I died choking on a boba pearl while lying in bed waiting for an anime video to stop buffering. In a 4,000-square-foot apartment my parents paid for, no less.
The video had been stuck at 78% for six minutes. I'd ordered taro milk tea and pad thai about an hour before that, and the pad thai was already cold on the nightstand with maybe three bites taken out of it. The noodles had gone sticky. I wasn't going to touch them again.
[From: mama]
> r u dead. come eat dinnr
[From: Father.]
> ...
I was drinking the boba sideways because sitting up was too much effort. One pearl went down wrong, and I kicked once, coughed twice, and that was it. Twenty-three years, and the last thing I saw was a loading circle.
I definitely saw my mom's text. My dad's? Choked to death before I could see what he had to say. Probably nothing at all. It was better that way.
[Initializing...]
[Initialization complete.]
'That was rather fast. Was my life not that grand to begin with?'
The darkness didn't feel like anything. Just cold and a whole lot of nothing. I floated there for a while. There wasn't a ground for my feet. And I didn't even have feet. If I could throw up this was the time.
[Assessing past life karma...]
[Total accumulated karma: 3,600,000]
[Classification: Severe]
That can't be right.
I waited for the montage. The flashback reel, how ever many years of memories compressed into some tearful highlight package. But nothing came. The number sat there, glowing against the black like a credit card statement I'd never bothered to open.
3.6 million. Of what? I didn't kill anyone. I didn't steal. I recycled... sometimes.
[Accumulated minor debts to 2,714 individuals across food service, domestic labor, and parental sacrifice.]
Over two thousand people...I tried to think of a single one of their faces and came up blank. When they came to my address with the food, I made sure not to show myself or they would see a naked skunk prying through the curtains. That was about the extent of it. A door, a bag, and footsteps walking away.
[You have been granted the following class: Cook]
Cook.
Cook?
[You have been assigned to Purgatory Express, a Canteen-class establishment in the newly discovered region: Pangaea Prima.]
Canteen-class. Pangaea Prima. None of those words meant anything to me. Before I could file a complaint, stone flooring found my feet, followed by a familiar warmth of fire—not that I'd ever been camping, mind you. I hate germs.
A smell hit me next. Wet stone and metal, and underneath that, something raw and animal. It came on fast, and before I could make sense of it, the darkness was already pulling apart.
I opened my eyes. Blinked a few times. Opened them again.
The kitchen was small. Stone walls on every side, rough and damp in patches, with a ceiling low enough to make you hunch even if you didn't need to. Directly ahead was a wood-burning stove put together from sticks and chiseled rock, the iron grate on top blackened and warped on one side. To the left of that, a rack of knives—heavy, dark-handled, chipped at the edges. Nothing like the magnetic strip of Japanese steel my mother kept in our home kitchen and never once used.
Along the right wall were shelves. Clay jars with no labels, wooden boxes with lids that didn't sit right, bundles of dried something hanging from iron hooks. No order to any of it.
And on the counter in front of me, splayed open from throat to pelvis, was something with too many ribs.
[Welcome Cook, to your Canteen!]
> Would you like to begin the tutorial?
Why wouldn't I? Not like I had any idea what a Canteen Cook even was.
And then there were two things that came to mind immediately.
Number one being that I had never cooked in my entire life. And no, cracking eggs in the pan or ramen noodles didn't count for shit—trust me.
And two—I was standing at a measly 5'1 with bones for arms. I looked down at my hands. Small, thin, knuckles poking out. Different body, two inches shorter, and somehow even less muscle than before. At least they kept me a girl. Small mercies.
I pushed some hair out of my face and looked back up to a shadow announcing itself.
The man standing before me rested a giant broadsword twice his size on his right shoulder, the tip nearly touching the ceiling, with armor seemingly ripped off whatever monstrous wolf he must have slain an hour ago. Fur still stuck to the shoulder plates. Something dark was smeared across the front.
He looked at me, then at the counter, then back at me.
"I got an expedition in twenty minutes." His gruff voice filled the room. "Make it quick."
I looked at him. Looked at the thing with too many ribs. Looked back at him.
That was it.
I was going to die again.