I was floating.
Not peacefully, not serenely. more like a corpse someone forgot to finish drowning. The sensation was weirdly weightless and nauseating at the same time.
I had no idea how long I’d been here. Minutes? Hours? A full server maintenance cycle? A glitch? No telling.
“Oh… right. We were fighting that scary‑ass orc… and then… then what?”
My memory coughed up a flash of pain, the sensation of falling, and then…
SYSTEM ERROR: MEMORY CORRUPTEDNothing.
“Hugh… my head.” I groaned.
The pain felt like someone was trying to carve their initials into my brain with a rusty spoon. I stayed curled up in agony until it finally ebbed to something less murderous. When I dared to open my eyes, I was greeted by… white.
Just white…?
A vast, endless, soul‑tax‑audit kind of white.
No color. No shadows. No textures. Just pure, existentially offensive emptiness.
Then a voice rippled through the void.
“It would seem you are finally conscious.”
I froze. The voice was feminine, calm, lilting. The kind of voice that could soothe a rampaging dragon or convince you to sign a suspiciously long contract, with fine print you could barely read. It echoed from everywhere at once, like a choir of one, but somehow not? IDK. My brain was to mushy right now to care why or how.
“W‑Who’s t‑there!!” I squeaked. Yes, squeaked. My manly dignity was clearly still buffering caught at 99%.
The voice chuckled…warm, amused, and absolutely omnipotent.
“Do not fear, little fragment. You stand before She Who Shapes Worlds, the Architect of Souls, the First Light of Creation… though most mortals simply call me the Goddess Hestia”
A soft chime rang in my ears.
[NEW ENTITY DISCOVERED: Goddess of Creation]
Level: ???
Threat Level: Please Don’t Annoy Her
My stomach dropped.
Great. I died, and now I was in a cosmic customer service lobby with the games literal goddess of creation.
Because of course I was.
So…You meet the in‑game goddess when you die. Man, the devs really thought of everything.
Like, “Hey, you died horribly — here’s a cosmic customer‑service rep made of sparkles.” Talking to no one in particular.
“I brought you here for a reason,” the voice said, with a laugh smooth as silk and twice as alluring.
“Under normal circumstances, you would have died. The strain of the link between almost snapped your fragile mind.”
Fragile mind? I thought
Rude, but fair.
Before I could complain, reality hiccuped, like someone hit Ctrl+Z on the void, and the Goddess appeared in front of me.
Not descended, not materialized, not phased in.
No.
She popped into existence like a magician’s trick in reverse. Instead of pulling a rabbit out of a hat, she shoved the entire universe into… the hat? The rabbit?
“Ahh!!,” I sighed.
my mind not able to keep up. Better to not think about it while I’m having an existential crisis.
My mouth fell open in stunned silence.
Exe. Brain error.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: Cognitive Processing Failed. Rebooting…]She was beautiful and ethereal, made of starlight and… marshmallows?
Yes. Marshmallows.
Like someone took the night sky and added a suspiciously whimsical dessert aesthetic.
Her face was like a porcelain doll, flawless, majestic, and absolutely the type of face that could smite you for mispronouncing her title.
Her hair flowed like the Milky Way, shimmering with tiny points of light that shifted whenever she moved, like galaxies politely rearranging themselves.
And her eyes…
Her eyes were twin stars.Warm, blazing, fierce, annd unflinching. The kind of eyes that said, “I could create a world with a thought… or delete you like a corrupted save file.”
A soft chime echoed in my head.
[STATUS DEBUFF] affects:
reverence:
+50% Awe,
+30% Panic,
+10% Chance of
She smiled gently, which somehow made everything worse.
“Do not be afraid, little fragment,” she said. “If I wished to destroy you, I would not have bothered waking you up.”
“Wow,” I muttered. “Comforting.”
(￣^￣)
Her smile widened.Oh good. She had a sense of humor….,Or she enjoyed watching mortals squirm.
Possibly both.
“Although it pains me to say this,” Hestia began, her voice dipping into a tone normally reserved for tragic opera finales, “the link of the Between has been mostly severed. Hence the reason you’re here.”
Her expression turned grave. Like divine‑being‑who‑knows‑your-search-history grave.
“Huh?” I blinked. My brain, ever loyal, immediately betrayed me again.
“Severed? By severed you mean… what exactly?”
A cold, uneasy twist curled in my gut. Never a good sign.
“Nothing you should be concerned about yet…” she said, which was exactly the kind of sentence that guaranteed I should be extremely concerned.
“But in order to repair the link of the Between, the you must first accept the self. In doing so, the link will be renewed. Not only renewed, but strengthened.”
She paused, giving me a look that suggested she was trying very hard not to call me an idiot.
“It is a little early for this to happen, but your… what do you call them? Devs? Yes. Your Devs have tampered with the events of causality. This has forced me to step in and rectify their mistake.”
I stared at her.
“Ok… Hestia, ma’am, I don’t have the first clue what’s going on or why, but if it gets me out of here and back to my friends, I’m all for it.”
Her entire face lit up like someone had just told her the universe was on sale.
With a clap of her hands, she smiled, a smile so radiant it temporarily blinded me.
I swear I heard a choir.
Or maybe that was just my retinas screaming.
“OH, DELIGHTFUL!” she chimed, sounding like morning bells dipped in sugar and cosmic authority.
Then—
SNAP!!!
The sound echoed through the void, through my bones, through my soul, through whatever metaphysical organs I apparently had now.
A warm pulse surged through me as a bright PING flashed across my vision.
My eye twitched. My soul twitched. Honestly, even my afterlife twitched.
But I still jabbed the glowing option like a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing.
YES.
The moment I accepted, the void reacted like someone had just hit the “install update” button on reality.
A deep hum rolled through the emptiness, vibrating my bones, or whatever spectral placeholders I currently had.
Hestia’s smile widened, radiant and terrifying in equal measure.
“Excellent choice, little fragment.”
The words echoed like a divine pat on the head… or a warning label.
Then the world detonated in light.
A tidal wave of warmth surged through me, flooding every corner of my being. It felt like sticking my soul into a cosmic toaster, warm, buzzing, slightly alarming, and definitely not OSHA‑approved.
[SYSTEM UPDATE IN PROGRESS…]
Do not turn off your mortal coil.
My vision blurred as lines of text scrolled across the void like a boot‑up sequence:
APPLYING BLESSING…PING…
REWRITING SOUL ARCHITECTUREPING…
INSTALLING CLASS FEATURES-
ICE PRINCESS
PING…
WARNING: EMOTIONAL COOLDOWN MAY APPLY
GRANTING PERMANENT STAT BUFF
PING…
ATTEMPTING TO STABILIZE HOST…
ATTEMPT FAILED
HOST MENTALLY CONFUSED
PROCEEDING ANYWAY
PING…
UPLOADING LEGENDARY LOOT BOX“W‑Wait—Ice Princess? Why princess? Why not Ice Knight? Ice Warrior? Ice…
”SOMETHING MASCULINE?!” I pleaded
Hestia tilted her head, amused.
“You accepted the self, did you not? This is simply what your soul resonates with.”She turned her head and puffed her cheeks into a pout.
Yes a literal pouting Goddess
“My soul resonates with WHAT?!”
”AND, WHY ARE YOU THE ONE POUTING!!!”
She shrugged, galaxies rippling through her hair like it was no big deal.
“Labels are mortal concerns. Power is power.”
Before I could argue, the meaning of cold condensed into a single point in my chest, then exploded outward in a shockwave of shimmering frost. The void around me cracked like glass, spiderwebbing with icy veins.
I gasped.
My breath came out as mist.
NEW TITLE ACQUIRED HESTIA’S HERO
PASSIVE UNLOCKED: DEVINE FAVOR
MINOR
STATUS: SOUL INTEGRITY 10%- ACCEPTABLE
Hestia stepped closer, her presence overwhelming but strangely comforting.
“Rise, my hero. The world awaits you… and your friends need you more than you know.”
The void beneath me shattered completely.
Gravity returned with a vengeance.
I plummeted.
“OH COME ON—!!”
Hestia waved cheerfully as I fell through the collapsing whiteness.
“Do try not to die again so soon!”
Her voice echoed after me, bright and musical.
“—it’s terribly inconvenient!”
And then—
Darkness.
Cold.
A heartbeat.
[LOADING NEW BODY…]
.