The application process had been suspiciously easy.
Luo Feng stared down at the golden badge now pinned to his robes, its lettering glinting under the celestial office lights:
TEMPORARY DEITY OF MINOR INCONVENIENCES
(Probationary Period: Eternity Minus One Day)
The Death Queen had nearly choked laughing when she saw it. Li Qing had simply raised an eyebrow—which, from her, might as well have been rolling on the floor hysterics. Even his shadow seemed to be judging him, if the way it kept facepalming was any indication.
His first day started with an orientation led by a harried-looking minor god whose name tag read "Gary - Celestial HR (Please Be Gentle)."
"Your duties are simple," Gary explained, handing him a scroll that unfurled down to the floor and kept going. "Papercuts. Stubbed toes. Misplaced keys. The little annoyances that make mortals question their life choices."
Luo Feng blinked. "That's it?"
Gary smiled wanly. "That's it. Oh, and try not to—"
But Luo Feng wasn't listening. He'd already spotted his first target—a stack of tax forms waiting to be blessed with bureaucratic misery.
What followed could only be described as a divine workplace accident.
He reached out to infuse the paperwork with his usual Eclipse energy, but something went wrong. Terribly, catastrophically wrong.
Instead of making the forms more frustrating, his power made them... better.
The moment his fingers brushed the parchment, the tiny print enlarged itself to readable size. Onerous clauses self-deleted. Signature lines moved to the front page.
Somewhere in the afterlife, a thousand souls suddenly sighed in relief.
Gary turned pale. "What did you just do?"
Luo Feng stared at his hands. "I think I just invented... user-friendly bureaucracy?"
The ground beneath them trembled as, somewhere in the higher realms, the God of Red Tape suffered a divine aneurysm.
By lunchtime, word had spread.
A crowd of minor functionaries had gathered outside his cubicle, their eyes shining with something dangerously close to hope.
"Can you look at our afterlife queue management system?" begged a harried-looking angel. "The line to get judged has a 3,000-year wait."
Luo Feng tapped the spreadsheet once. The numbers rearranged themselves instantly—first come, first served, with express lanes for souls who died in particularly stupid ways.
The resulting cheer shook the foundations of heaven.
Meanwhile, his attempt to curse a mortal with misplaced keys backfired spectacularly when every lost key in the universe suddenly grew little legs and marched home. Down on earth, confused humans found their missing car keys waiting patiently on kitchen counters, house keys dangling helpfully from doorknobs.
The Death Queen, who had been watching this unfold while lounging on his desk eating divine grapes, smirked. "Darling, I do believe you're the first god to ever accidentally improve the mortal experience."
Li Qing chose that moment to appear, frost crackling at her feet. "The War God just tripped over his own spear in the middle of a smiting."
Luo Feng winced. "That might have been me. I was trying to give someone a stubbed toe and, uh... overdid it."
The Ice Phoenix studied him for a long moment before nodding approvingly. "Good."
The Pantheon's leadership noticed three things too late:
First, every "improvement" Luo Feng made was quietly siphoning off bits of their divine authority.
Second, the Fox Spirit had hacked his employee badge—it now read "GOD OF MAKING YOUR LIVES DIFFICULT (TEMPORARY MY ASS)."
Third, and most alarmingly, the afterlife suggestion box had gone missing along with several key celestial policies.
When the Sky Father finally stormed into the office to fire him personally, he found Luo Feng's cubicle empty save for three things:
A perfectly organized filing system
A sticky note that read "Try not to suck so much - xoxo Eclipse Guy"
The Death Queen's lipstick stain on the chair
Somewhere in the distance, a choir of previously overworked angels could be heard singing celebratory show tunes.
The plush demons, meanwhile, had unionized and were now demanding better working conditions.
END OF CHAPTER 81