I slammed into a chair in front of a desk in a small office with beige walls. The red dragonoid lady, Gladyx, was sitting at her desk with several blue screens floating in front of her. She tapped her desk and the screens flattened against it. She gave me a perfunctory smile that was full of terrifying dragon fangs.

“Welcome,” she said. “Sorry about the confusion.”

“Uh, s’ok,” I responded, processing. “But, what was that about a souldebt?”

“Right,” she started. “So. Bit of a pickle, really. Earth’s parent company, DruxWug, is shutting down. Took on too much, overspent, and couldn’t crawl out of the hole, sad to say, but it happens all the time. The Parxathlem Corporation—that’s us—bought up some of their assets, including Earth, and all the souls that came with it. There were quite a lot of you on Earth, so, it should have been a good deal.”

I nodded, as if any of this made any sense to me, so she continued.

“Unfortunately, it appears that DruxWug was in worse shape than we were aware. Despite starting to set up the Earth, they never actually installed an operating system, and so it went a bit… feral. Generated lots of souls, but every single one was in quite a lot of souldebt. Couldn’t earn any experience without a system in place, after all. I’m told you Earthlings had to make up your own religions and reasons for living?” She shook her head with a chuckle.

“Uh, yeah, I guess. I didn’t even think souls were real,” I said lamely.

She blinked at me, and cleared her throat. “Anyway, some good news. Since Earth’s state wasn’t disclosed properly in the sale, Parxathlem was able to submit a complaint on your behalf. Kind of like what you might call a class action lawsuit. We ended up getting a sizable refund on the sale price of Earth and its souls, to be passed on to you. DruxWug will probably end up filing for bankruptcy now, but that’s how it goes sometimes.”

“Oh. So, does the refund get me out of debt?”

“Goodness, no,” Gladyx laughed. “It’s enough to get you set up with a few perks and boons for your new life, though.”

“New life? Oh, yeah, Fefferlem was saying something about resurrection. Or employment.”

“Ah, well, employment isn’t really an option for you. Technically, you haven’t actually lived yet. You need to have had a life before we can offer you employment, although if living isn’t to your tastes, you can pay off any remaining debts with employment after your first life. Resurrection is really your only option right now. Well, I suppose obliviation is an option as well. Would you rather cease to exist?”

“I don’t think so?”

“Right, so then, let’s get you set up for resurrection. If you were born with a system in place this would all have been handled then. It’s unusual to have so-called life experience prior to having a class. The whole thing is really rather odd. Lots of work for us middle-management types. There’s a guideline in place now, thankfully. We’re going to incarnate you fully-formed rather than start you as a baby, for obvious reasons. Unless you want to be a baby?”

“I think I’d rather be an adult, thanks,” I said.

She nodded. “Better for your would-be parents, too, since we’re not supposed to wipe your memories. We would do a memory reset for a normal resurrection, but since your memories were formed organically without a system, they aren’t suitable for resurrection suppression. Burned out a number of souls before we figured that out, or so I’m told.”

I stared, horrified, but swallowed and tried to power through. “Yeah, no, that’s, uh, fine.”

“Let’s get you set up in our system now. This will just take a minute,” she said, tapping at a screen on her desk.

My brain exploded, splattering the room with blood, bone, and gray matter. I gasped, and watched my body slump off to the floor. Blood pooled on the cheap carpet. I was seeing myself in the third-person, my physical self having fallen away from my soul. I looked up and saw Gladyx, unbothered, tapping away at a screen. With a final tap, my body and all the gore disappeared.

“There we go. Right, we’ve transferred your memories to your soul and connected you to the system. I’ll help guide you through the resurrection process now. First things first, we have to choose a planet. The Parxathlem Corporation has over 600 planets to choose from. Do you have any preferences?”

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

“I literally don’t understand any of this and just watched my own brain explode, so… no. No preferences.”

Gladyx laughed as if I was making a funny little joke, then brought a screen up and faced it towards me. “Well, there are a number of broad classifications. High magic and low magic worlds, high tech and low tech worlds, high difficulty and low difficulty worlds.”

“Difficulty?” I asked.

“Ah, right. Well, simply put, higher difficulty worlds will let you earn more experience points more quickly, assuming you survive.”

“And if I, uh, don’t survive?”

She shrugged. “Then you pay toward your debt with whatever experience you managed to earn and start over. If you want. Or you can apply for employment.”

“Or obliviation?”

“Well, yes, technically. Not sure I’ve ever seen someone opt out of existence entirely.”

“What does that entail, exactly?”

“I couldn’t possibly know the exact process, but it more or less entails rending your soul asunder, reducing your entire existence to energy and spare parts with which to use in the formation of a new soul.”

“Is that… painful?”

“I would imagine it’s the most intense pain imaginable, yes.”

“Right. Let’s just assume I’d choose employment or resurrection, then.”

“Wise.”

“And this souldebt business. Is it possible to get out of debt?”

“Of course! That’s what you’re working towards through earning experience points. Or through employment, if you’re patient.”

“And what exactly does that mean? What do I get for getting out of debt?”

Gladyx stared at me for a moment, then shook her head and laughed again. “I’m sorry, I keep forgetting you grew up outside of the system. Ascendancy, of course.”

“Ascendancy,” I said, thinking. “Is that, like… Heaven?”

Gladyx tapped at one of the screens, pulled up some text in a language I didn’t know, and read a bit. “Ah, I see,” she said after a minute, still reading. “It’s a bit like your Earthen ideas of Heaven, yes, although probably closer to this ‘Nirvana.’ I mean, nothing you came up with on Earth can quite cover it. For all intents and purposes, though, sure, call it Heaven. Your language can’t quite encapsulate it.”

“Is my language going to be a problem? Fefferlem was speaking something else at first, I think.”

“No problem at all. We’ve set you up with a translation skill on the cheap so you can jump right in. Ideally you’d learn the System Common tongue naturally, but strange times call for strange measures.”

I pondered everything Gladyx had said so far and came to a decision. “Ok then. I guess I’d like to try a low difficulty, high magic world. Maybe… mid tech? Is that possible?”

She nodded, tapping some screens. “High magic worlds usually use magitech, but if I take it to mean that you don’t want to rough it in a completely primitive world, I can make that work. Carbon-based life?”

“Uh, yes please?”

“No problem. I’ve got at least a dozen possible candidate worlds, then.” She showed me a screen with a bunch of planets, most of which seemed very Earth-like. “If you want to be something similar to a human again, it would rule out these three, because of the high gravity, but the other nine all work. I guess it really depends on what race you want to be.”

“How many races are there?”

“In total? 12,983.”

I grimaced at the prospect of navigating through this monstrous decision. Gladyx smiled at me. “If I can make a suggestion, perhaps you’d like to stick to something familiar this time around. If we stick to races that can live on these nine planets, with two arms, two legs, and one head, there are only less than a hundred real choices.”

She pushed a screen towards me with a menu that let me tap through the races she had mentioned. As I navigated through the choices, I saw all sorts of creatures, including the green orc-like fellow and the stoneskin person I had seen in the waiting room.

“Wait, is this an elf?”

“There are a few different elven races,” Gladyx said.

I wanted to ask how elves could have been part of human stories on Earth if they were a real, alien race, when Earth wasn’t even a part of the system, but I was starting to get the impression that Gladyx wanted me to hurry this along, and I had no idea how much more time this would take without more questions, so I decided to keep my thoughts to myself.

I scrolled through the rest of the list, briefly pausing on the option to pick a regular human, but then cycled through again until I hit the one that had caught my eye the first pass through. I clicked on it, choosing the male option, and Gladyx looked up—I think she had been filing her claws under her desk while I browsed—and smiled. “Great choice,” she said with feigned interest. “In that case, I’d suggest one of these three planets,” she said, and the screen with planets blinked out the rest.

I looked at the options again, ruling out one immediately. It was massive, with a huge surface area that was only possible without having a crushing gravity because it also had extensive underworlds, which kind of freaked me out. The other two seemed fairly similar, largely blue-green marbles with white clouds, but one had large stretches of yellow that I assumed was desert and the other had large swatches of pink-purple that seemed intriguing. It was called Neria. I shrugged and picked that one.

“Excellent,” Gladyx said. “Now let’s talk refund bonuses.”