The crack in the corner of the ceiling was still there.

  Kein found it before fully opening his eyes, as always. A small, diagonal fissure. This morning, he was in no hurry to stop staring at it.

  '7:04 AM.'

  He sat up, swung his feet over the edge of the bed, and remained there for a moment, seated. Outside, Los Angeles was already making noise. It always made noise. But it felt different to wake up without calculating how much time he had left before shutting down.

  '222 units. Nine long days.'

  For the first time since he arrived in this world, the Sword of Damocles was no longer inches from his neck. It was still there, somewhere above his head. It was just a few meters higher now.

  He went to the bathroom, turned on the cold tap, and washed his face. It was then that it appeared: a flicker at the left edge of his field of vision, translucent, with no defined shape. It lasted less than a second. Then, nothing.

  He dried his face, looking at the towel instead of the mirror.

  'Calibration,' he recalled. Prisma had warned him. Mild visual superposition until full adaptation.

  He waited. It didn't happen again immediately. Good.

  He opened the fridge, stared for three seconds, and closed it. Half a block of butter and something that, at some point in its life, had been sliced bread.

  'Now that I have time, it's time to get organized.'

  He closed the fridge without even thinking about eating that, went to shower, and began to think about food.

  Yesterday he had run out of pocket money; he needed cash. But he didn't know Kein Adler's bank password.

  Kein Adler's bank account was a number he couldn't reach. Kein's body was intelligent and orderly, the type of person who didn't write passwords down on paper and didn't forget them—because why would he, if he had them in his head? No family. No close friends. There was no way to infer anything.

  But there was a laptop.

  And the laptop, he noticed as he sat at the desk with his hair still damp, had been in sleep mode with the session open since before he arrived.

  The browser's password manager had dozens of entries. Email, academic platforms, the UCLA portal. Everything was there. Except for the bank, of course. It was the kind of thing people kept mentally by instinct, as if putting it in the browser were too much.

  Kein navigated to the file explorer. Trash: empty. Recent history: nothing relevant. But operating systems keep traces of deleted files as long as the space isn't overwritten—fragments, metadata, pieces. It was like finding torn pages from a notebook on the floor. They were still pages if you knew how to order them.

  Twenty minutes later, he had reconstructed a file from a few months ago called "misc notes." Eight lines. Among them, one labeled "bank."

  He jotted the password down on a piece of paper, opened the bank's website, and tried to log in.

  'Bingo.'

  He checked the balance. Enough to not go hungry for the next three months if he didn't do anything foolish. It wasn't much. It was enough for now.

  He put on his hoodie, went down to the corner store, and returned with rice, eggs, a jar of kimchi, and some fruit. He ate standing in front of the sink—rice with a fried egg and kimchi straight from the jar, no plate—and while eating, he realized this body was truly hungry. Not the hunger of malnutrition, but the hunger of someone who can have more, be more.

  So he thought about his next step. His health.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Health came first. He had reviewed the numbers the night before—Strength 0.8, Endurance 0.7, Speed 0.6—and although the classification was from NEXARA and he knew how to read it, the benchmark was clear: 1.0 was a normal adult. Without special training. This 24-year-old body was below that in almost everything, which was, in simple terms, a situation that could not remain as it was.

  Even for an actor, having a healthy and strong body was mandatory.

  He cleared the space between the bed and the desk enough to move.

  The training known as [Base Cadence] was an old protocol created by the highest technology and information of generations, designed for people working without bodily enhancements: 12 chained movements, without pause, three cycles with rhythm variation. Efficient. It targeted 70% of muscle mass in less than 40 minutes if the pace was sustained.

  The problem was the second cycle.

  His knees protested at an angle that would have been trivial in his previous body. The muscles responded, but the coordination wasn't his; it was Kein Adler's, a boy who studied psychology and who probably had never thought of training like this. The body had the fibers. It lacked the memory.

  He kept going anyway.

  Forty minutes later, he added the second part of the training, [Refinement]: stabilizing muscles, neck, deep obliques. The remaining 30%. Slower, almost completely isometric.

  He finished on the floor. Trembling and in a small pool of sweat, with his pulse somewhere between "intense exercise" and "I should reconsider my life choices." The crack in the ceiling appeared in his field of vision again, and this time with a flicker superimposed over it, something that tried to be text and dissolved before forming.

  He stayed on the floor for three minutes to rest.

  Next was training the brain.

  Kein Adler's psychology books had notes in the margins. Small, neat handwriting, two colors of highlighting, adhesive markers on specific pages. The original Kein Adler had studied this for real. Not as a chore, but as something that mattered to him.

  Kein opened the first one to page one and began to read.

  Three pages later, a line about episodic memory triggered something: terminology, definitions, a conceptual scheme that was suddenly there, vivid, without him having summoned it. It lasted two seconds. Then it was gone, like water through his fingers.

  He tried again. He reread the paragraph.

  The echo took longer to return, and when it did, it was blurrier.

  'I expected it to be like the information when I first arrived in this world—something easy.' It was something that had to be earned.

  He studied for two hours. Some things resonated. Others didn't. It certainly wasn't something that would happen in one morning. He closed the book, left it on the desk, and looked at the clock.

  The afternoon was a good time to start building a foundation. It was time to find Marcus.

  ---//------------//---

  The Silver Theater had a brick facade painted dark green—the kind of green that had gone too many years without being refreshed. Kein entered through the side door, which was unlocked, and the first thing he heard were voices.

  Not dialogue. Screams, babbling. Pitch scales, resonance work—the kind of exercise that sounds strange but has its logic in a theater.

  He found them on stage.

  Ana was standing near one of the wings, repeating a sequence of vowels with her jaw deliberately loose, a notebook clutched against her chest. On the other side, sitting on the edge of the stage with his legs dangling, the actor playing Hamlet was doing something different: while looking into a mirror, he frowned, relaxed, arched his eyebrows, lowered them, twisted the right corner of his mouth, and returned it to the center. Systematic. Working the muscles as if they were an instrument that needed tuning.

  Without the Danish prince's makeup, he looked like just a young guy with dark hair falling over his forehead. Shorter than Kein—enough to notice.

  Ana saw him first.

  "Kein!" She said it with the tone of someone who had been holding onto a question for two days. "What are you doing here?"

  "I came to talk to Marcus."

  "He'll be here in an hour." She lowered the notebook slightly. "Hey, I was thinking about Claudius's monologue yesterday, how—?"

  "Dustin." The actor playing Hamlet at the edge of the stage said it without looking up, without stopping his facial muscle exercises.

  Kein looked at him.

  "Dustin Ruiz." Now he did look, directly. He extended a hand without moving from the edge. "The actor playing Hamlet."

  There was something deliberately dry in that introduction. It wasn't hostile. Just the attitude of someone who had already decided to skip the pleasantries.

  Kein shook his hand.

  "I know who you are."

  "I know." Dustin lowered his feet to the floor. "I also know you're not from the guild."

  Ana opened her mouth, about to intervene, but she didn't have time.

  "No," Kein confirmed. "Is that a problem?"

  Dustin considered it for a few seconds with an expression that didn't reveal much. Then he gave a slight shrug.

  "Depends on what you want to learn."

  Ana exhaled with a relief she tried to hide and didn't hide at all.

  Kein sat in one of the side chairs. Marcus would arrive in his own time. He was in no hurry.

  "What were you doing?"

  "Warm-up," Ana said. "Facial muscles and vocal cords. Dustin says if you don't do it every day, it shows."

  "It shows," said Dustin, who had already returned to his exercises.

  Kein watched them work. Outside, Los Angeles continued with its background noise. Inside, the stage woods creaked occasionally with the midday heat.

  Two days remained until Jackson's audition.

  And for the first time since he had opened his eyes in this world, he wasn't counting the minutes to see if he would still be alive the next day.

  It was a small change.

  But it was a change.