Ring! Ring! Ring!

6:00 AM. The alarm pierced the dawn's silence in Arif's boarding room. To anyone else, morning heralded fresh hope, yet to Arif, this was merely the opening curtain of an exhausting theatrical production. He refused to budge from his curled position atop the thin mattress devoid of a bedsheet. Pulling his frayed blanket completely over his head, he tried to block out the sunlight filtering through the ventilation slats.

Today, Arif decided to surrender unconditionally to time. He wouldn't head to the station platform to observe the human robots, wouldn't set foot in the intrigue-choked logistics office, and wouldn't spend phantom money at high-end restaurants. He chose to lock himself inside this cramped, nine-square-meter cell—becoming a hermit trapped within his own time cage.

The cheap wall clock above the door kept ticking, crawling slowly yet steadily toward the single timestamp Arif had come to both dread and anticipate above all else lately:

6:00 PM.

As the long and short hands aligned at twelve and six, the cheap smartphone resting on the cement floor suddenly flared to life. Vibrating furiously, it cast a bright glare across the dim, shadowed walls of the room. A familiar name materialized there, pulsing as if demanding his attention.

Mom is calling...

Arif stared at the screen, holding his breath. The phone's vibration seemed to throb in perfect sync with his increasingly aching heartbeat. During the earlier loops—especially when intoxicated by the euphoria of the three hundred million rupiah he'd extorted from Pak Malik—Arif had always swiped the red button without a second thought. He would dismiss the call irritably if he answered by accident, treating his mother's care as an annoying distraction amid his quest to master the day.

"Mom, Arif is busy! I've got important office business, don't call right now!"

Those words echoed relentlessly inside Arif's head, sharp as a razor slicing through his consciousness. He recalled how harsh his tone had been, how utterly indifferent he was to the raspy voice on the other end of the line that simply wanted to hear how he was doing. Throughout his migration to Jakarta, Arif's ego had swollen monstrously. Obsessed with financial success, corporate validation, and superficial luxuries, he had relegated the woman who gave birth to him to the absolute bottom of his priority list.

The tears that had pooled in the corners of Arif's eyes finally broke free, dampening his stiff cheeks. He scrambled toward his phone, but his hands shook far too violently to even swipe the green button.

"I was so selfish..." Arif whispered into the quiet of the room. His voice broke, choked by an overwhelming wave of crushing remorse.

Flashes of memory from before he was trapped in this time loop rushed back. Back in his village, an aging woman with whitening hair and calloused hands from working the fields always sent her best prayers through text messages that Arif rarely bothered to reply to. His mother had gladly cut back on her own groceries just to ensure Arif had enough pocket money during his first grueling month in the capital. And Arif? The moment he arrived in the metropolis, he grew ashamed of his humble roots, drowning headfirst in the whirlpool of urban prestige.

Even after he harnessed the mystical power of the Frost Circle ring, his very first instinct had been to satisfy his own petty vengeance and greed. He partied, rented sports cars, and feasted like he was the most important being on earth, never once pausing to think about using that looping time to bring joy to his mother.

Buzz... Buzz... The phone stopped vibrating. Its screen faded to black, leaving behind a single missed call notification.

Arif clutched his phone tightly, pressing it against his chest. The dense loneliness permeating his room now felt a hundred times more agonizing than the ice-cold ring on his finger. Inside this Time Prison, everyone forgot him the moment the day reset. Pak Malik forgot his threats, the restaurant waiter forgot his face, and his coworkers forgot he even existed. The only constant love, appearing at the exact same hour with unwavering sincerity, was the call from his mother.

Yet that constant love now felt like a sentence. His mother was trapped in perpetual ignorance; she would unfailingly call every evening at six, asking the exact same questions, worrying about the exact same things, never knowing that her son was slowly dying inside a frozen dimension.

"Forgive me, Mom... Please forgive me," Arif sobbed, breaking down in the dark corner of the room. He hugged his knees, letting his body shudder under the crushing weight of a belated regret.

Amidst the dark, rain-drenched night of Jakarta, shut inside a self-created time isolation ward, Arif came face-to-face with a fundamental truth. His soul, long hardened by empty ambition, cracked, shattered, and burned to ash beneath his tears of remorse. The Frost Circle ring on his finger shimmered dimly, as if recording a new spiritual vibration from an owner who no longer sought wealth, but rather redemption for the blinding ego that had consumed him for so long.