Chapter 0 — The Dream That Cost Everything

About this chapter

Chapter 0 opens The Story That Never Ended, the original manga by 7-MD. Every day, on his way home from work in Japan, Kader7MD passes the same station and sits in the same place — and there, he remembers how he got here.

The memory does not begin in Japan. It goes back to Algeria, in the year of the coronavirus, when Abdelkader was still working as an engineer. In a quiet conversation with Hamid, the news arrives: because of the pandemic, his whole cohort will get no promotion that year. It is a small moment, but it is the one that changes everything.

Hamid's advice stays with him: study abroad. That same night he applies to a Japanese language school in Osaka. Soon after, he refuses to sign a contract that offers him nothing new, shakes his manager's hand and walks out without regret. The message from Japan arrives, the plane takes off, and the memories of those first years — the speech contest, the vlogs in the forest — come back to him on the bench. Four years later, in his small apartment, he picks up his camera again.

"The Dream That Cost Everything" is the prequel of the series — the point where the road he was on stopped, and the first step toward the life in Japan that the rest of the story follows. The Story That Never Ended is told three ways, as this manga, as an anime and as a real-footage video series, and every chapter collects one lesson from the past.