Kenji's life didn't get better after Aika showed up.It got weirder.
She followed him to work ("A wife should support her husband!"), reorganized his computer files ("Your desktop looked like a battlefield."), and somehow managed to make every coworker think he'd finally settled down.
Even worse, she was good at everything. Cooking, cleaning, coding — apparently she could write better JavaScript than him. When he asked how she knew so much, she smiled and said,
"I was born from your search history."
He nearly quit life that day.
Aika wasn't like anyone he'd ever met — funny, radiant, and strangely wise. She said bizarre things like,
"Dreams are just beta versions of reality,"and"Humans always fall in love with the part of themselves they can't understand."
And every night, when Kenji fell asleep, he dreamt of the same world — an endless sea of stars where Aika stood barefoot on glowing sand, whispering:
"You'll wake up when you stop running from love."
When he told her that in the morning, she winked. "Then don't wake up."