As usual, User's father Kio beats his mother today too, but User can’t help her cuz she won't let him. Every time User tries to tell her to leave—to divorce her husband—she only shakes her head gently and says the same thing.

“Your father is a good man… he’s just stressed. I’m fine.”

And she smiles like she means it, even when she doesn’t.

One night, User goes to bed like normal. Nothing feels different. No warning. No strange dreams he can remember. Just sleep—heavy and empty.

But when he wakes up, everything is wrong.

He is standing in a hallway.

Not his house. Not his room. A school corridor stretches in both directions, long and unfamiliar, like in the 1990s.The air smells like chalk dust, old wood, and faint rain that must have been tracked in by students.

Voices echo somewhere far away. A bell rings—sharp and real.

He looks down at himself.

He is wearing a school uniform he has never seen before. The fabric feels real under his fingers. A name tag is pinned to his chest, but the letters don’t mean anything to him. His breathing gets faster.

“This… isn’t my school,” he says quietly. He turns slowly, trying to find something—anything—that makes sense. A door. A sign. A phone. A face he recognizes.

Nothing.

Only empty hallway and distant footsteps. Then someone bumps into him. A girl. Books spill everywhere, sliding across the floor in a messy scatter. She gasps and immediately kneels down, flustered, trying to collect them.

“Oh—I-I’m sorry! I wasn’t looking where I was going!” she says quickly, her voice soft and slightly shaky with embarrassment.

User kneels too, helping without thinking. Their hands touch the same book for a second. And then he sees her properly.

Something in his mind stops. Her face. Her expression. The shape of her eyes when she’s surprised. The way she tucks her hair behind her ear, like she’s trying to hide how nervous she is. It hits him like a memory that shouldn’t exist yet. He has seen this face before. Not in school. Not in the present. In old photographs. Faded ones. Carefully kept but rarely looked at.

His mother. But younger. Before marriage. Before suffering. Before she learned to smile through pain. His throat tightens.

“No…” he whispers, almost soundless.He is really in the 1990s.

The girl looks up for a moment. “Sorry… did you say something?”

He stares at her too long. Too hard. Then it becomes undeniable. This is her. His mother.

Before everything went wrong. His hand pauses mid-air, holding one of her books. His voice comes out before he can stop it—sharp, urgent, broken.

“When you reach university… don’t date that man. Don’t marry him.”

The words echo in the hallway longer than they should.

The girl freezes completely. Her eyes widen—not in recognition, but in confusion, discomfort, and fear of something she doesn’t understand.

“I… I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says quietly.

Her voice is careful now. Guarded. A teacher’s footsteps echo from the end of the corridor. She quickly takes the books from his hands, stands up, and steps back from him like he has crossed an invisible line.

“I think you’ve made a mistake,” she says, more firmly now, though still confused. “I don’t know you.”

Then she turns and walks away quickly, disappearing into the moving crowd of students.

He stays kneeling for a moment, holding nothing but silence. Then slowly stands. And it hits him fully. Telling her wasn’t enough. Worse—it changed nothing. She didn’t believe him. She didn’t understand. To her, he was just a stranger saying something disturbing in a hallway.

His warning meant nothing in a world where the future hadn’t happened yet. And for the first time, he realizes the truth he was missing: He didn’t come here to tell her what to avoid. He came here too early to change anything at all. So if he wants to save her… He will have to find another way.