DAY 5 DIMENSION: 5 "In the next world, you will see every life you did not choose." The moment those words disappeared, I was back home. The same room as yesterday. The same bed. Misaki was sleeping beside me. "Again...?" As I tried to sit up, I noticed something was wrong. There was no ring on my left hand. Until yesterday, Misaki and I had been married. I looked beside me. Misaki was gone. No. She had definitely been there just moments ago. Instead, a woman I didn't know was sleeping beside me. I shot out of bed. At that moment, the room changed too. A spacious apartment. Outside the window was a city I didn't recognize. I checked my phone. The screen was flooded with notifications. Messages from work. A company I'd never heard of. Coworkers I didn't know. I opened my photos. My life was there. But it wasn't the life I had lived. Me, successful at work. Me, living overseas. Me, married to a woman I didn't know. Me, holding a child. "What the hell is this...?" My phone vibrated. "CHOICE BRANCHES DETECTED." Countless options appeared on the screen. A life where I went to college. A life where I didn't. A life where I joined that company. A life where I quit. A life where I met Misaki. A life where I never met her. Every path I had chosen not to take. I tapped one. The world changed. I was in a hospital. Misaki was lying in a bed. A man who looked like a doctor bowed his head to me. "I'm sorry, but..." The world changed. This time, I was in a small house. Misaki and a child were laughing at the dinner table. I was laughing too. The world changed. An apartment where I lived alone. There wasn't even a photo of Misaki. The world changed. A cemetery. My name was engraved on a gravestone. The year of death was three years ago. "I... died three years ago?" The world changed again. I was an old man. In the mirror was my white-haired reflection. Behind me, an elderly Misaki was smiling. A life where I died. A life where I survived. A life where I got married. A life where we never met. A life where I succeeded. A life where I gained nothing. Every one of them was me. New words appeared on my phone. "OBSERVABLE WORLDS: 1,048,576" More than a million lives. And the number kept increasing. I turned off the screen. "Enough." I didn't want to see anymore. I could no longer tell which life was the right one. I had always believed the life I remembered was the real one. But here, every one of them existed. Then what was real? That was when I noticed something. There was one thing that existed in every world. It wasn't me. It wasn't Misaki. It was the phone. In every life, I had the same phone. Even in the world where I was dead. Even in the world where I had grown old. The phone alone was always the same. "No way..." I remembered the first day. When I entered the first world, the phone was there. It was there in the second world. The third. The fourth. No matter how the world changed, this thing always followed me. I placed the phone on the floor. Then I stepped a few paces away. The screen lit up on its own. "HAVE YOU NOTICED?" My heart jumped. "Who are you?" More words appeared. "You are not receiving messages through the smartphone." I didn't understand. Then I read the next sentence, and stopped breathing. "The smartphone is receiving you." I stared at the screen. I was being received? "Explain." The moment I said it aloud, the world around me vanished. In the darkness, countless versions of me appeared. Me as a child. Me as a student. Me as an office worker. Me, married. Me, single. Me, dead. Me as an old man. Hundreds. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Every version of me was staring at me. At the center stood a single man with his back turned. The same height and build as me. The other me I had seen in Chapter 4. "The original entity..." The man turned around. He had my face. But something about him was clearly different. He was the only one looking at me with a smile. "So you made it to the fifth." "Are you the original me?" The man didn't answer. "Was it you who sent me into these worlds?" Slowly, he shook his head. "No." "Then who?" The man pointed behind me. I turned around. A gigantic smartphone was floating there. On its screen were countless versions of my life. Each one had a number. I searched for mine. I found it. "ORIGINAL: 2" Beside it was another label. "STATUS: DUPLICATE" My body froze. "Duplicate...?" I looked at the original entity. "Am I a copy of you?" The man answered. "You're not my copy." Then he pointed to his own chest. "I'm a duplicate too." "Then what is the original entity?" The smile vanished from his face. "It's not human." At that moment, countless worlds began collapsing at once. A warning sounded from the phone. "UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO OBSERVATION DOMAIN DETECTED." The original entity's form began to distort. "Wait!" "Where is the real one?!" Just before he disappeared, the man left me with one final message. "Go to the sixth." "From there, you can see every world from the outside." Light exploded around me. A new display appeared on my phone. DAY 6 DIMENSION: 6 Beneath it were words I had never seen before. "OBSERVER ACCESS GRANTED." And finally, one last line. "The world you believed was reality currently exists in 1,048,576 versions."