I used to think I was cursed, but cursed implies someone else did it to you. Everything that happened, I did to myself.
Name’s Joseph Bloomberg. People called me Joe. I had a girlfriend, a dog, a house with a yard, and two web novels with a cult following. The kind of readers who draw fan art and fight in your comments over plot points you haven’t even figured out yet.
I had luck. Stupid amounts of it. That’s the part I didn’t appreciate until it was gone.
The idea hit me on a Tuesday. Nothing good starts on a Tuesday.
I wanted to write a transmigration harem novel. Pure power fantasy, the kind I used to clown other writers for making. I knew it’d get hate. The genre always does. But I was confident I had the skills to flip the whole thing on its head.
I called it A Streamer’s Guide to Surviving Haremdale. The hero transmigrates into a fantasy world with a system that makes him unstoppable. Infinite luck, peak combat stats, flawless looks, and the ability to get stronger every time he wins over a woman.
I built the Hero System to be the most overpowered cheat I could think of without making readers roll their eyes.
I gave him everything I didn’t have.
Thought that was funny at the time.
I started writing on Wednesday. By Friday, my girlfriend had moved out.
Not for the usual reasons, either. She left for my brother. Marcus, who I’d trusted with my apartment keys, my Wi-Fi password, and apparently, my whole relationship.
She told me at the door, her bags already packed. She apologized, which was somehow worse than if she’d just left. An apology meant you’d thought about it and done it anyway.
I told myself it was a coincidence. Bad luck comes in clusters, right?
Then came the dog.
Bolt, a mutt I’d rescued three years ago. He slipped his leash during a walk and bolted into traffic. I chased him for six blocks.
Wasn’t fast enough, and that’s all I want to say about that.
I kept writing. The words came easier than anything I’d ever written, as if the story were pouring out of me. My whole world was falling apart while my word count kept climbing, and I was too stubborn to connect the two.
The house went three months later. I defaulted on the mortgage. I burned through my savings and watched my royalties decline until it all eventually caught up with me.
I moved into a studio apartment that smelled like mildew and whoever had lived there before me.
The readers dropped off next. Not all at once, just a slow leak. Comments thinned out, fan art stopped, and Discord went quiet in that specific way where you walk into a room and know everyone was just talking about you because they suddenly have nothing to say.
I kept blaming the algorithm. The platform. Timing.
I blamed anything but the pattern.
By then, I had nothing left but a dying novel and a horrible studio apartment. I sat at my desk and finally said out loud what I’d been avoiding.
The moment I started this book, my luck started draining.
Literally. Like I’d built a system that gave a fictional character infinite luck, and the fuel had to come from somewhere.
Right then, I decided to quit writing that cursed novel. I closed the document and resolved to get my life back on track.
I was walking down the street on a sunny afternoon in October, doing nothing but thinking about where to start. A job, maybe. Something small. Something that didn’t need much luck.
The lightning hit without warning.
No rain, no thunder, no dark clouds. Just a flash of white so bright it burned through my eyelids, a crack like a stone splitting, and then I was on the ground.
Couldn’t feel my legs or my arms. Couldn’t feel anything, really.
I could smell something burning, and it took me a second to realize it was me. My shirt. My hair.
The pavement beneath my cheek was warm. People were shouting. Someone was calling an ambulance. Their voices sounded like they were coming from the other side of a wall, getting farther away.
Then I heard something else.
A voice.
It wasn’t coming from the street or the sky. It was inside my head.
System recalibrating.
A progress bar appeared behind my eyes, a thin line of light filling from left to right.
Recalibrating. 70 percent.
I was dying, and I knew it. My body was shutting down in pieces. My fingers first, then my hands, then my chest.
Recalibrating. 80 percent.
My mouth wouldn’t open. My lungs wouldn’t expand.
But the progress bar kept filling.
Recalibrating. 90 percent.
Then the voice changed.
System online. Welcome, host.
Then I died.