If you are reading this, it’s because, unlike you, poor sap, I got a pen. Silver lining: you are functionally illiterate at worst, and I can work with that. Please, don’t take it personal and don’t believe yourself special: I am an ass to everyone equally. And it is with the explicit intention to flaunt my amazing exploits that I write this book.

Now, let’s get real: Unless a miracle has happened, we live inside a demon, and thus life cannot but suck for us all. But the Gonzales. They seem happy with the whole dysfunctional-soul-family thing they have going on. And Clara. I despise Clara. She’s a perfectly serviceable gal and a normal man would love to turn her into a wife. I’d like to do so too: A wife of someone else who lives on the other end of the acid sea. I need to come up with a Mail-bride system to get rid of Clara…

Where was I —ah, yes. In case a miracle has happened and someone outside our lovely homeland is reading this: I am David Hasdiel Vera, farmer extraordinaire, and my soul got eaten by a demon, along many others whose importance is… lesser. And I know what you may think: Motherfucker is named like angels and got swallowed by a demon. Yes, that’s the current situation. Welcome to David’s life in the coziest place in hell.

Now, where do I truly begin the tale? Maybe when I woke up over a field of red, facing the white, sterile light of one of the firmament’s bioluminescent streaks. That spares you hearing about the diminished grandeur of my life on Earth, where I was thrice a victim of cancer. One a melanoma from which I recovered. Two, a belligerent ex whose birthday was on the 3rd of July, and from which I didn’t. Third, and most fatal, a pack of huge feral crabs. Which worked in tandem with Clara and her gangster boyfriend. Not the Clara I want to ship overseas. The Ex named Clara. The other Clara has not proven to be a murderous psychopath as of the current date.

I… may have a problem with females named Clara, regardless of their species. Worst Doctor companion, too. By far.

That aside, I opened my eyes, and realized the landscape was a bit odd. A bit lacking in greenery, maybe a big spike of bone jutting out the ground a few meters from me, some weird shit flying by whose silhouettes weren’t the ones of falcons or eagles or pterodactyls. Like, I think being sent back to the Jurassic would have been a good afterlife. Nice climate, cool fauna, absolute lack of people, can piss in future oil deposits. It’s all bnefits until you meet some big ass archosaur. And then you die. And I guess you get sent further back to some cold ass glaciation or a ball-charring volcanic eruption. Where you die again. I wouldn’t know, but I dig it, like paleontologists do. Well, not dig, sometimes they find it on walls and have to bore the things out, right?

But I digress. Again.

The point is, I woke up and my National Document of Identity wasn’t in my pocket. The inside of my pocket wasn’t in my pocket either. I had pants, but no pockets. Pockets are sold separately here. Naturally, after remembering my gruesome death, I jumped to conclusions before jumping to my feet.

“Have I been reincarnated as a woman?! No!”

Checked the basement. All in order. Neither female nor Asian. I was clear to proceed and worry about more urgent matters. “Where the hell I am?”

“That is, I could say, a very accurate description.” A voice that you could notice wasn’t trying to sell me anything wafted from behind me, and made me turn my neck slowly, with an appropriate quota of disdain. There stood a pale man, nude except for a loincloth, a monocle, and a kneepad he wore like a bandana. His hair was the color of tar and, had I dared to touch it, probably just as oily. I could have gotten a jumpstart in this life, had I decided to exploit that rich-ass petroliferous basin that was his head.

“Hello there, scourge of deodorants. I have no spare change,” I said, dusting off my new clothes, a simple t-shirt and some pocketless shorts.

The man strode to my side, and I remember considering he had overdone it with how long his legs and arms were, compared to their ricketiness. He stood there, facing the light that slithered down from the streak on the firmament. “Billy,” I thought he said, a bang of black hair sticking to his face.

“Mine’s David.”

“No, no, what you have under your feet, this red ‘grass’. Villi. With V.”

“Pardon me?”

“Do not freak out, David, all of us here lived full-fledged lives in other planes. Mostly on Earth. All of our souls were unworthy enough to end up devoured by a giant demon,” he explained with an enviable calm. “We are inside the demon now, and this that looks like grass is equivalent to your intestinal lining. Name’s Random, by the way.”

“Random? Like decided by luck?”

“I tried to have fun with the system and it said ‘your name cannot be a Random assortments of letters’. I got a Random assortment of letters alright.”

You should have seen my face, the rictus of horror at what he had just said.

“I know it’s hard to process that we have been devoured by a demon and…”

“System? Is this a shitty gamefied reality?” I asked the most urgent of questions. “Turn based?”

“Yes. No. You have no problem with being inside a demon?” He crossed his arms, his hand dangling over the cradle of his elbow like a deceased baby.

“Fuck! Is the demon male?” Once again I demonstrated my superior logical mindset at stablishing priorities.

“Sort of hermaphrodite, as far as we know. It has like seven different sexes.”

“Good, it’s not as gay as it could. No, I don’t mind.”

Random blinked slowly. Then he winked like a gecko who’s considering if you are enough of a cockroach to be tasty. “It’s okay to panic. You don’t have to be strong here.”

I managed to sidestep his arching arm just in time to avoid one of those awkward half-assed hugs people do by slinging their limbs over your neck like a scarf. “What sort of videogame world are we talking. Respawn mechanics? JRPG? Grindy or not? Will I eventually ascend to practical godhood and seduce some girls of questionable age?”

“Have you played Doom?” he asked so casually, shoving a hand between his hip and the sling of his loincloth.

“No, but I obviously know it. I was no good at shooters. I may have to take a spoonful of concrete.” I shrugged and stared wistfully at the lack of sky. “How do you guys measure days?”

“Stardew Valley?” He Olympically ignored my question.

“Oh crap. Oh sweet fuck. No. No!” I fell on my knees over the slimy… grass… wait, this is a system world, so [Grass?] “The shell of my mother!”

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

“The… what of your what? I think the universal translator is acting funny again. What language are we speaking from your point of view?”

Realizing this was a drunk babel fish situation, I saw a chance to appear interesting. “Castilian.” I said, hoping it translated literally and not to the S word.

“Okay. I never heard of that one. Where did you live?”

“In a poor country north of Antarctica. A pretty insular territory until recently. We got some sweet marsupials, even. Many got extinct due to invasive species.”

“Ah, so you are from one of Oceania’s islands?”

“Not quite, but don’t bother trying to guess. It’s all water under the bridge.”

He nodded effusively and put on a nervous smile. “We do have those here. Bridges.”

“What about water?” I stood as fast as I could and grabbed him from his slick shoulders. “Do you have water here?”

“The rich do. The rest of us generally don’t bother distilling it from the wallmilk.”

I refrained from asking “the what” and let him go. Dusted off my hands to avoid weeping them in my clothes out of reflex. For all I knew, the man could rape me. Or kill me, but when you are freshly reincarnated death kind of loses its punch, you know? Death’s whole shtick is that it is final. You die, leave everything behind and stop existing, which often improves your worth as a human being vastly. But if there are lives after deaths it’s just like moving to another country. A shitty one in my case, but, hey, maybe they didn’t have corruption or taxes or mosquitos, and that was a plus in my book. Before branching out again, I’ll conclude the thought: death without finality is merely paperwork.

“So…days?” I prodded once more.

“We have clocks and kind of winged a standard measurement of time that has to do with the cycles of nature all around us.”

An explosion in the distance made me whip my head around, but Random just giggled and patted me on the shoulder. “That was in the pustule fields. Don’t worry. It happens often.”

“Okay… we are standing here, in this… hill of villi.” I took the time to gesture at the grandiose gutscape around us. “And you name-dropped a farm simulator and a fps. How do they combine to create this reality?”

“You can be either a hunter bringing resources back to town, which enjoys a low life expectancy but a handsome wage, or farm some… unusual crops as a poor sap and forage resources around the safer areas. Choice of yours. Farmers sometimes go out to hunt too and hunters can do whatever in their private property as long as it complies with the law.”

Scratching my chin, I asked the question I guessed Random, being a sort of guide of this underworld —or so I assumed— had probably heard a million times. “Are there monster girls? Can I ranch monster girls?”

“Why?” I could see the defeat in his face. He thought he had avoided the bullet, just to be met with the galena breath of the canon right in front of his face. Ha. “Why should everyone make either that question or… the bachelorette one. There are no bachelorettes, we are not NPCs we are full-fledged people, and it will be frowned upon if you go around marrying people just to turn the resulting children into birds. Which cannot be done, so psychos just sub it for infanticide.”

Meanwhile, I had stopped paying attention to him midway through his rant. “Inventory.” I called out. Nothing. “Bag.” Again, nothing.

“You don’t have access to the system until you choose Farmer or—”

“Farmer. Fame and glory sound amazing, but limited in scope. I am going for the sandbox option and finding my own way in it.”

“This isn’t a game, David.”

“You mean I cannot create a lucrative flatworm farm and use the funds to make the lives of my fellow humans harder?”

Random’s eyes rolled away from my gaze as he smiled awkwardly. I should have had a “oh no” moment, but, sincerely, I couldn’t be bothered. “…We are a moneyless society.”

My pupils went the size of your brains. I felt the veins on my head quivering, my heart pumping in savage fashion, the mouth drier than turkey. Chicken? Superior. Armadillo? Heavenly. Capybara? Angers the Japanese, ergo transcendental. “You are fucking goddamned endoparasitic hippies?”

Random exploded in laugher, letting himself fall over the cushioned mat of villi as he grabbed his stomach with one hand and pointed —with a healthy dose of Parkinsonism— at my face with the other. “Oh man, I knew that would make you react. Credits, we have credits!”

“I am sincerely baffled: this is like the bastard child of Fantasy, Sci-Fi and someone’s fetish. And it isn’t mine!” The latter was absolutely a complaint born out of offense, don’t mistake it for anything else.

Random incorporated faster than I ever thought a man with an aching belly would be able to, peeled off a smile, and pointed behind me. “Come with me, David. I’ll show you your plot. It’s over there, a few kilometers.”

“Of land, of story, or of breast enhancement?” I asked just ‘cause I had to ask. Absolutely had to ask.

Random blinked thrice. Recalculating. “Pardon me?”

“Will I get terrain, painful character development, or a big pair of silicone implants?”

“A… parcel of gutground where you will be able to plant parasite seeds and grow them. Like you would turnips.”

I rolled my shoulders as we walked downhill, side by side, three meters apart. Ah well, a good farm house and a bit of manual labor is not a bad afterlife.”

Random stopped in his tracks and glanced at me like a pit bull overdosed on speed. “No. You don’t get it, David. You get the plot. Only the plot.”

I crossed my arms. “So where will I live?”

“We have an inn. Alternatively, that’s for you to figure out: we have people you can pay to build you a neat house,” he said, rubbing his fingers together to emphasize the fact he was speaking with a dispossessed motherfucker sunken in the most abject poverty, woe was me.

I rubbed the dorsal of my metacarpal region, massaging my hairy flesh in a nervous fashion. “Is healthcare public?”

“Yes, we charge people only if they are above a certain level of wealth. Don’t worry about pre-existing conditions, you are not likely to have it there. Your body is not the same you ahd on Earth. It’s more like a fleshification of the soul, if you want to call it somehow. Your soul now bleeds, your soul now—”

“Cums!”

One could see the light leaving Random’s eyes candela by candela. “Yes… that too.” Not even an hour in this world and I had already murdered a man inside. And it gave no XP. Shame. “The point being, don’t die because your very soul gets digested by the demon, obliterated, poof. No more David anywhere in the universe.” He gestured exaggeratedly as he spoke, hands nearly flailing around as we resumed our walk downhill.

“Natural death. Possible?”

“We don’t age. It is an afterlife of sorts. But we are still inside a demon.”

“Does the demon age?” I asked, looking him in the eyes, and he laid a hand on my shoulder, silence reigning in the villi-ridden hills. Then I understood that was the question everybody forbade themselves from asking. “I asked if the demon fucking ages.”

“Read the room pal. Please, get used to reading the room.”

“I am room-literate. In time you will learn that me being able to read a warning often leads to me doing exactly what it is trying to discourage.”

The hand shriveled off my shoulder like tree leaves in autumn. Near Chernobyl. “That attitude is not going to help you thrive in our community.”

This elicited an awe-inspiring shrug from my person. “So long as I can make everyone a bit more miserable.”

“Are you one of those pathologically contrarian people?” His eyes bore into mine, and the pity could be seen in them.

“Maybe.” I answered, because he expected me to say “No”. Or perhaps to gloat and be proud of it. But I’ll let everyone know I am not that kind of man. I pick my battles. Only the easily winnable ones. Mostly the easily winnable ones.

Okay, I may be a bit terrible at picking some battles, but they are good pretenders. Mischievous fae of a strife, see? They like, parade around as easy ones. They are the abusive “pick-me”s of battles. I am a martyr. I am definitively a martyr, exile any doubt about it.

Where was I? Ah yes, walking downhill besides Randy, good ol’ Randy.

I hated him back then. I never stopped hating him. It’s kind of my thing, hating. But in that moment, traipsing towards my fate, under the changing lights that came from the bioluminescent stripes on the ceiling of the Town chamber, we were just a couple dudes facing an unknown, mysterious, slimy world, and probably wondering: Is it worth it trying to dig a hole to dick the ground under our feet?

My head got jerked out of the gutter by small white structures appearing on the horizon. They sprouted from the ground in conical or rectangular shapes, somethimes something more cylindrical or squared sprinkled around. “What’s that?”

“The town. We build with lumberbone. Truly, it’s bone with only few of the characteristics of wood, but it does the job and someone named it that and… I don’t know, I am not a bonemason.”

“There are bone trees?”

“Uh… yes… more or less. Whole forests of them,” Random said, scratching the back of his neck. “Some people are full-time bonejacks. Farmers, mostly, but hunters sometimes want a more peaceful life and only go on obligatory hunts, so they need side hustles to pay the bills.”

The hills unrolled until we arrived to the plains, the town rising taller as we got closer. Because physics.

“Listen David, I’ll introduce you to the higher ups and you will get your plot assigned. Please. “He joined his hands as in prayer. “Please be normal. For the sake of both of us.”

Then Random motioned for me to follow him, and following a winding path of white tiles we intruded the unusual town.