Act of God: The Adjuster

Dev Malhotra was twenty-nine, a software tester with a bad sleep schedule and a worse habit of arguing about comic books with strangers. He died mid-sentence, mid-argument, of a burst vessel in his brain. Then he woke up in someone else's bed, in a Queens apartment he had never seen, wearing the body of a thirty-one-year-old insurance claims adjuster named Owen Calloway. Owen's life comes pre-installed. Dev can recall a childhood in Ridgewood, a mother who calls on Sundays, and a decade of expertise in assessing property damage. None of it happened to him, and all of it feels true. He can fill out a loss-of-use form in his sleep and cannot say why he knows his mother takes her tea with too much honey. He is a tenant in a finished life, and he has to decide whether to live in it. The world he has landed in is Marvel's: gods, invasions, and men in armor are part of the tax base. Owen's employer, Brightwater Mutual, exists because superheroes break things and somebody must decide who pays. Dev knows every hero by name. For the first time he sees what the stories skipped, which is the paperwork of the aftermath. Then the Ledger opens. It is a system only he can see, styled like a claims form. It awards Merit for verified good deeds, and Merit converts into Draw Tickets. A Draw pulls a power at random from the whole sprawl of human fiction: a Marvel mutation, a DC oath, a cultivation technique from a Chinese web novel, a curse technique from a Japanese manga, a Korean hunter's skill. The Ledger does not care what he needs. His first pull is a spirit-sense good for finding a lost child and useless against a man with a crowbar. His second is worse. Every power arrives with fine print, and Dev is a man who reads fine print for a living. He cannot punch his way through this. He has to investigate, adapt, and improvise, using odd tools and a claims adjuster's eye. That eye soon notices a pattern in the damage reports crossing his desk. Too many "acts of God" cluster around properties later bought cheap by Meridian-Aegis Salvage, a company that always arrives first and always leaves richer. Someone is manufacturing catastrophe and collecting on it. The Ledger's origin is a question of its own. Dev is not the only one keeping accounts in this universe, and the Ledger has a counter-party. — Description from novelcodex.orgFull novel: Act of God: The Adjuster — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠