The afternoon sun began to dip toward the west, casting a reddish-orange glow across the tightly packed rooftops of Suka Maju Village. Bagas dragged his feet as he walked down the village lane, his head spinning in every possible direction. His brain was still caught in the middle of a Category 5 hurricane of confusion after witnessing Dad’s impossibly long lifespan numbers and the mysterious hourglass emblem at the coffee post.

What on earth is actually going on with this family? Why does everything feel like a heavy-budget sci-fi movie script that somehow wandered onto a cheesy local drama set? Bagas muttered to himself, kicking a stray pebble off the side of the road.

The moment he shoved open the door of Barokah Jaya Convenience Store, which had already grown quiet for the evening, the familiar scents of coconut oil and dust rushed to greet him. But it wasn't the smell of the shop that stopped him in his tracks—it was the frantic, emotional hammering of a calculator's plastic buttons.

Click-clack-click-clack!

Behind the legendary wooden cash register sat a sixteen-year-old high school sophomore still wearing her rumpled grey-and-white uniform. It was Rara, Bagas’s younger sister, sitting bolt upright with a pen in her right hand and a scientific calculator in her left. Her shoulder-length hair was tied back in a messy ponytail, and her brow was furrowed sharply like an independent auditor auditing a bankrupt multinational corporation.

"Look who finally decided to grace us with the presence of our international lazy-resting minister," Rara barked without shifting her gaze away from the tiny pink screen of her calculator. "Where have you been, Big Bro? The shop almost got seized by the state because our management style strictly follows hardcore socialism without any clear mathematical calculations."

Bagas dropped his weight heavily onto a plastic chair near the cash register, letting out a long sigh as he massaged his throbbing temples. "Don't start lecturing me, Rara. I've got a headache. My brain feels like it's about to pop off its hinges after looking at all this absurd nonsense all day."

Rara stopped hammering the keys and glared at Bagas with a single, sharply arched eyebrow. That cynical, investigative stare was a carbon copy of Mum, just blueprinted ten years younger.

"You have a headache? I'm the one who should be having a nervous breakdown, Big Bro!" Rara snapped, tapping her pen aggressively against the desk. "Just look at this daily ledger! Our household financial balance sheet this month has plunged into acute deficit! We are deep in the red! If we keep going like this, it won't just be the shop going under—my future education majoring in accounting at vocational school is going down the drain right along with it!"

Bagas glanced briefly at the coffee-stained ledger opened wide in front of his sister. "What is it this time, Madam Chief Financial Officer? People come in to shop here every single day, you know."

"Shopping is one thing, but where does all the money actually go?!" Rara growled, crossing her arms over her chest. "This afternoon, I checked the cash revenue from selling the three-kilogram LPG gas canisters. There should have been a net income of one hundred and fifty thousand rupiah from the three tanks we pushed out. But when I counted the cash in the drawer, there was only ten thousand rupiah left!"

"What? Seriously, just ten thousand?!" Bagas gasped, his eyes widening slightly.

"Yes! I swear on the squared value of my accounting practical exam!" Rara hissed angrily. "When I asked Mum about it, you know what her exact answer was? She said, 'Oh, yesterday the RT Head's wife came over crying because her stove broke down, so I gave her the gas tank for free, complete with a bonus pressure regulator hose.' What is going to become of this convenience store if our charity model is run like an international relief organization?!"

Bagas rubbed his chest slowly, trying to brace himself against the utterly defying laws of financial reality governing his household. "Good grief, Mum... why do you always love giving your kids sudden heart attacks..."

"And it's not just the LPG gas, Big Bro!" Rara violently flipped another page of the ledger. "Mum also loves miscalculating change for neighbors who are a bit too good at sweet-talking. Every single time a neighbor shows up wearing a new house dress and compliments our shop, they immediately get slapped with a seventy percent discount. That’s not running a retail business—that’s just aggressively handing out blind charity!"

Bagas could only offer an awkward, sheepish grin, completely out of ammunition to defend Mum. "Well, you know, Ra. Sustenance is already managed by the universe. Don't stress too much, or you'll get pimples and ruin your high school prime."

"Ugh, way to change the subject!" Rara protested fiercely, rolling her eyes in deep annoyance. "Stop hiding behind destiny when our bookkeeping looks like a crime scene! Right now, we are going to crack open the emergency piggy bank to patch up this cash flow hole!"

Rara stood up from her chair, marched to the lower corner of the cash register desk, and pulled out a large, battered Khong Guan biscuit tin with rust creeping along the edges of the lid. That legendary tin served as the family's secret "emergency fund" repository, believed by everyone to hold thick stacks of one-hundred-thousand-rupiah banknotes secretly saved away by Mum over many years.

"Behold, the final line of defense for our family's financial survival," Rara declared with supreme confidence, slamming the biscuit tin right onto the table in front of Bagas. "Open it, Big Bro. Count how many stacks of cash are inside so I can finally draft a balancing financial statement for this week."

Bagas stared at the rusted biscuit tin with a storm of mixed emotions. He reached out, grabbed the lid, and slowly pulled upward.

Creak...

The friction of the aging tin echoed loudly inside the quiet shop. Rara had already slipped into a hopeful, beaming smile, eagerly waiting to welcome a flood of Mum's paper savings.

Yet, the moment the lid came completely off, there wasn't a single red or blue banknote to be found inside.

What sat inside that legendary biscuit tin was nothing more than a towering stack of yellowed, blank shopping receipt pads, last year's motorcycle parking stubs, a few slips of local pharmacy medicine instructions, and old supermarket discount brochures that had expired three whole years ago.

Rara froze solid. The hopeful smile on her face instantly shattered, replaced by a vacant, soul-crushed expression.

"What... what is this, Big Bro?" Rara asked in a trembling, fragile voice, pointing a pen at the pile of waste paper inside the tin.

Bagas scratched the back of his neck, offering a helpless, awkward smile as he surveyed the tragic disaster before them both. "Well... it looks like Dad's alien conspiracy theories have nothing on Mum's high-level financial survival strategies, Ra."

Rara slumped limply back into her chair, burying her face straight down against the cash register counter as she silently mourned the crushing reality of being the only sane person left in this household.

"We're bankrupt... We are genuinely going to become the elite homeless vagrants of this village..."

Right in the middle of Rara’s muffled sulking and furious venting over the family’s deficit, the sharp vibration of a cell phone suddenly buzzed loudly from inside Bagas’s trousers pocket.

Bzzzt... bzzzt...

Bagas dug his left hand into his pocket, dragging out his smartphone, whose screen was glowing faintly with a critical battery level of two percent. Smack in the middle of the screen sat a new text message notification from an unknown, nameless number.

Bagas furrowed his brow, tapping open the messaging app with a potent mix of curiosity and dread. The exact second he read the words displayed on the screen, his entire body turned ice cold.

The text message read:

"Stop looking at their numbers too often, or your own numbers will start to fade away."

Bagas jolted violently out of his plastic chair. He stared down at the phone screen over and over again, his heart hammering against his ribs as if trying to burst straight out of his chest.

Before Bagas could even begin to guess who might have sent such a chilling message, the phone screen flickered once and died completely as the battery gave out its final breath.

The convenience store instantly plunged into a heavy, suffocating silence, while outside, the afternoon twilight finally surrendered entirely to the coming night.