Chapter One
The fluorescent lights above my desk had been flickering for the past hour, and at this point, I was convinced the universe was personally mocking me.
It was past eleven. Everyone else had gone home. But me? I was still here, hunched over a pile of documents that my seniors had dumped on my desk with matching fake smiles and a rehearsed speech about
"building character through experience." I'd smiled back. Said thank you. Mentally added another teaspoon of arsenic to their morning coffee.
I wasn't always this person. I used to be idealistic. Hopeful. I believed that if I worked hard enough and kept my head down long enough, the universe would eventually reward me with something decent. A stable income. A life I didn't have to beg for.
After years of job rejections, humiliating interviews, and surviving on instant noodles with questionable expiry dates, I finally got this job. So no matter how many "newbie tasks" they piled on me, no matter how many times I had to refill the printer paper or fetch coffee orders like a well-dressed errand boy, I swallowed it. All of it.
Because I needed this. And I was going to hold on to it with both hands.
I pressed the heel of my palm to my eye socket, pushing back the headache building there, and reached for the next document.
And then the lights went out.
Not just the flickering one. All of them. The hum of the air conditioner cut off mid-cycle. The low buzz of the computer monitor died. The entire office plunged into a silence so complete that I could hear my own heartbeat.
I blinked.
"Okay," I said slowly, to no one. "Power outage. That's fine. That's very fine."
I reached for my phone to use the flashlight.
Except my hand didn't move.
I looked down.
There was no hand to move.
There was nothing. No desk beneath me, no chair under me, no floor, no ceiling, no flickering fluorescent lights, no stack of documents. There was just... white. An endless, blank, suffocating white that stretched in every direction without a single edge to anchor my eyes to.
And standing in the middle of it was a woman so beautiful it almost hurt to look at her.
Golden hair that caught light that didn't exist. Eyes the color of autumn honey with entire galaxies swirling inside them. Robes that looked like someone had sewn clouds together and called it fashion. She was holding her hands in front of her, fingers laced, expression apologetic in that infuriating way people look when they know they've done something terrible but are hoping their face will do the apologizing for them.
"I'm really sorry, human," she said, and her voice landed soft and sincere in a way that made my skin crawl, or would have, if I had skin. "I know this is a lot to take in."
I stared at her.
She shifted under my gaze. "You have every right to be upset."
"I'm not upset," I said carefully. "I'm tired. It's past eleven and I have a mountain of work, so if this is some kind of elaborate prank, I want you to know that I do not have the emotional bandwidth for it right now."
"It isn't a prank."
"An anime fan, then." I looked her up and down, cataloguing the costume with the eye of someone who had spent too many late nights scrolling through fan forums. The wig was impressively done, I'd give her that. The contacts too. The ancient robes were a nice touch. "Who let you in the building?"
She closed her eyes briefly, like she was steadying herself. "Human. You are dead."
The word dropped into the white silence like a stone into still water. I let it sit there for a moment.
"I'm going to need you," I said very calmly, "to say that again."
"You are dead," she repeated, softer this time, like volume was the part of the message I'd struggled with. "I am truly sorry. There was a system error and your life was... cut short. You were not supposed to go yet."
"A system error?."
"Yes."
"I'm dead because of a system error."
"...Yes."
I opened my mouth. I was going to say something very reasonable and measured. I had a whole response forming in my head that began with "Listen here" and ended with several words I normally reserved for traffic jams and printer malfunctions.
But then I realized I couldn't feel my mouth.
The thought arrived late, like it had been sitting in a waiting room for ten minutes before being called in. I couldn't feel my mouth. I couldn't feel my hands. I couldn't feel the phantom sensation of my chair under me, or my shoes on my feet, or the dull ache in my lower back from sitting hunched over a desk for six hours.
I couldn't feel anything.
I looked down. There was nothing to look at. No body, no outline, no shadow. Just the white, and somewhere in the white, a vague awareness that I existed, like a thought that hadn't fully committed to becoming real yet.
"Where," I said, and my voice came out very quiet, "is my body?"
She winced. "That is part of what I need to explain."
"WHERE IS MY BODY?"
"Please don't shout, you'll draw attention and I am not supposed to be here doing this personally, there are protocols and I may have bypassed several of them and the Lord God cannot find out right now, so if you could just—"
"WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME? I WANT MY BODY BACK! I WANT MY HANDS! I WANT TO GO HOME! I HAVE WORK TO FINISH AND A LIFE TO LIVE AND I HAVEN'T EVEN—"
She snapped her fingers.
My voice vanished. Not like going quiet. Like a cord cut clean. I was still screaming internally but the sound had nowhere to go. My mouth, if I had one, had been switched off at the source.
She exhaled slowly, smoothing down her robes. "I will give you your voice back. But first, you need to listen."
I glared at her with everything I had.
"You are currently in a soul state," she said, clasping her hands again. "Your physical body has been... cremated. In your world."
Cremated.
The word sat in my chest like a swallowed stone.
I had work to finish. I had rent due in three weeks. I had a life goal I hadn't come close to touching yet, a proper apartment, a savings account with more than two digits in it, a decent meal that wasn't eaten standing over a sink at midnight. I had not, and I cannot stress this enough, broken my V-card. Which is deeply, catastrophically unfair.
The goddess flinched. "I can hear your thoughts."
I stopped.
"All of them," she added.
I mentally went very, very still.
"I was curious," she said, and the corner of her mouth twitched like she was physically fighting a smile and losing, "about what you'd say."
My internal voice, which had no filter at the best of times, began constructing a complaint so thorough it could have filled a legal document.
She snapped her fingers again. "Quiet."
And just like that, even my thoughts went muffled. Like she'd pressed a pillow over the part of my soul that couldn't shut up.
"Now," she said, folding her hands neatly in front of her, her expression settling back into that practiced look of gentle remorse, "I have a proposition for you. Because while I cannot undo your death, I can offer you something that might make up for it."
She let the pause sit.
Something about the way she was watching me, careful and measuring and just a little bit guilty, made the formless thing that was currently me feel very, very uneasy.
"The catch," she said, "is something you may not like."
She held up one finger before I could even begin to react.
"And before you try to argue," she added, "I should let you know that you don't actually have a choice."