I am what society proudly stamps with the label of “Average.”
Average grades in school, average GPA in college, and a painfully mediocre desk job.
For twenty two years, my greatest contribution to the world was not making it actively worse.
I was just another unnamed NPC loitering in the background of eight billion other lives.
But honestly?
I didn’t mind it at all.
We had a happy family.
We had a quiet little house, and we had just enough money to afford the occasional luxury without having a panic attack over next month’s EMIs.
Life was comfortably beige.
I was also what polite society would call a “Good Boy.” No drinking.
No smoking.
No drugs.
And absolutely, positively, no sex.
I was a twenty two year old virgin whose wildest Friday night involved double checking if the front door was locked and watching movies and series.
But the universe, I have come to learn, absolutely despises beige.
It prefers painting in violently dark strokes.
The dominoes started falling with one phone call.
My dad, who worked on the farms and had hands as rough as tree bark but the gentlest smile, had gone to the city for a simple errand.
He met with an accident.
Just like that, my perfectly average life was ripped away in an instant.
What followed was a terrifying blur of sterile hospital corridors, the suffocating smell of cheap antiseptic, and the brutal realization of how fast medical bills can swallow a lifetime of savings.
We poured every single rupee we had into keeping him alive.
For thirty agonizing days, we prayed to gods we hadn’t spoken to in years.
But one month later, the heart monitor flatlined, and our bank accounts followed suit.
Grief is heavy, but it is infinitely heavier when it physically breaks the people left behind.
The sheer shock of losing my father paralyzed my mom.
Literally.
I was twenty two, freshly burdened with the absolute certainty that life was profoundly, systematically unfair.
For the next three years, my world shrank to the size of my family home.
I became a full time caretaker, bearing the crushing, helpless weight of watching the strongest woman I knew wither away in a bed.
My aunt helped when she could, but mostly, it was just me.
In the dark hours of the night, listening to the rhythmic hum of her oxygen concentrator, I aged decades.
Then, she was gone too.
Four years.
That is all it took to completely erase a happy family from the face of the earth.
I was twenty six, utterly alone, and living in an empty house filled with ghosts.
To keep myself from staring at the ceiling until I went insane, I threw myself into the family farm during the day and retreated into fiction at night.
It started innocently enough.
A buddy of mine told me to watch some anime to take my mind off the crushing isolation.
Anime quickly became manga.
Manga inevitably became web novels.
Before I knew it, I was reading translated Chinese magic novels until 3 AM, completely absorbed in worlds where hard work actually paid off, unlike reality, where it just gave you lower back pain.
My buddy and I used to debate power scalings and magic elements for hours.
Then, last year, the universe decided it wasn’t done throwing punchlines.
My friend, the guy who introduced me to all these vibrant, magical worlds, died.
Not by a monster attack, not by a heroic sacrifice to save the world.
Cardiac arrest.
High cholesterol at twenty five.
I stood at his funeral, completely numb, staring at a plate of fried samosas at the reception and thinking, Are you actually kidding me?
That was my wake up call.
I was the last man standing, and I furiously refused to go out because of a blocked artery.
I completely overhauled my routine.
I started eating leafy greens that tasted like profound sadness.
I jogged.
I stretched.
I treated my body like a temple, purely out of a spiteful determination not to die early.
And it worked.
I was finally getting my life back on track.
I was physically fit.
I had my farm, my web novels, and a functioning heart.
I even woke up today, June 06, 2026, my twenty sixth birthday.
I stepped out onto the street, taking a deep breath of the fresh morning air.
Today is going to be a good day, I thought to myself.
Maybe I’ll go into town, buy myself a ridiculously large chocolate cake, and not be so pathetically lonely for once.
I should have known better.
Man plans, and the universe laughs so hard it sends a ten ton commercial vehicle to deliver the punchline.
I was crossing the street.
I looked left.
I looked right.
I did everything the “Good Boy” manual told me to do.
But nothing prepares you for the Isekai Express.
It came out of nowhere, a speeding truck blowing right through the red light.
I didn’t even have time to scream.
There was just the deafening blare of a horn, the horrific screech of burning rubber, and then… a heavy, violent crunch that rattled my very soul.
I lay there on the boiling asphalt, my vision rapidly blurring, a pool of warmth spreading beneath my shattered ribs.
The irony was so thick I could choke on it, though maybe that was just the internal bleeding.
I had spent the last entire year eating raw spinach and running miles just to avoid dying early, only to get violently splattered on my birthday by a guy who was probably drunk and fell asleep at the wheel.
My cake, I thought deliriously as the edges of my vision turned black.
I didn’t even get to eat my birthday cake.
No matter how desperately I clung to life, no matter how hard my perfectly healthy heart tried to beat, it couldn’t change the outcome.
I was dying.
The agony finally began to fade, replaced by a strange, weightless sensation.
At least I always used incognito, so my browser history was safe.
As the world slipped entirely away, a single, absurd thought echoed in the encroaching dark: If reincarnation is real, I swear to God, I want magic.
And maybe a slightly less boring life.
Then, nothing but silence.