Several thousand years after the previous interlude but still before the main story.

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In the void of interstellar space between the Perseus and Orion arms of the Milky Way, a round red object floated in absolute darkness. You'd be excused if you confused it for a moon or a planetoid. It was rather big. If one could see it with only the faint starlight that hit its polished exterior, they would see it was shaped like an apple. You could ask why it was shaped like an apple and the answer would be, because why not?

Here in the void, where the particle density is 0.2 atoms per cubic meter, the shape of your spaceworthy vessel matters not. So, if I wanted it to be red and apple-shaped, so be it.

It also wasn't a moon. It was a space station. The classics never die.

Sitting on my mechatronic throne, I let my mind wander the dozen inner worlds in my pocket dimensions. The people weren't happy but it was easier to herd cats than to make a large group of humans happy. One would think that a few dozen thousand years would be enough for them to get used to no longer being the apex species but noooooooooo. They still demanded to go back to their homeworld.

Fuck Earth.

Earth was a joke, a failed experiment. The Big Y Guy, the one from that famous Middle Eastern book, decided to ditch our dimension and BAM. Demonic apocalypse. Man, Earth was crap. I could recreate Earth, remove the magic, and move the people there, tell them that they went back home but I had 99% certainty it wouldn't fix their dissent.

*

*

I turned to my mascot and most trusted advisor.

"Larry, I think I should try that extinction-level event again. Maybe people won't complain so much if they go back to the stone age. You know, too busy trying to not be eaten by sabertooth tigers, and all that jazz."

Larry was my magical girl mascot. Yes, you heard that right. I had a magical girl mascot, which made me a magical girl, despite my identifying as a male. Complicated story. Just one of the many grievances I had with my biography. It was a gender bender. A technicality. I didn't have a gender but natural language gave me one regardless.

I am an apple. A crystallized apple. Just one of the many identities that combined to make me. Look, I am not one to brag. Let's just say that I am a min-maxer player and I took whatever gave me the biggest bonuses. I had to survive an apocalypse, dammit.

"Contractor, It didn't work the last five times you tried," the platypus sitting behind me in the cockpit replied.

My power animal was a platypus. Deal with it. But Larry was right. Unless I erased the knowledge of Earth entirely, people would act like hipsters and think that life before magic was better.

Fuck Earth.

Long story short, I was a human, died pathetically to a demon dog, reincarnated as an apple, was eaten past my expiry date, ended up in a landfill, and then was inducted into the System. It turned me from rotten fruit to rotten Dungeon core. I was stolen, had to fend for myself, went the magic-cybernetic way, made myself a slick robotic body, owned some noobs that wanted to break me, ascended to godhood, got a mission to save Earth, failed miserably, escaped the planet before it exploded.

It didn't explode but we escaped before it could think of that. Earth imploded, then whoever remained down there managed to mash together a few Norse realms and make a Frankenstein planet. Franken-planet. But that, Conan, is another story.

The key takeaway from all that is that it's okay to fail. Look at me! My whole life was failure after failure, and I ended up as the God of a dozen billion humans. Dozen billion Karens, that's more like it.

Now, me and my crew flew around the vast interstellar space in the Milky Way, at near relativistic speeds. Where are we going?

To the Star System called Kepler Object of Interest Five. Or KOI-5. A dear friend of mine needs a System core for the people living on the planet there, and I kind of volunteered to repay the favors she did me when I was nothing if not a dumb fruit. But this dumb fruit became the galaxy's most powerful Dungeon, ascended to godhood, and also became the System Core for all the people in my inner worlds. What's one more world, huh?

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

You could call it fate, but I also needed to finish another quest. There's a pesky psychopath who controls most of the galaxy and wants a little favor from me. I won't go into details, it's better if you don't know. Because if you do, she's gonna force you to help her achieve this goal. I can't do this alone so I'm roping this scaly friend of mine to help with this mission.

*

*

A lotta thousand years later, we reach our destination. The humans managed to create worldwide rebellions and extinguish all life in five of my dozen planets during this time. Even if I don't knock them back to the Stone Age, they have a marvelous capacity for destruction. And that without nukes. Yikes. As a parenthesis, radioactive isotopes are stabilized in a mana-infused area. It leads to interesting metallurgical achievements but I digress.

I extend my sight outside my starship, gazing upon the ternary star system. One main sequence blue star, and one main sequence yellow orbiting each other in an eternal ballet. A single mini-Neptune planet, situated around a dozen AU away spun around the central stars, right in the Goldilocks inhabitable zone. And further away, a dwarf star that was radically changed by magic. Purple stars shouldn't exist, but neither should sentient apples.

Smack in the barycenter of the two stars lies a massive space station. No, that one can't be mistaken for a moon because it's shaped like a big ring. Not a halo, we don't want to be sued. It's a major transportation hub for the whole galaxy. And it is well-defended. A fleet of ten thousand warships point their Wave Motion Guns at me. No, they aren't Wave Motion Guns but the geek inside me wished they were. It would hurt less than the antimatter torpedoes. Antimatter disrupts Mana fields. It's quite nasty and rather deadly to magical creatures like Larry and me.

I need to call in a favor to get their pesky weapons of mass destruction away from me. I open a communication channel.

"Lily, can you tell your sister to make her goons power down their weapons? If they blow us up, not only we're going to die but the candidates we have with us will be vaporized too."

The plant woman lazying around on the bridge of my not-moon-space-station snickers. She's a cyber-dryad. An artificial intelligence running in a quantum supercomputer made out of plants. If you want to know more, buy the books. Though there are no more bookstores where they're sold. You lost your window of opportunity. Because the books remained back on Earth; and I won't let you borrow my copies. If only the website where you could read it for free was still up.

I heard glass creaking in the metaphysical. Hang in there, Fourth-Wall-Chan. I promise this is the only one. To think we were led to believe Deadpool was the only one who could pull it off. See? Hang a lampshade on it, and move on. Okay, okay.

"Lily!" I shout a bit louder. Not with a mouth, I don't have one. But my mecha has loudspeakers. Very loud loudspeakers.

"Okay, okay," the Cyber-Dryad finally decides to move.

Goodness gracious. Her only purpose in life (she's not alive) is to make sure the candidates have a chance to live again and hope one of them is the right one. And yet, the little sociopathic AI drags her vine feet.

While she creeps toward where she should have been a few centuries ago, I go through my magical girl transformation sequence. My rotten and half-eaten crystal body becomes plump, red as rubies, and a ribbon ties into a bow around my stem.

Dryad-Lily goes to the communications console and starts to type the codes to open a communication channel. It was quite the feat to make sub-light communications work in a magical environment. Microelectronics don't work in mana-dense areas. Magic short-circuits electrical conductors under a few micrometers. But once more, go check the book for more details.

Soon, we see the face of Galactic Empress Lily. It's A.I. generated because Lily is an A.I. The one on the not-moon's bridge below is a copy of the one transmitting the image.

"Skip," the Empress grins.

"Lily Prime," I reply. "We have arrived with the candidates."

The Ring Station A.I., her code way less corrupted than the lazy waste of plant matter below, immediately perks up.

"Really? Did you find HIM?" She literally shouts and squeals the last word.

"Most likely. I need to settle my station in orbit of the planet so I can start testing if they are the real deal or not. But I'm convinced that it should be one of them. We are not going to find more souls from Earth, not this far from XX Century Earth in every single Euclidean and Relativistic dimension possible."

Fuck Earth.

"If you can't find him..."

Lily starts to threaten but I cut her off. I am rather pissed with this fucking bot. The threat of antimatter annihilation does that to a fruit.

"Then I will spend the next hundred, two hundred thousand years traveling the multiverse, the whole galaxy, harvesting souls until I find him. I'm aligned with the Great purpose!"

"He is," the dumb robot fern down there agrees.

The Empress nods. "Then you have safe passage to the planet, Skip. Do not disappoint me."

The screen goes dead and we wait. We wait for hours. Because we are a few AU away from the center of the System with only visual and radio inputs. We need to wait for the light and electromagnetic radiation to reach us. Empress Lily used some really bullshit trans-relativistic shenanigans to talk to us in real-time.

Larry runs a sensor scan. "Contractor, the starships are depowering their weapons."

I conjure a navy jacket and an admiral hat around me. I'm a Dungeon so I can create stuff out of whole cloth.

"Set course for planet KOI-5-Ab, Larry. Let's see if we can have some isekai fun with our candidates. Play the Theme Song!"

Down on the communications console, Dryad-Lily squeals in joy. The very loud loudspeakers start playing my song.

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https://youtu.be/Pw37EeC5Xig