Only Me

For the first four days, I thought it was a gas leak. I was wrong. I was the evacuation.

When the global population vanishes overnight, Ridwan assumes his quiet, isolated life in Jakarta simply caused him to be overlooked. He is partially right. Humanity was abducted by higher powers for a forty-year “transmigration” training program—but Ridwan was deliberately left behind, deemed too fragile to survive the transport.

He spends the next four decades counting the pristine, unaging corpses of the sick and broken left behind with him: 100,000 bodies. He is 100,001.

But time on Earth is broken. The forty-year transmigration program experiences a catastrophic time-dilation error. While the chosen humans train for decades, Ridwan spends three thousand years completely alone on a paused planet, managing a closed-loop ecosystem of immortal, hyper-evolved predators. He fractures his own mind to survive, building floating fortresses and localized AI to manage the silence.

Then, the angels arrive to “fix” the Earth for humanity’s return, accidentally resurrecting millions of starving, apex predators just as the naked, unprepared transmigrators begin falling from the sky.

They thought they left a dying boy behind. They are returning to a planet ruled by a man who has managed the apocalypse for three millennia. And he’s about to go to war.