe clapped.

  “I think I’ll just read next time,” June said dryly, face sour and expression flat.

  "Hehehe," Yet, Zoe smile only grew wider. “I always wanted to see someone eat one. Wow. You really are brave.”

  “What?” June’s brow furrowed, looking up at her cheerful, shining expression. For a ghost, she was incredibly alive. Maybe even more than the people he remembered from before. There was something bright in her, something loud and warm that didn’t fit in this quiet, crumbling world.

  “I mean,” she added quickly, her tone turning sheepish, “I didn’t know it would work. I was just bored one day and thought, you know, what would happen if someone ate a monster book?”

  June’s mouth fell open, his entire body freezing. “You mean… I was a test dummy?”

  "Hahaha," She didn’t answer, instead laughed louder, too pleased with herself.

  June's face scrunched up in fury. He looked away, muttering under his breath that he really needed to stop trusting strangers so easily. Lesson learned. A big, bitter lesson that still tasted like paper and regret. And what if, God forbid, the book had attacked from inside? What if it had tried to digest him instead? The thought made him instantly wrap both arms around his stomach in panic, fingers pressing into his sides to check if everything was still where it should be.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “Relax,” Zoe laughed, clearly amused by his distress. “You’re not gonna die. And hey my idea worked, didn’t it? You just learned an entire book in fifteen minutes. Plus, you’ll probably get some EXP for it too.”

  “No thanks,” June huffed, still irritated, still chewing phantom paper in the back of his mouth. “I’ll stick to actual reading.”

  Zoe snorted. “Suit yourself. Just don’t expect me to help next time you get eaten by a thesaurus or something.”

  Then, without warning, she dispersed into mist, vanishing from the stairs like the ghost she was, leaving only a shimmer of her laughter behind.

  …

  Meanwhile, June spent the rest of his day quietly reading, browsing through shelves, and picking up anything that caught his interest, and there was definitely a lot.

  Based on just the number of books Zoe had already picked out for him to eat, he figured he’d need at least a month to go through it all, even without reading them the normal way. But he wasn’t sold on that method. Even now, he could still feel the content of the first book floating in his mind like a leaf drifting across a still pond, present, but not exactly useful yet. His brain didn’t seem to know what to do with so much information absorbed all at once; it was like swallowing food without being able to digest it. So, he decided to wait, to let it settle and see what came of it before committing himself to another book. If something seemed truly important, then maybe he’d consider taking another bite, but otherwise, he saw no point in hoarding information he didn’t know how to use.

  More importantly, he now had a general idea of what had happened, at least a broad understanding of how the world collapsed twenty or so years ago. Still, it didn’t make the current world feel any less strange. All the chaos and collapse had happened long before he arrived, leaving him to wander through the echoes, the ruins, the forgotten scraps of it all. Like picking leftovers from a banquet that ended long ago.

  But there was no rush.

  A step at a time, he muttered to himself, turning the page of a basic elementary science book he had once failed to understand in school. Now, the concepts within were clearer than the sky outside, like opening a third eye that could see through the noise, right into the structure beneath. What was once a blur was now just… obvious.

  Later, as the light shifted and the evening slowly bled into night, Zoe appeared beside him again, hovering at the edge of his vision with an unusually hesitant posture. She didn’t speak at first, visibly holding something back, her arms crossed too tightly, her foot tapping once, then stopping.

  June didn’t try to push. He didn’t have the energy to read minds and even less patience to prod someone into talking. He just let her pace herself.

  “Hmm… where are you staying?” she finally asked, voice casual but a little stiff.

  “Inside the mall,” June answered without looking up.

  “Why don’t you shift here?” she said after a moment, tone lighter, almost rushed. “I mean... not that I’m asking. I’m suggesting, okay? Just, like… if you want. No pressure at all. I’m not totally alone or anything or need someone to talk to…”

  June blinked. A hundred thoughts passed through his mind in an instant. Was she trying to keep an eye on him? Maybe even planning to silence him at night while he slept? He shouldn’t trust people easily. And to survive alone in this dungeon for twenty years, Zoe had to be more dangerous than she let on. There was no way someone stayed alive for that long without some serious strength or leverage, and the cheerful, bubbly act was nice, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have knives hidden behind it.

  “I still have some areas to explore,” June replied tactfully, his voice light but his words deliberate. “Once I’m done with those, I’ll think about it.”

  It was a polite refusal, and he meant it that way.

  Zoe didn’t argue. She just shrugged and walked off, leaving him to return to his thoughts.

  Yes, she was beautiful. Yes, she talked pretty. Yes, she had been helpful and even somehow genuinely kind. But June had learned the hard way that kindness didn’t always mean safety. And while his past self might’ve trusted her outright, the new him.

  His Intelligence epithet (Thinker) helped him clearly understand the logic behind things, and his Wisdom was sufficiently high to push him toward good decisions, if not always perfect ones.

  …

  Time had begun to slip quietly by in the small, forgotten town of Perry.

  Days folded into each other like pages left too long in the sun, and before June truly registered the passing of weeks, eleven months had already gone. Almost a year in solitude, unmarked by calendar or celebration, save for the slow accumulation of survival and understanding.

  While he spent his days wandering the town’s ghostly ruins, scavenging for useful scraps and tinkering with broken things, his nights were dedicated to reading. Always reading. Books stacked like barricades around him, their pages slowly turning into thoughts, their ideas stitched into the corners of his mind. Knowledge had become his companion, more constant than wind, more comforting than food. And in these long nights under pale moonlight or candle glow, June had grown mentally, emotionally, almost spiritually. His eyes had grown clearer, sharper, less easily fooled, and his thoughts now formed with a clarity he once never believed he could possess.

  Yet, surviving the apocalypse was one thing. But surviving it alone… truly alone… for days, weeks, months that was something else entirely. Everyone liked to believe they could endure the end of the world. Few ever considered what it meant to outlast even the end itself. What was left for the last person alive, when not even death came knocking?

  And yet, strangely enough, not much had changed. Not in the world, at least. No people had returned. No new monsters had crawled out from forgotten places. No miracles. No final boss. The world was silent - still turning, still rotting, still watching.

  June’s level hadn’t gone up once, despite all that time, but his body had changed tremendously. His Radicals, those strange stats had seen a significant boost in recent months.

  Furthermore, he had actually upgraded his Intelligence once more and it had happened out of nowhere where it changed from (Thinker) to (Scholar) and swallowed his wisdom radical for some unknown reason. It was the first stat he lost or perhaps the right word would be merged…

  :::[June]:::

  Level: 6

  Class: [Unassigned]

  Titles: [Preserved], [No Place Home]

  [PERSONAL RADICALS]

  [STR] Strength: 22 → 40

  [DEX] Dexterity: 22 → 32

  [VIT] Vitality: 15 → 23

  [INT] Intelligence: (Scholar)

  [WILL] Willpower: (Brave Heart)

  [CHA] Charisma: 13

  [LCK] Luck: 9

  [EXPERIENCE]

  Total EXP: +[251 → 290]+

  Total Radical: +[5]+ WILL,

  EXP Required for Level 7: 1529

  …

  The scarlet sun bled low on the horizon, casting long shadows across the overgrown buildings and fractured roads, painting everything in that surreal, red glow.

  June rose to his feet from where he had crouched beside one of his newly sprouted vegetable beds and brushed the dirt from his palms. The sun dipping like that was his cue, it was time to return home.

  In recent months, his days had been consumed by cultivating food, building water filters, and slowly solving the more stubborn problems of daily survival.

  His intelligence and reading had proven far more useful than all the physical strength he had gained. Sure, he could now easily lift seventy five kilograms without flinching or outrun a horse over short or long distances, but those things couldn’t stop him from dying of hunger or dehydration. Especially now, when his enhanced physique demanded nearly twice the nutrition he once needed.

  Finally, he took a last look at his small patch of thriving garden, already proud of how it had grown in the last season.

  He had put a tremendous amount of work into them. Honestly, he found agriculture more complicated than building a radio or bringing back electricity. For this small patch, he had used a series of interconnected rain barrels and gravity-fed irrigation channels, and then lastly he was able to create a self-regulating watering system for his crops. He'd salvaged solar panels from nearby rooftops and rigged them to power small UV purification systems for his drinking water, eliminating the need to constantly boil it. His garden now produced a carefully calculated balance of nutrients, proteins from beans and lentils, carbohydrates from potatoes and corn, and vitamins from a variety of leafy greens and fruits.

  He had a bicycle which was honestly super great when broken cars were everywhere or monsters running behind you. They were good, fast, and the only way to escape on car-blocked roads.

  At the Allmart plaza in the last few months, he had also been working hard on using all the burnt cars in the parking lot to create a maze-like fence for safety and security. And within specific cars, he'd set up alarm systems using tension wires and suspended cans filled with small stones, primitive but effective tripwires that would alert him to intruders. It wasn’t foolproof, but it slowed down anything large or mindless, and gave him precious time if something ever made it inside.

  And although the CME had fried a lot of things on Earth, he had still been very diligent in his studies and had brought back temporary power to his base.

  Using knowledge from electrical engineering books, he'd created a makeshift power grid throughout the central section of the mall. Solar panels provided the primary power, while a wind turbine constructed from air conditioning fans and aluminum sheeting supplemented it on cloudy days.

  His most impressive achievement was a radio transmitter capable of sending and receiving out automated signals, not that anyone had ever responded, but the possibility kept him motivated.

  …

  "How was it?" Zoe asked as he parked the bicycle nearby. She was standing at the bookstore door, which had basically become his home too.

  "Great," he replied softly.

  They had been living together for almost ten months, and June had developed a great deal of trust in her. He hopped off and handed her the bag of freshly gathered vegetables, which she took with an almost exaggerated grin, swinging it playfully like it weighed nothing. He made his way inside and collapsed onto the couch with a familiar groan, already feeling the tension begin to slip from his spine.

  The first floor of the bookstore had changed a lot since the early days, the bookshelves once crowded and towering had been moved upstairs, and in their place sat soft cushions, rugs, a reading nook by the window, and their mismatched collection of chairs and tables that had, somehow, become their home.

  Dinner didn’t take long. Zoe cooked, even though she didn’t need to. She still insisted on playing her role, still liked pretending, and June had stopped questioning it a long time ago. They sat side by side on the couch, two plates on the coffee table, last light spilling in through the windows. She took a bite, as she always did, and made her usual remark.

  “It’s really good,” she said, eyebrows raised in mock awe.

  “Just stop,” June muttered, shooting her a flat look. “You can’t even taste it.”

  “Hehehe,” she laughed, that half-teasing, half-sincere giggle of hers. “Well, it doesn’t hurt to dream. If I exist, it means I’m alive in some way, right? And if I’m alive, maybe… maybe someday I’ll walk out those doors again.”

  June wasn't so sure about her dreaming of miracles. Some doors closed and never reopened, no matter how long you stared at them. Of course, he wished such doors never existed in the first place.

  Still, he understood one thing: whatever friendship truly meant, she had shown him. In a world where he had been born invisible and forgotten, Zoe had treated him like he mattered, laughed with him, listened to him, taught him. She even joked they were “friends with benefits,” which he understood only now wasn’t about supplies or survival. She’d tease him often, saying he wasn’t her type, too quiet, too serious, too bookish and too good looking. There were good chances he would be stolen by someone, so she had closed her heart before she got hurt.

  Which honestly confused June because he didn’t know how any of that was supposed to be an insult, aside from the part about not being her type. That, at least, seemed straightforward.

  “What?” Zoe asked suddenly, eyes narrowing as she caught his expression.

  “What?” he blinked, yanked from his thoughts.

  “Why are you staring at my lips?” she asked with a mischievous glint, then leaned forward with an exaggerated pout. “You wanna kiss me?”

  “Ugh!” June recoiled like she’d thrown a snake at him. “Why would I wanna kiss a ghost?!”

  “A pretty ghost,” Zoe corrected and broke into wild laughter, tossing her head back.

  June meanwhile folded his arms, sulking just a little, but his mind was already spiraling.

  It wasn’t like he didn’t know about these things, he’d read plenty of romance novels in last few months, not all of them PG, and honestly, a lot of them had left him wide-eyed and uncertain about how humans even functioned, especially in bed. They’d opened his eyes, though. Given him ideas about affection and attraction, about how people chose to be close, to connect. But even with his stats, his grown height - now almost five-ten - and his lean, maturing frame, he still felt like a small lost kid who was lost at heart.

  Fourteen or Fifteen when it started. Maybe sixteen now, technically, if time was even real anymore. He didn't think he had found his purpose yet.

  Zoe, despite her appearance, had died years ago. In truth, she was probably in her late thirties.

  That would make her, by comparison, an old cow eating young grass… But, not that it mattered to him. Not really.

  He folded deeper into the couch, arms crossed and face tight.

  Zoe leaned over, still grinning. “Oh my god,” she said, half in disbelief. “You were actually considering it. You really were, weren’t you? I mean, I get it I’m so pretty and hot and we basically live under one roof and sometimes even share blankets. What kind of man would not be tempted?” She gave him a look with her eyes that screamed, what are you going to do about it?

  June felt his body turning pretty hot for no reason whatsoever.

  He immediately decided to change the topic before Zoe made more fun of him, “I’m thinking of visiting the nearby towns.”

  Instantly, Zoe’s smile faltered, only for a heartbeat, but it was enough. She had never told him, but the idea of him leaving haunted her more than anything. Even now, just the mention of it echoed inside her like a stone dropped into an empty well. This past year or this time had been the best thing she’d known since the world ended. A kind of peace. A kind of home. Not just because June was the only human she’d spoken to in twenty years, but because he’d been kind. He listened. He smiled when she teased him. He trusted her. And slowly, unknowingly, he'd given her a reason to keep existing in this limbo of flickering light and silent bookshelves.

  If he left…

  Her hands curled slightly in her lap.

  “You should,” she said finally, voice even. “It makes sense. You’ve been here too long already.”

  June looked over at her. Her face was unreadable. Maybe too calm.

  “I’ll be back,” he said. And it wasn’t like he was leaving on a long journey, maybe for one or two days max.

  She nodded, still not looking at him. “Sure.”

  Yeah, he was pretty sure, it wasn’t how ‘sure’ sounded.

  “I mean it.”

  Zoe chuckled, “You don’t owe me anything, June. You’ve already given me more company than I ever thought I’d have again.” She stood, brushing off her hands, pretending to fuss with something on the shelf nearby. “If you go, just… make sure it’s worth it. Don’t disappear out there chasing ghosts.”

  June didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t meant to hurt her, hadn’t even thought about how it might feel for her. But hearing the distance in her voice now, the way she seemed to drift further away with every second…

  “I’m not going tomorrow,” he offered. “I’m just… thinking.”

  Zoe didn’t turn around. “Thinking is the first step to going.”