Tick... Tock... Tick... Tock.

"Shut the fuck up!"

A masculine figure belonging to a young man lay sprawled on his bed, squabbling before rolling on his right reluctantly until he reached the edge of the bed. With his face down onto a pillow that muffled it, he raised his right hand and allowed it to fall loosely until his palm jammed on the desk beside the bed.

PAA*

"Shit, it’s not the alarm. It’s the wall clock."

He returned his hand and rolled on his left until he was now lying in such a way that his face was raised to the ceiling. Then, he wavered his eyes until they were finally open, staring at the white ceiling above.

"I should never buy an electric wall clock in my life again. The hands are just too loud."

Taking off the bed’s blanket, which was already half-covering him, he rose from the bed and ventured towards the corner at the wall where the supposed wall clock should be.

However, there was no wall clock.

Tick... Tock...

Still, the sound continued, and this time it was resonating rapidly in tiny-spaced intervals.

’So what was making that sound earl—’

His sleepy mind cleared immediately, and he suddenly remembered that there was never an electric wall clock in his room, or even an alarm clock to begin with.

The device that was making that sound was a...

BOOM!

The whole room, and probably the whole apartment where this young man was living, exploded, leaving nothing inside with any atom of life.

***

Tony Starke lay on the bed, sleeping soundly until a loud, ticking sound woke him from his sleep.

"Again?"

His eyes shot open, clear from any form of sleepiness. Immediately, he jumped out of bed and ventured towards the corner of his room where a wardrobe should have been, and a ticking device was placed by its side.

On reaching there, though, he instead found out that what was making the loud, ticking sound was an electric clock placed on the wall... and instead of a wardrobe, a tall mirror was affixed to the wall.

’What is happening? Why is everything not the same anymore?’

He ventured closer to the mirror, and his eyes suddenly set on his reflection from the mirror. As soon as his eyes set on his picture’s reflection, a biting pang soared through his head, causing him an unsettling pain that led him to crouch on the floor, holding his head tight.

Some minutes after the pain started, it stopped, and Tony found himself accumulated with memories that weren’t his own.

’A new world?’ he summarized after the memories settled. ’So, I actually died?’

He rose from his crouch and was now able to look at his full reflection in the mirror without any disruption from pain of any kind. Surprisingly though, this new body of his seemed to have retained every other physical feature of his previous self.

His face was sharply cut with a defined jawline and high cheekbones. His skin was lightly tanned and smooth, providing a perfect blend with his short, dark brown hair, with some strands of it falling out of place and providing a styled frame for his analytic brown eyes.

However, although this new body retained his features and even his lean, athletic body, the only difference was that there were no broad shoulders where they should have been. In its place, he was currently staring at the ones that should belong to a late teenager, around seventeen to eighteen years of age.

The most coincidental fact about the two of them, though, was their name. The owner of this new body answered to the same name as him.

"Tony Starke?"

Upon this new development, Tony cupped his palms together and covered his face with them for a moment before sliding them down and turning back to his bed.

"I guess this is me having a second life I never wished for. And by the worst possible means."

While returning to the bed, he also found out that this room he was currently in was nothing like the one he used to live in.

It was not as luxurious as his former room; however, it was comfortable enough for someone at the age of eighteen — a comfy bed placed in the center, the wall mirror earlier, and by the left side of the door was the wardrobe. The room was also ventilated well enough, with the two-frame window oppositely adjacent to the foot of his bed.

Taking in these details, he sighed and practically dropped on the soft foam on his buttocks.

"Bad enough, this Tony’s life is a direct opposite of mine. What happened to me, though?" he muttered and cracked his neck twice before raising it to the ceiling to reminisce about what happened.

In his previous life, he had been the 25-year-old Tony Starke who loved to live a fashionable, luxurious life alone. Things had turned out easy for him because his late father had set out a rich foundation for him to carry on.

There were the weapons and engineering industries, which he pioneered successfully and with immense business strategy; however, his ambitions had led him to personally start developing a unique kind of machine.

He was going to name this unique machine Dimetravl.

It was a name he coined from the words "Dimension" and "Travel," and the machine was going to work with the sole purpose of being able to transfer human beings from their world to another world with a different dimension from theirs. If it was because of the explosion of this machine that he found himself in this world, then he had fucked himself up.

That was never his plan for the device. Although it did a perfect job of sending him to another dimension, he never invented that system to transmigrate human beings.

’Or is that not the case?’

He slumped his back on the bed.

If what he presumed was what happened, then the device with the ticking timer that had disturbingly woken him from his beautiful sleep was Dimetravl. And it had exploded.

And that meant... that he died.

’So I indeed transmigrated?’ he thought, sampling his teenage hands and dropping them on his belly.

’That should explain the reason it all appeared as if I regressed but in another world. I can’t call it regression; the life of this... my new life was never what it used to be when I was this age.’

Tony remained calm on the bed, allowing this thought to naturally flow on its own.

He had wanted to blame what had happened on the ability of Dimetravl, but now that he truly understood what really happened, he called himself a "failure."

"I couldn’t even completely invent my stuff before it blew up," he murmured and rolled to his side.

Then what about the current Tony Starke? Who was he?

From the memories that had flooded into him, he realized one thing about this world he transmigrated into.

Tony sighed at the next influx of information that flowed into his memory.

"A thousand or more years have passed, and not even the second floor has been completely cleared. What a shame!"

Tony shook his head against the slow development of this world. If it was on Earth, he guessed that much time would be enough to even destroy the tower.

Nonetheless, just like him, the previous owner of this body had failed... except woefully.

For every citizen of this Tower World, awakening as players was a sure way to earn the chance of living a new kind of life.

For Tony, though, he thought that the luxurious perks of living as even the lowest-ranked "Player" were going to be accounted to him once he turned sixteen. However, life was unfair.

The third attempt — at age eighteen — is the last chance anyone ever gets. Fail again, and he’ll remain a powerless nobody in a world ruled by Players.

That last chance, and how successful or unsuccessful it can turn out, will be revealed tomorrow... during the awakening ceremony.

With no family, crushing poverty, and only a loyal girlfriend who refuses to abandon him, Tony expects nothing from his final awakening... except another failure. Consequently, he had only inhaled a killing spray, which, according to calculations, would have him killed in the middle of the night.

He wanted a peaceful death... and he got it.

"And that is how I found myself here, guys." Tony spoke to no one in particular as he stood from the bed, performing a two-hand fling that said, "whatever."

Walking to the kitchen section of the apartment, he retrieved a can of water from the refrigerator by the side and, after drinking all the contents in it, exhaled softly.

"He’s not so poor though."

He closed the cover of the refrigerator.

"Well, let’s see what happens tomorrow at the awakening ceremony."