❝In the tale of fate, the red string connects us all, but not every thread leads to a soulmate.❞
In a world where love is entwined with fate, an abandoned conductor escapes the confines of an unnatural train into a universe he's forgotten.
As he nav...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The sun hung low in the sky, casting a muted golden glow over the streets of Asabuya. Hotaru sat on the wooden steps of his small, rural house, absently staring at the familiar landscape before him. Everything seemed exactly as he remembered—yet nothing felt the same. The wind rustled through the trees, carrying with it the distant hum of the modern world he had once glimpsed, but here, in 1975, time moved at a slower pace.
He had returned.
But the cost of his return weighed heavily on him.
He clutched a small, crumpled paper in his hand, his grip so tight that his knuckles turned white. Yuta had handed it to him a few moments ago, cheerfully offering a snack wrapped in it—taiyaki. Yuta worked part-time at the local train station and had brought the snack.
Hotaru had accepted the taiyaki with a faint smile, though his mind was miles away, lost in the sea of memories and emotions that had begun to resurface. The paper felt heavy in his hand, as though it carried more than the weight of a simple snack. He opened it carefully, smoothing it out against his knee.
At first, it looked like nothing—just an ordinary sheet of paper with faint lines running across it. But the more Hotaru stared at it, the more familiar those lines became. They weren't just lines.
They were tracks—train tracks.
His heart skipped a beat as he recognized the faint, ghostly outline of a ticket embedded within the paper's folds.
A ticket.
His ticket.
The Bound Line's ticket.
His chest tightened as he traced the edges of the paper with his fingers. It was real. He felt a shiver crawl down his spine, cold and familiar.
Hotaru sat frozen, memories of the train rushing back like a flood he couldn't stop. The endless rows of seats. The dull hum of the tracks beneath his feet. The faces of the other passengers, each one waiting—waiting for something that may never come. He had thought he was free, that Emi's sacrifice had given him a second chance at life. But now, the paper in his hand seemed to suggest otherwise.
He could still hear the sound of the conductor's voice as if echoing from a distant memory. "Ticket, please," they had said. And now, here it was—his own ticket, handed to him in the form of an ordinary piece of paper wrapped around a snack.
The Bound Line had finally come for him. It was his actual turn.
His mind flashed back to the old man he had stolen from, in a moment of desperation and recklessness. The guilt had haunted him ever since. He had boarded the train with someone else's ticket, lived another man's fate, and yet now the Bound Line was offering him what it had once denied.
What would happen if he boarded again? Would he be able to leave, or would he be bound to the train forever, just as the others were? He remembered the other conductors, their faces twisted in resentment and sorrow. The cold, mechanical routine of collecting tickets, the endless repetition, the hollowness of their existence. Would that be his fate now?
Did he doubt that Emi wasn't his soulmate anymore?
Did she mourn his absence?
The sound of a distant train horn cut through the evening air, low and haunting. Hotaru's breath caught in his throat. He stood abruptly, his legs shaky, as if the sound had a physical pull on him. He looked around, but there were no train tracks in sight. No station nearby. Yet the horn's eerie wail continued, getting louder, creeping closer, as if the Bound Line itself was calling to him from the shadows.
He gripped the paper tighter, his fingers trembling. His mind was a whirl of conflicting emotions—fear, curiosity, resignation. That train had taken so much from him already. It had stolen years of his life, had turned his existence into a tangled mess of timelines and impossible choices. And now, it was back.
Hotaru's eyes flicked toward the horizon, where the sun was beginning to rise, casting long shadows across the fields.
5:53 A.M
His home. The world he had returned to. The people who loved him, his mother, his friends. All of it seemed to hang in the balance as the train's horn echoed louder in his ears.
His breath quickened. He had a choice to make.
He glanced at the paper again, his mind swirling with the weight of it all. The Bound Line had made him who he was. It had shaped his past, and now it threatened to shape his future.
The train's horn screamed again, louder this time, almost frantic. Hotaru's heart raced in his chest. It was waiting for him. He could feel it.
His eyes darted toward the distant hills, where a thin line of smoke was beginning to rise into the evening sky. The Bound Line. His body tensed, every muscle aching with the urge to run. But he wasn't sure where to run—towards it or away from it.
And so, with the paper clutched in his hand, Hotaru sighed, tears welling up in his eyes. He might never be able to come back this time.
