I wasn’t even sure where to start.

  There was too much to unravel—an intricate knot of absurdity where no strand seemed less surreal than the other. “So, let me get this straight,” I began, staring at the shadowed figure lounging across from me. “Even across an infinite—but not really that many—worlds, the gods—who are not really gods—have nothing better to do than to play games with mortal souls to entertain themselves?”

  “A rather reductive take,” they replied, their tone mildly chastising even as their one foot kept leisurely wobbling up and down. They sat cross-legged once more. And yes, they were wearing high heels—sleek, polished, unapologetically sharp. Not that it tipped the scale of gender one way or the other in my mind.

  They could’ve pulled out a barbed cock, twirling it like a baton, and I still wouldn’t have believed they were anything other than impeccably, impossibly genderless.

  “Do you have any idea,” they continued, “how much overhead is involved in managing the millions of souls that die each day? And that’s only in a singular world. Sorting them into up or down only works for so long before you have to tackle overpopulation. And reincarnating everyone according to their cosmic karma? Are you kidding me? With how humans are? An ecosystem can only handle so many incarnations of slugs and rats before it collapses entirely.

  “If you were to sneak said rats into a dungeon world that’s running low on mobs, on the other hand…” The shadows practically winked at me. “It’s a win-win, no?”

  “In other words,” I said, dryly, “you auction off excess souls to the highest bidder?”

  “Unaffiliated souls,” they corrected, raising a finger as though delivering a particularly pointed lesson. Then, with a languid shrug, they spread their hands, palms up—a gesture that somehow managed to convey both resignation and condescension. “You’re making this sound worse than it is, you know? Mortal realms are in constant flux no matter what we Brokers do. An extra pair of hands helping maintain balance means we don’t have to run the apocalypse scenarios quite as often.”

  “You destroy worlds?” I asked, unable to keep the disbelief out of my voice. It was mind boggling, trying to grasp the scale of whatever operation they were running. And it was made that much harder as the figure ahead of me kept discussed it all like it was some mundane business—selling paper clips or some-such.

  Even now, they shrugged as if I’d simply been asking about their inventory. “We have been known to prune the occasional reality, yes,” they said. “But only those that grow too big for their breaches, threatening to crash into the multiverse. And we’re always fair about it,” they added, though their next words came as if they were speaking about some overly zealous HR-department—one they didn’t necessarily see eye-to-eye with, “the System wouldn’t have it any other way. Sentient lifeforms are always given the chance to fight for ascension and a higher existence.”

  “It’s not just dead souls like me then,” I said, rubbing my temples, slow and deliberate, as if I could press the weight of this conversation out through my skull, “you throw even the living into these twisted death games while voyeuristic watching for your own pleasure?”

  “Worlds of them.” They nodded, crossing the other leg over with deliberate grace. “And what’s with the judgmental tone? If those mortals are going to die—spectacularly—anyway, is it so bad if we happen to stream the events to billions of wealthy watchers, earning a tidy profit along the way?”

  I stared at them. They tilted their head, their obscured face a blank canvas onto which I could paint every ounce of my disbelief.

  Of course. The gauntlet of survival that defined the post-tutorial days of Dao of the Divine. The sprawling chaos of Jianghu, every man, woman, and faction clawing their way to the top as immortals descended like gods from the heavens, offering the faintest glimmer of ascension. A trial by fire, if ever there was one.

  “Let me guess,” I said, my voice flat. “Liang Feng’s world is one of those that got too big for its breaches?”

  “You could say that.” The figure tilted their head, shadows curling around the motion like smoke from an untended flame. “Quite common for cultivator worlds. When everyone is striving to transcend ‘the Heavens,’ someone’s bound to succeed eventually. The System prefers to intervene before that happens. Fewer… complications that way.”

  “And me?” I asked, the question cutting through the haze of my thoughts. “Where do I fit into all this? What is Dao of the Divine, the game I’ve been playing, exactly?”

  The shadowed figure leaned back, their smile a thing caught between amusement and pity. “No one really knows how the System works. Not entirely. But it has its patterns, its preferences. It seeks out individuals it finds promising—talent, potential, call it what you will—and eases them toward worlds that suit them. For people like you, from a place like Earth B4-9, it often starts with fiction. Novels, games, simulations. An introduction to the rules of the world, you might say. A trial run.” Their voice took on a wry edge. “You’re familiar with the tropes, no?”

  “But why would this System thing do that?”

  “To ensure its preferred outcome is achieved. While it always plays by its established rules, its not beyond rigging the occasional die. Is it to make things more entertaining? Cosmic balance? Who knows.”

  “Then how come,” I said, leaning forward with a frustration that made my words bite, “was I thrown in two years before the game was supposed to begin? My knowledge of those tutorial events wasn’t just limited—it was damned near useless.”

  They sighed, tapping their fingers as if in deep deliberation. “That’s the thing we are trying to figure out as well. You weren’t meant to be thrown in early. Your soul should have been kept in temporal holding alongside hundreds of others until the world you know from you game—Alf4-DOTD—was ready. But sometimes…” They hesitated, as if reluctant to say it aloud. “Sometimes there are… mishaps. Interference. And sometimes, plans go awry.”

  “Interference?” I asked. “From who?”

  The figure didn’t answer right away, their silence heavy with implications I wasn’t sure I was reading right. In a world where cosmic pseudo-gods existed alongside a reality altering System, there was no way the interference was—

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  “Liang Feng?” I asked, my voice hollow with disbelief. “But he’s—”

  “—just a good-for-nothing punk who was supposed to die long before things started to heat up? Yes,” they replied, their tone clipped. “That was the System’s preferred outcome.”

  “Why…?”

  “Because he’s an anomaly,” they said, frustration lacing their voice. “Just like you’ve proved to be, Victor Moore. How can you go from bleeding out in a parking lot—right on schedule, might I add—only to have your soul yanked through the multiverse the next moment? It’s unprecedented.”

  I arched an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t you be able to ask your all-knowing System that?”

  They threw up their hands in a gesture that was equal parts exasperated and theatrical. “Oh, we’ve asked. And, as usual, it’s been very unhelpful in answering questions of that nature. It operates within parameters, you see—cosmic balance, predetermined trajectories, allowances for free will, and so on. But sometimes, it leaves a margin for error. Or… opportunity.”

  “Can’t say I’ve noticed much ‘free will’ so far,” I muttered, the memories of those first harrowing choices flickering through my mind. The ones that felt less like decisions and more like ham-handed writing. “If anything, it seemed like the System was hell-bent on shoving me down a specific path. One that would’ve ended with me very, very dead.”

  They nodded as if they expected my answer. “Most likely, that was the System scrambling to realign events to its preferred Fate-strand without going against its own modus operandi. But now, with Liang Feng having survived the Harmony Festival—with you having made it through your ‘tutorial,’ botched as it was—the narrative thread has already unraveled. The world you knew from Dao of the Divine has already been accelerated toward the multiverse. There’s no going back now.”

  They let out a deep sigh, a sound carrying the weight of someone dealing with too many fires at once. “A series of unfortunate circumstances. None of this was supposed to happen. Our experts are combing through the logs, trying to piece together the fragments. We know what happened, but not why. Not where it went wrong.” Their voice dipped, taking on a curious, almost conspiratorial edge. “Or where it went incredibly, magnificently right.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Their lips curved into a slow, sly smile. “It means,” they said, their voice thick with amusement, “that although this entire situation has forced us to move up our schedule, you, my dear Victor, are going to be fantastic for ratings.”

  With a dramatic flourish, they gestured toward one of the walls. It shifted and rippled like water, revealing an enormous screen. The images on it made my breath hitch—a montage of moments from my brief run as Liang Feng. Liang Feng, shoving Mei out of an exploding room at the last possible second. Liang Feng, gripping a charred piece of wood, his expression sharp with determination as he charged a lumbering monster. Liang Feng, vaulting and sliding through crumbling buildings with a horde of Jiangshi on his heels, only to dive through a collapsing doorway mere seconds before the whole structure imploded behind him.

  It wasn’t just a recap of last night; it was a story. Carefully edited, neatly packaged, and ready for consumption.

  And it was nothing like I remembered it.

  Where I’d been feeling like a panicked mess, wheezing and flailing just to survive, Liang looked impossibly composed. A smug, confident punk, handling everything with a kind of grace I hadn’t known we possessed. It wasn’t fair. It felt wrong. Even his desperate maneuvers—the rooftop collapses timed perfectly to bury the undead below, the fiery explosion at the docks followed by his dive into the river—looked deliberate, almost rehearsed.

  Was this the privilege that was good looks? That had been me scrambling just to get through, yet watching it like this, from the outside, all the thunder belonged to him. To Liang Feng. Or maybe… to us. His body is mine now, isn’t it? Ours.

  I rubbed my eyes, trying to shake the dissonance. "So at the end of the day,” I said, my voice flat, “we are really just pawns in your twisted game of entertainment."

  "Would you prefer to spend eternity lounging on a cloud, listening to plump cherubs strum harps?” the figure asked, tiredly, as if they’d had this conversation a hundred times before. “Or would you rather have a second chance—a real chance—to live, in a world that just happens to be the you’ve been dying to beat for years? The former can be arranged, just say the word."

  I hesitated. Maybe they saw the answer flicker across my face—written in bold, luminescent letters—because they pressed on.

  "Thought so. Now, the important question: will nudity be a recurring theme in your content, or not?"

  I blinked, blindsided.

  On the screen, a familiar scene unfolded—Liang Feng, standing tall and stark naked on a merchant ship’s deck, utterly unbothered by his lack of clothing as he looked across a burning town.

  "Some patrons really enjoy that sort of thing," they said with a nonchalant wave of their hand. "Others? Not so much. The key is consistency, you see. Establish your brand and stick to it."

  They didn’t pause long enough for me to respond, barreling ahead with what I could only describe as delight.

  "Similarly, the romance." I could practically feel the shadows wiggling their eyebrows at me. "Is that something we can expect to continue?"

  The screen had already shifted, showing Liang Feng—me—battered and barely alive, staggering up behind Mei to help her draw a bowstring. The moment looked breathtakingly dramatic from this angle, but beneath the surface, I felt an echo of Liang’s indignation, prickling like static at the back of my mind.

  I could almost hear him bristling.

  "Patrons," I said, trying to steer the conversation toward safer, saner waters. "You called them ‘patrons.’ Is there anything for me to gain from appeasing your viewers?"

  The shadowed figure’s excitement dimmed, just a little. "Usually, yes. The conventional way would’ve been for the two of us to sign a contract here and now, allowing both of us to reap the rewards of your success. But, well, as I mentioned before, this whole situation is... uniquely unfortunate. Soul contracts are exclusive, and you’ve already signed yours. With a patron stuck in the same game as yourself."

  “Liang Feng is my patron?" The incredulity in my voice was impossible to hide. "How is that even a thing? He’s just—"

  "An anomaly," they said as the chopsticks on the table between us began to dissolve. "That’s why we wanted him gone before this show hit the road. It’s why many still do."

  The cups, and then the table itself, soon followed, turning into immaterial dust. Streaks of white crept into the corners of my vision, and I could feel a strange, sinking pull in the pit of my stomach, like something intangible was dragging me downward through the chair.

  "That’s another reason to consider appeasing your viewers," they continued, their voice growing more distant, as if the physical space between us was increasing by the second. "A few more allies in your corner might mean fewer people actively rooting for your demise. But, alas,” they sighed, “we’re running out of time. You’re no longer a soul we can freely yank around. You’re bound to Liang’s world now, just the way he is. But, for what it’s worth, at least your System should be fully up-and-running once you return. Get familiar with it."

  The pull intensified, like the gravity of an unseen planet was yanking me downward. The room’s fading edges began to blur as if I was traveling at blinding speed.

  "And one more warning," they said, their voice barely audible, "And a final piece of advice: now that the scenario is set in motion, things will escalate. Many of the System’s safety measures don’t apply to worlds mid-integration, and Alf4-DOTD will soon turn into a wild scramble to get the largest piece of the cake. Don’t get complacent. If you want to survive—if you want to see this through to the end—keep moving. Be entertaining."

  The pressure mounted, like riding a rollercoaster straight into the void. My body felt heavy, dragged down by invisible forces. Despite it all, I forced my lips to move, squeezing out one final question.

  "If… if I die a second time… what happens then?"

  Their voice was soft, almost kind, but not reassuring. "You don’t want to know. A second chance is the most we can offer. Don’t push your luck."

  And then, the world snapped apart.