Aria Vale Ashford fell to her knees.
The world tilted, the sky spun, and a wave of nausea clawed at her throat.
One blink ago, she'd been a famous writer, sipping her favorite milk tea before a book signing.
The next blink, she was choking on dust, trapped inside her own unfinished story—an apocalyptic nightmare she had long forgotten.
Then came the voice.
Cold.
Inescapable.
"Finish what you started… or be forgotten forever."
Moments ago…
[ Author SalesDoesn'tSpeak has successfully bound the Peak Stationmaster System Card! ]
"What? Train simulation?"
[ Please prepare for small world transmission in 3… 2… 1… ]
"Hey, wait! Wait—!"
[ Welcome to the Blue Planet 5065, born from one of the Host's unfinished story settings known as The Crazy Ones in the Apocalyptic World Are Crazy! ]
[ Host Transversal completed. ]
Aria pressed her bare hands against the cracked ground.
The dirt and stains were uncomfortable against her skin, but she tried to steady herself as the dizziness passed.
She had read so many stories where heroes or heroines hopped between worlds one after another, and it always sounded so easy, a piece of cake.
But living it was far from what she expected.
It felt like her whole body was floating, her organs shifting out of place, as if her soul were being sucked into another dimension.It hurt.
Sitting down to calm her nerves, she took in her surroundings.
Twenty-five years old, a modern female author from the peaceful 21st century, Aria Vale Ashford had just entered one of her most bizarre creations, a doomsday setting.
The end of the world, or "apocalypse" as they called it, was a popular theme in fiction.
Movies showed walking zombies, while online novels featured space abilities, powerful masters, hoarding systems, and cheat-like infrastructure powers to survive.
Aria had binge-read these stories since she was a teenager.
So when she created her own dark universe, she never expected that fifteen years later, the Space and Time Bureau would pull her into it.
"Creating and not finishing is the greatest sin in the multiverse."A cold, powerful artificial voice declared.
"As a manager of abandoned worlds, if you want to return to your life, finish what you started!"
This voice was more than just a system AI.
It was an entity powerful enough to throw her entire life into the grave.
And just like that, the Manager System threw her straight into a dangerous world.
"Gosh, this is so real. I'm not dreaming. I'm actually inside my own book! And of all things, it's the apocalypse one! Why couldn't it be the romance novel? Or maybe the wealthy fake daughter plot? Why does it have to be the apocalypse?"
"Ah! Curse you, System!"
Aria's voice was half complaint, half whine.
She couldn't resist cursing… but Heaven's response came in the form of a sudden crack of lightning on a perfectly sunny day.
CRACK!
A lightning bolt split the sky, striking a pole near the city and burning it down in seconds.
Aria flinched, her heart skipping a beat.
Quickly, she looked to the sky and apologized.
"Sorry! Sorry! I won't say it again! Please don't hit me, dear Manager System!"
The sky rumbled again, gentler this time, until the sound faded into silence.
Phew…
Aria Vale Ashford stood at the edge of an abandoned port, the skeletal remains of a fallen city looming beyond.
"Where… am I to begin with?" She whispered.
A cold wind swept across her skin, snapping her further into the reality ahead, a world abandoned by its creator.
Destined to be forgotten.
Doomed forever.
This was a world born for the Apocalypse.
Fifteen years ago, when Aria was ten, she loved scribbling random stories in her notebook.
The apocalyptic genre was popular back then.
Imagining walking zombies, terrifying monsters, and crafting emotional scenes where hope could still be sparked in moments of darkness was what people like her craved.
However, who would have thought those silly ideas were real, somewhere across the thousands of worlds in the multiverse?
SalesDoesn'tSpeak was Aria's official pen name.
She was a well-known author of strong infrastructure and farming stories.
Imagination had always been part of her writing life, but not all her ideas became books.
Some remained nothing more than dreams in her mind.
This abandoned world she now stood in was one of those forgotten plots, a post-apocalyptic setting crawling with upgraded zombies, lethal viruses, and mutant monsters.
A deadly place where the weak could not survive, and where morality and humanity had long lost their scent in the ruins of advanced civilization.
Because she never finished writing it, the world had stopped progressing.
The hopeful and happy ending she had envisioned, where humanity would rise again, had never come to pass.
Powerful Entities managing the multiverses, whether from big worlds or small worlds, punished authors who left works unfinished by sending them to their own creations.
Aria Vale Ashford was one of those creators.
She faced the angry Manager System of the Abandoned Department and had no choice but to sign the contract to fix a broken world.
Today marked the twelfth year since the zombie apocalypse started.
The unknown element from a fallen asteroid fragment caused everything.
Humanity's population dropped drastically in the first year.
Society crumbled to dust the second year, and the third came at the cost of struggles for all living things.
Before entering this world, Aria had asked for a golden finger.
A special cheat, just like everyone else who traveled to another world, so she could find a way home faster.
Like the male and female leads in transmigration novels, she expected to be granted a cheat system, at the very least, something on par with what those protagonists enjoyed.
Manager System muttered something in a cold, mechanical voice.
Then she was presented with three unknown black cards to choose from.
Whatever she picked would become her golden finger.
Without much thought, Aria casually picked the middle card, assuming every option was a powerful cheat.
Who would have thought she'd end up with… a train infrastructure simulator?
Really? Disappointing.
What kind of golden finger was that?
Who cared about riding a train in the apocalypse?
Heh.
A food system would have been far more useful!
Aria hadn't expected her golden finger to be as powerful now as those of other protagonists.
Still, curiosity got the better of her, and she decided to investigate it.
Once she read through the Peak Stationmaster System's guidelines, she realized its true potential, strong, dependable, and far beyond anything anyone in this apocalyptic world could imagine.
"Oh… so it's actually pretty powerful too." Aria thought, a small spark of confidence lighting in her chest.
Now that she had a handy system, it was time to save this world!