1 Prologue

My name is Haruki Saito, the Head of Treasury at a major corporation called 'Hitachi.'; the company once stood as a pioneer in its industry, creating coloured television and other innovations. But it fell from mainstream. The pay was still great though, until that day. 87 Billion Yen. That was the amount I had supposedly embezzled. I had worked for them for 12 years, and yet nobody stood up for me. Not. One. I was shamed by the media and my assets were sold.

Being sentenced to prison didn't help with the bankruptcy or my health. I started experiencing headaches during the morning and would feel tired, going back to sleep. "It's just stress," I initially told myself until a few weeks later, when coughing with chest pain were added to the list. Then, I fainted. I could remember the ambulance sirens fading along with my consciousness.

-

"Saito, you there?"

A nurse was holding a torch to my eye.

"Yeah." I try to make out the surroundings, but my vision is a haze.

"We're just going to run an MRI scan due to your symptoms."

"Uh sure." It felt hard to even concentrate. Thirty minutes went by, sitting down. After some inaudible discussion they were having in an adjacent room, a doctor walks up to me.

"The scan revealed tumours in your left lung but there are signs that it's metastasized to the right too. I'm guessing Lung Cancer, though the autopsy will confirm it.

So I laid on the hospital bed, staring at a room devoid of colour. Everything hurt. What even was the point of it. I was done. My family stopped visiting at one point and now it's just me by myself. Later on as my condition worsened and I was placed in ICU; like the extra time was going to amount to anything. Now there's medical equipment everywhere, and that repetitive sound again.

I could hear faint pulses, a line on the monitor dancing with every heartbeat. I turn to look at the window and gaze at the cold night sky of Tokyo and the sea of lights below it. I've always wondered what death was like. Would it just be an endless abyss? I close my eyes and hear the sound waning until it abruptly stops. I had spent so long thinking about what would happen after.

But not a single one of the scenarios I imagined. Out of many.

Had prepared me to meet a god.