CAPSULE GODS — Volume 1
CAPSULE GODSThe World That Was Never HeavenPrologue — Reality Was the FlawKanzaki Reiji had everything.
Money. Influence. A body preserved by the best medicine modern science could offer. Yet every morning, when he woke in the real world, he felt the same quiet disgust.
Reality did not reward effort fairly.
Reality forced endings.
Reality did not care who deserved what.
Stories did.
In stories, heroes rose for a reason. Power had meaning. Death was reversible, purposeful, dramatic. Even suffering was framed as growth.
Kanzaki Reiji did not want to watch isekai stories anymore.
He wanted to enter one.
That was how the Reincarnation Experiment Center was born—hidden beneath shell corporations and research grants with names vague enough to invite no questions. Officially, it studied post-mortem consciousness continuity.
In truth, it was a testing ground.
Rows of capsules stretched beneath sterile white lights. Inside them lay bodies that had been declared dead—people without families, without friends, without anyone who would demand answers.
Their minds were not sent to heaven.
They were redirected.
Above them bloomed countless artificial worlds: swords and magic, kingdoms and demons, tragedies and triumphs. Each one carefully engineered.
Every subject was a rehearsal.
Every life lived there was data.
Because before Kanzaki Reiji abandoned reality forever, he needed certainty.
If others could survive eternity in fantasy… then so could he.
Chapter 1 — Death Is a Transfer ProtocolI died during an inspection.
That was the irony.
I had signed off on the safety checks myself.
The railing on Platform C snapped without warning. Twenty-three floors vanished beneath my feet. I remember the rush of air, the dull realization, and one final thought before impact:
So this is what it feels like.
Darkness followed.
Not unconsciousness—transition.
When I opened my eyes, the sky was too blue.
I lay in grass that bent under my fingers with artificial softness, beneath a sun calibrated to warm but never burn. My body felt wrong—lighter, stronger, unfamiliar.
I sat up slowly and stared at my hands.
Young. Unscarred.
A Class-A Adaptive Body.
I laughed.
"No," I whispered. "You didn't."
They had.
My name was Haru Ishida. Senior Systems Analyst at the Continuity Ethics Bureau. I had spent years overseeing these simulations.
And now I was inside one.
My real body would be sealed in a capsule. My legal status marked deceased. To the system, I was just another lonely man repurposed into a fantasy.
I wasn't reincarnated.
I was reassigned.