A downtrodden 30-year-old man, broken by his family and betrayed by the world, dies and wakes up inside a novel never read before — reborn as an 18-year-old rival heir who must raise his affection bar to 100 before his 25th birthday, or share the same tragic fate as the "canon fodder" character whose body he now inhabits.

High on the slopes of Mayon Volcano, Barangay Santa Rosario has sealed its gates. The infected are already loose in Tabaco City below, and the mayor's answer is normalization — keep the fiesta, keep the routine, keep pretending the barricades going up around every mountain barangay are precautionary, not necessary. Displaced families are funneled uphill into towns like Rosario even as those same towns wall themselves off, and the tension between charity and self-preservation splits neighbors who've known each other their whole lives.Totz Barameda, a construction worker trusted more for reliability than skill, and Jigz Alcantara, Rosario's genuinely capable captain, lead the fortification effort together — one building it, one commanding it. It isn't enough. When Rosario falls, the barangay scatters: some die at the gates, some are lost in the chaos, and the survivors are left to find their own way down the mountain toward the one place that might still be safe — Tabaco's port, and the island of San Miguel beyond it.The Baramedas flee along the river, down through forest that looks like shelter and isn't — the infected cluster in shade, drawn to stillness and dark, and no one alive yet knows it. What should be the safest stretch of the descent becomes the most lethal, one instinct at a time. Behind them, other households — the Alcantaras, the parish priest's found family, a mother with nothing left to lose but her son — are making the same descent through their own losses, not yet knowing whose paths will cross again at the bottom.Ahead lies the highway, exposed and unforgiving, and beyond it, a city that was already dying while Rosario looked away. Every mile down the mountain is a mile back toward the place they were told to run from in the first place — and the price of getting there alive is paid one person at a time.A story about the instinct to protect, the guilt of who gets left behind, and a family finding out — piece by piece — who they really are when the ground gives out.