It was a brutally cold, dry, foul-smelling dream. But soon he realized it wasn't a dream at all. It was his last memory before coming here.
Clatter, clatter, clack.
The office at 3 a.m. The air in the office, its heater shut off, was frigid, and only the glow of the monitor stabbed at his hollow eyes. Five years as a civil servant, then he'd stormed out swearing he couldn't take the complainants anymore, and it had been three years since he'd joined a corporate audit team. His career soared after the move, but the final destination of a life spent grinding away was professional overtime-worker. Even today, in this life of wasted electricity bills, his vision blurred until he thought he was hallucinating.
“Team Leader Yoon, you done organizing the breakdown on this embezzlement case?”
“Almost there.”
“You can get the report up by tomorrow morning, right?”
“…Yes, Manager.”
He'd answered grudgingly, but even the time it took to answer felt like a waste. It was the third night running of all-nighters. The numbers before his eyes started tap-dancing. The cells of the Excel file began to look like iron bars. He clearly wasn't in his right mind.
Ah, my chest feels tight.
Was it from drinking too much coffee? He wanted to close his eyes, just for a moment. He couldn't tell whether his heart was beating fast or slow. He really couldn't hold on any longer.
Just ten minutes…
Thud.
His head dropped onto the keyboard. In the instant his uncontrollable body sounded the alarm, he thought:
Ah, did I hit save?
You really have to make Ctrl+S a habit. That was his last memory.
When he opened his eyes again, he was in an all-white space.
Instinctively, he realized he was dead. It wasn't as shocking as he'd expected. Five years earlier and he'd have wailed and thrown a fit, but now he was just far too exhausted. The "I could just die" he used to say as a joke had simply become reality—well, so what.
It was a more comfortable space than he'd expected. Soft and plush, the temperature just right. He wondered whether souls slept too, the temperature dialed in like a hotel, and had just closed his eyes when—
[You there. Open your eyes.]
At a voice anyone would call holy, he opened his eyes to find an exceedingly white being. It had the form of a human, yet he could clearly sense it was something else entirely.
It was a curious being, sending him such a remarkably warm gaze. He didn't think he'd ever received a look like this even from his own parents. Who is this? The instant he wondered, the being told him it was the "god" of a world different from his own. As a natural progression of things, he ended up hearing a great deal. And then…
[Save him.]
“No thank you.”
He flatly refused the god's request. He had no desire to keep working even in death. He was a man with every right to claim eternal rest, and he was far too exhausted—his soul needed a break too.
Sure, this was an age of trucks running over office workers and reincarnating them into other worlds, but that ought to be reserved for people with at least some motivation. Wasn't it a bit much to hand more work to a soul that had died of overwork?
[But why!]
The god seemed flustered. To begin with, operating outside your jurisdiction is itself a problem, Luan wanted to tell him, but even that felt like too much effort.
“I need to make up thirty years of sleep right now.”
[…!]
“There's a saying in my country—'Sleep in the coffin.' And I've already gone into the coffin.”
[What a cruel thing to say…!]
“I'm going to sleep.”
[W-wait!]
And just as he'd leaned his body against something resembling a fluffy cloud, the god spoke.
[If you save that child—Luanisiel—I'll grant you a wish.]
Now that was a little tempting. A wish granted by a god. The voice—clinging to him like a hand grabbing his trouser leg (though he wasn't sure souls even had trouser legs)—carried the kind of proposal whose payoff he'd only ever daydreamed about.
[I promise you a life overflowing with wealth without lifting a single finger.]
This was tempting.
[The 'fortune-without-toil and rest' you so longed for.]
The lottery!
In the end, he had no choice but to open his eyes. It was an exceptional offer. A rich layabout. Wasn't that the very dream he'd prayed for every night, clutching his lottery ticket?
“There's a condition, I assume?”
[Become the Empress, 'Luanisiel,' and save that child.]
“Deal.”
I'll live the perfect life of a layabout for you. Work a few years, then loaf around eating well for the rest of his life—it was a profitable contract. There was finally some payoff for being worked to rot.
There was nothing to do but stamp his seal on the dispatch-worker contract without a single backward glance.
[Each time that child's fate ran its course, I had to scream, again and again, at the edge of the world.]
The god's space, when he faced it once more, was as unrealistically peaceful as ever, but in the god's eyes as they looked at him there hung a sorrow difficult to put into words.
[Luanisiel was the purest, most transparent soul I ever shaped into the world. When I set the pale-violet divinity into that child's eyes, I hoped he would live as a serene priest, beloved by all.]
When the god swept a hand through the air, Luanisiel's short and cruel life flashed past like a panorama.
The day he was dragged out of the temple by force, driven by his House's greed. The nights spent alone on the cold palace floor, vomiting blood, writhing in agony from the divine power overflowing within him. The god had said he'd watched all of it, unable to intervene.
[The threads of fate are something even I cannot snip carelessly. From the moment of his birth, that child was destined to be a sacrifice to complete the fates of the Emperor and Aiden. I could not save him, and he gave up on himself.]
The god's voice trembled faintly. It seemed that even an all-knowing, all-powerful god could not stop the agony of watching the creation he loved most die wretchedly, draped in the false guise of a villain.
[So I summoned you. Because you—a soul from another world, capable of twisting causality itself—could stop that child's unjust death and enjoy, in his place, the peace I so wanted to give him.]
“…For the god to have cherished him that much—my shoulders feel a little heavy.”
He answered dryly with his mouth, but somewhere in his chest there was a tight ache. It was surely because the dreadful pain and loneliness the original Luanisiel must have felt lingered in this body like a residue. He thought he understood now why the god had crumpled his all-powerful dignity to cling to him with such an extraordinary offer of a layabout's life.
[Save that child. No—it's also the path to saving you, who has now become Luan. In this life at least, don't be anyone's tool or anyone's shield. Just live for your own happiness.]
Leaving the god's earnest plea behind him, he opened his eyes once more.
When he rose in the still, vast space and went to stand before the mirror, the fact that he'd become an exotic beauty with platinum-blond hair and pale-violet eyes was a bonus. Since the goal was to rescue this body and live in peace, he had no choice but to examine it carefully. A bit sickly-looking was a flaw, but he was handsome, so it would do.
The problem would be the difficulty level of this fellow "Luanisiel Requies's" life. Now Luan, he quickly analyzed the original Luanisiel's memories and the future memories the god had handed over, churning through them like running an Excel sheet. The god had organized this world's history neatly, like a novel.
He pondered a way to survive in the body of Luan, who was fated to die wretchedly.
Should I seduce the Emperor?
Rejected in one second. The novel's male lead is Aiden, the one favored by the god. No matter how hard he flailed, the moment true love showed up he'd be left out in the cold. It was the perfect course for getting his head removed for not reading the room.
The one to save the soul of Emperor Kirian, who suffered as though bound tight in iron chains. No matter how Luan struggled, the instant Aiden—the man of destiny—appeared, everything would reset to square one. A clueless villain wedged between the protagonist couple was death-flag number one.
Divorce and leave?
Adopted.
In any case, the personal fortune he'd brought from House Requies was ample, and on top of that, the wealth the god had guaranteed awaited him. Before Aiden made his full entrance, he just had to neatly settle the paperwork and fly off to the warm south.
“Not bad.”
In order to live. And, this time for real, to finally get some proper sleep—divorce wasn't a bad method at all.
Once his resolve was set, his body moved first. With hands trembling from low blood sugar, Luan took up a pen and sat at the desk. Pulling out the countless official-document formats stored in his head, he began to sketch the skeleton of a divorce agreement draft onto blank paper.
All the planning and paperwork were done. Now all that remained was the Emperor's approval.
