"Ooh. Mighty Emperor of the Solar Empire, Julius Borealis. Welcome to the world of Orion. It is with a heavy heart that I inform you that you have been called to this world. Your new life is about to begin, and you will make history in this world as a great person once again."
Those were the first words I heard when I found myself standing in a white room.
The situation was so sudden that my brain refused to process it.
I looked around. White floor, white walls, white ceiling. No doors, no windows, no furniture. Nothing to indicate where I was, how I had gotten here, or why everything was aggressively white. The last thing I remembered was saving a game file out of habit and closing my eyes on a chair that was not nearly comfortable enough for a seven-day war.
Then I looked at the woman in front of me and my brain, which had been refusing to process anything, decided to process her instead because she was significantly harder to ignore than the white room.
She was beautiful. Not beautiful in the ordinary human sense. Beautiful in the sense that if goddesses truly existed, the woman in front of me would qualify without an interview. Long golden hair. Eyes as clear as open ocean on a cloudless day. A gentle, almost holy glow that made the white room feel even brighter. She looked like a teenager but carried herself with the quiet authority of someone who had been deciding the fates of nations for several centuries and found it only mildly interesting.
Her white outfit was elegant and clearly not from any world I recognized. It reminded me of a Roman toga, the kind worn by a senator from a palace, except tailored and fitted in a way that made it obvious that whoever designed it had opinions.
She also had very large melons.
I noted this the way a scientist notes an anomaly. Objectively. Without editorial comment.
Hah. At least I died having literally conquered the world, even if it was only in a game.
"Am I dead?" I asked.
"Yes, you are dead." She smiled pleasantly. "Even though your previous life was mostly worthless."
She snickered after saying it.
This damn goddess.
I took a breath. I had survived three years of endgame politics on the Radical Server. I had outlasted every nation that had ever attempted to destroy me through patience and careful resource management. I could survive one goddess with poor bedside manners.
Keep calm. Assess the situation. Find the exit.
"Of course your life was not entirely in vain, my child," she added, in a tone that suggested she was not entirely sure about this.
Sure. Of course.
"Can I ask one thing?"
She nodded. "Of course."
"I am not Julius Borealis. I am not an emperor. I am not a great person by any reasonable definition. I am an ordinary person who spent three years playing a grand strategy game and accidentally won it the night the servers shut down." I looked at her steadily. "Why am I here?"
"Are you stupid?" she said. "Look at yourself."
A mirror appeared in front of me. I did not see it arrive. It was simply not there and then it was, which I noted as my first confirmed observation of magic operating in real time.
I looked in the mirror.
"What."
The face looking back at me was not my face. It was objectively a better face. Black hair as dark as a screen with the brightness turned all the way down. Red eyes, the color of a warning indicator on a radar system. Facial structure that could charitably be described as distinguished and less charitably described as aggressively handsome. The kind of face that Julius Borealis had on his character portrait, which I had spent twenty minutes adjusting during the initial character creation screen.
"This is magic?" I said.
"Obviously," said the goddess. "This is the result of my power. You are welcome, Chicken Emperor."
I looked further down. The body was proportional. Well-built without being excessive. Muscle composition that suggested someone who did actual physical activity rather than someone who spent seven days in a chair fighting a browser-based war. And then there was one more detail that I clocked immediately because it was impossible not to clock.
"I have a very large banana," I said.
"Pffft." The goddess covered her mouth. It did not help. "Hee-hee-hee. I did not expect that someone who died playing a video game would be the one summoned. Hee-hee-hee."
"Do not laugh at the dead," I said. "It is disrespectful."
"Ehm." She cleared her throat with effort. "Enough small talk."
This useless goddess.
She had a remarkable talent for making impressions. Not good ones, but remarkable ones. I swallowed my irritation because the alternative was spending the rest of eternity in a white room arguing with a divine being who giggled, and I had already decided that eternity in a white room was not acceptable.
She stood before me, still visibly suppressing the last of her amusement, while I stood in front of the mirror that had appeared from nowhere in a place with no doors.
"Nice to meet you, Julius Borealis," she said. Her tone shifted slightly, settling into something more composed. Not formal yet, but less chaotic. "My name is Nebula. I am the Goddess of Orion. You have one future available to you."
"Let me guess," I said.
"Become emperor and conquer the world."
I looked at her for a long moment.
"No," I said.
Nebula blinked. "Excuse me?"
"No. I just spent three years building a defensive nation specifically because I did not want to conquer anything. I accumulated resources. I researched technology. I sat on my island and waited for other people to exhaust themselves. That is my preferred mode of existence." I crossed my arms. "Find someone else."
"There is no one else."
"There are billions of people on my planet."
"Were," she corrected. "You are dead. And the others do not have your specific combination of strategic knowledge, resource management experience, and complete lack of conventional military ambition, which is, paradoxically, exactly what I need."
I stared at her. "That is a strange reason to choose someone."
"Someone who wants to conquer the world will conquer it for themselves," said Nebula. "Someone who finds it troublesome will conquer it and then stop." She paused. "Hopefully."
The hopefully was not reassuring.
"Hah," I said. "This is troublesome. And how long would it take? Decades, at minimum."
"Possibly longer," she agreed cheerfully.
This useless goddess.
She laid it out then, properly, without the giggling. Another world called Orion. Five continents separated by an ocean that killed every ship that tried to cross it. Native civilizations stuck in medieval technology while magic served as their substitute for everything from medicine to warfare. Five powers that had never met each other, never cooperated, and were all currently in various stages of internal collapse.
And something old sleeping under the ocean that was, apparently, going to wake up and end everything if nobody did something about it.
"Why can you not handle it yourself?" I asked. "You are a goddess. You appeared in a room from nowhere and produced a mirror from nothing. Why does this require me?"
Nebula was quiet for a moment.
"Honestly," she said, "I could explain the theological and metaphysical constraints on divine intervention in a world where free will is a foundational cosmic principle, but it would take a very long time and you would find it deeply unsatisfying." She paused. "The short version is that I cannot. And you can. And you are already dead, so your options are limited."
"What are the options."
"Option one: go to Orion, lead your nation, unite the five continents, stop the ancient threat, save the world." She held up one finger. "Option two: remain here as a spirit with no body, no nation, no strategic resources, no games, no food, no anything. Mostly just existing in a vague spiritual sense indefinitely."
I thought about this carefully and thoroughly.
"What do spirits do all day?" I asked.
"Small talk," said Nebula. "Mostly. For eternity."
I thought about this for three more seconds.
"I accept," I said. "But I have conditions."
Nebula raised an eyebrow.
"I want power," I said. "Specifically, I want to be functionally unkillable unless every cell in my brain is destroyed simultaneously. I do not plan to be on the front lines of anything, but I am not going to spend decades in a hostile fantasy world without a meaningful survival guarantee."
Nebula considered this. "Acceptable."
"And I want to choose the power."
"Also acceptable." She gestured toward a faintly glowing circle that had appeared on the floor. "Step in and state it."
I stepped into the circle. "I want a regenerative capability sufficient to survive any injury short of total cerebral destruction."
"Deal," said Nebula.
"Deal," I confirmed.
The circle pulsed once.
Nebula straightened. Something in her posture changed, the casual dismissiveness falling away and something older and more deliberate taking its place. When she spoke again her voice carried a weight that her previous giggling had entirely failed to suggest.
"Julius Borealis. I am Nebula, Goddess of Orion. I will now send you and your nation to this new world. I grant you Royal Authority, derived from my divine power, granting you longevity and the resilience you have requested. If you succeed in saving this world, the gods will grant you one wish commensurate with the worth of a world preserved. Any one thing you ask."
"One wish," I said.
"One wish," she confirmed.
I had not expected a prize. I considered it briefly.
"Then my wish," I said, "is already decided. When this is over, I will drag you to that world personally, and you will spend the next century serving as my court goddess learning what it means to run a functional nation without giggling at people who just died."
Nebula stared at me.
"I may also assign you administrative paperwork," I added.
"Sure, sure," she said, waving a hand. The older gravity in her posture had evaporated entirely. "Hush now. Go away."
The light began to build around me. Bright and warm and thoroughly inconvenient.
Hah. I was genuinely reluctant to lead a country, let alone conquer an entire world. I had spent three years avoiding exactly this kind of commitment. But since there was nothing I could do about it, I had no choice but to do it.
I had a bad feeling about this. Not a dramatic bad feeling. Just the steady, low-grade certainty of someone who had agreed to something that was going to require far more personal involvement than they had budgeted for.
Fine.
I would rule and I would conquer, but I was distributing the actual work at a ninety-nine percent ratio to my subordinates. I would be emperor in name and in strategic direction only. Delegation was not cowardice. Delegation was efficient resource allocation.
Let us finish this quickly and then find somewhere quiet to sit down.
The light swallowed everything.