Leo Keller's last memory was the piercing screech of tires on wet asphalt, the groan of metal and glass as the car rolled, and the moment he was flung out of the window like a ragged cloth—through the cracked windshield, he glimpsed the gnarled branches of an old oak tree breaking through, like God's withered finger reaching out.
Then?
Silence.
Not a gentle quiet, but a vacuum drained of all sound.
He should have been completely dead.
But consciousness, stubborn as a faulty boot sequence, flickered back to life. No hymns, no angels, no legendary white light leading to heaven. Just a strange odor invading his nostrils—like cheap incense desperately trying to mask the scorched-plastic smell of an overheating server, mixed with the acrid tang of burnt circuit boards, choking him.
"Wake up! Quit playing dead!"
A voice cracked through the silence, sharp like shattering glass, yet laced with the impatience unique to programmers—as if dragged back from debugging bliss to fix yet another critical bug.
Leo struggled to "open" his non-existent eyes.
He saw a data-scape hell.
The background was an endless downpour of green gibberish: 0s and 1s swarmed like insane ants, some forming "#DIV/0!" errors, others cramming into "Segmentation Fault" windows that hung in the air like moldy bubblegum, popping with a wet blorp only for new ones to bubble up.
And at the chaotic center of it all floated an... entity.
A goddess? More like a digital drifter.
She sat cross-legged on a lopsided "chair"—a thing cobbled together from ill-fitting LEGO bricks, its sharp angles jabbing the void, its polygonal edge-glow flickering unstably as if on the verge of collapse. Her "divine robes" weren't fabric, but cascading waterfalls of code: fluorescent green, lurid purple, blood-red strings tangling into intricate geometric patterns like living digital sigils, only to pfft into collapse moments later, revealing a plain gray hoodie (with a faded "I ❤️ Coffee" logo on the hem) and worn-out jeans underneath.
Most jarring was her hair—not hair, but a living cascade of binary! 0s and 1s poured down, flowed back up, and occasionally, pixelated unicorns (?) would poke their heads out from the data depths, whinny "Kernel Panic!" before shwooping back in, making the whole mass shudder.
But Leo's gaze finally locked onto her face.
It was a pretty face, bordering on girl-next-door cute: smooth skin, a nose straight as a ruler, naturally pink lips. But this "normalcy" was utterly ruined by two things.
Her left eye socket held no eyeball.
Instead, a translucent blue progress bar filled it, a thin light-crawler inching right at a snail's pace, stubbornly stuck at "87%." The bar's background occasionally flashed a deep, ominous red, like a system pointlessly retrying in the background, always falling just short.
Her right eye was a normal amber color, currently darting around with programmer-like focus and poorly concealed annoyance. But even this eye wasn't spared: every few seconds, a tiny "MEMORY LOW" alert bubble would pop into existence at its outer corner, flash red twice, then shrink away, like a digital pet desperate for attention but afraid to make a real scene.
Right now, she was resting her chin on her hand, her right eye slightly squinted, staring at an ethereal touchpad floating in mid-air. Her other hand flew across a virtual keyboard, her nails glowing a weird fluorescent hue—probably the color of a successful compilation. She was chewing on a "fiber optic lollipop," its core swirling with fractured light, its wrapper scrolling binary (01001011 01001001 01001011 01001001... looked like "KIKI"). She'd occasionally bite it, causing the encoding to scramble before sluggishly reforming.
"Base protocol's timing out! This shitty server's got the latency of my grandma's old modem!" she grumbled around the lollipop, which rattled clack clack against her teeth. "Took forever to fish you outta the garbage collection heap! Don't go Core Dumping on me now! My bonus this month rides on you!"
Leo opened his mouth (or tried to), his throat feeling like sandpaper. "...The fuck is this? Who are you? Shouldn't I be dead?"
The goddess (let's call her that) finally stopped typing. Her amber eye snapped to him, looking like she was appraising a newbie struggling with a mouse. "So many questions." She tched, pulling the lollipop out. Its data stream whooshed into scattered points of light. "Short version: You, Leo Keller, 28, software engineer, died driving drowsy after crunch time. Me, Kiki. Or 'System Administrator #7'. Whatever. I run the 'Cross-Dimensional Consciousness Migration: Beta' project... just hacked admin rights temporarily."
"Consciousness migration? Beta?" Leo's brain felt like a crashed hard drive. "The fuck kinda scam is this?"
"Yup!" Kiki snapped her fingers. Semi-transparent screens dinged into existence, showing blurry previews of fantasy, sci-fi, wasteland worlds—medieval castles, cyberpunk ruins, irradiated deserts, looking like poorly compressed pirated DVDs. She poked one labeled "Aethelgard (High Load/Low Stability) - NOT RECOMMENDED," jiggling the window. "Your 'thread signature' fit—strong logic, resilient (physically), logs full of 'assertion failures'... stubborn as hell. Got an open thread slot here. Slapped on a beta skill. Lucky you?"
"Beta skill?" Leo's paranoia spiked—he knew company betas; nine outta ten were garbage.
"Ta-da!" Kiki flung her hands out like a magician, conjuring a crude hourglass icon: warped glass, sand flowing counter-clockwise, labeled "LOAD" in crooked script. "Time Rewind! Save-scumming, baby! In the new world 'Aethelgard', this baby's admin access!"
Ice traced Leo's spine. He didn't feel lucky. He felt the back of his neck prickle. "Cost?" He cut straight to the point—a programmer's gut said free lunches didn't exist.
Kiki blinked, her left eye's progress bar grinding tighter. "Uh... just some 'runtime overhead'. Time ops gotta verify timestamps, backup world states, prevent causality crashes... eats RAM and CPU cycles. Someone's gotta pay the toll, right?"
She tapped a finger. Tiny, flickering text appeared beside the hourglass, barely legible:
[Skill: Time Rewind (Alpha v0.9.1 - Build 114514)]
-> Function: Rolls consciousness back to the last anchor point (Default: World Load). Retains memories.
-> Cooldown: None (But don't spam it, worldlines get unstable).
-> Cost: Each use randomly damages one core sensory driver (Sight/Hearing/Touch/Taste/Smell) as a "checksum."
-> WARNING: Irreparable. Five failures → "Background Process" (i.e., World Observer).
-> Note: Test coverage < 0.1%. Use at own risk. EULA agreed.
"Fuck me!" Leo felt dizzy (despite having no physical head). "Permanent damage? Random? Five tries and I'm wallpaper? This ain't a beta skill! This is a wipe-and-brick! That EULA's a goddamn slave contract!"
"Chill! Chill!" Kiki waved her hands, her right eye's "MEMORY LOW" bubble flashing again. "High privilege ain't cheap! Think about it—redo deaths! Restart checkpoints! Hardcore mode! Way better than starting with a rusty sword!" She paused, suddenly lowering her voice, fingers flying over the virtual keyboard to summon two new icons: one a gear entwined with circuitry (Code Intuition), the other a floating tactical sandbox (Tactical Deployment).
"Right..." her voice dropped conspiratorially, "the system said it's your first isekai... worried you wouldn't last... forcibly injected two more skills. Don't ask. I tweaked the config."
Leo stared at the new icons, pupils (if he had any) contracting. "What skills?"
"One... lets you 'see' the logic in magic circles and machines. 'Code Eye'." Kiki gestured vaguely. "Another..." she hesitated, "...each time you Rewind, you lose a sense, but eventually... you might turn into a 'human weapon'. Just... hang in there."
"Human weapon?!" Leo's voice cracked. "Are you fucking kidding me?!"
"Hey, don't freak!" Kiki flapped her hands, her left eye's bar nearly glitching out. "Those have even lower test coverage! I dunno the specifics... consider 'em system 'starter gifts'! You got Rewind already, what's two more?"
Leo opened his mouth to curse, but something caught in his throat. He saw the panic in Kiki's darting eyes, the faded coffee stain on her hoodie, the slight tremor in her lashes as she typed—this incompetent goddess seemed genuinely afraid he'd fail.
"Timeslice up! World instance launching!" Kiki jumped up, her "chair" instantly garbage-collected into nothingness. "Remember the anchor point! Right where you wake up! Go! Lucky!... I mean, Leo Keller! Go live your 'debugging life' in Aethelgard's medieval sandbox! Use the skills! Log everything! Rooting for you!"
She waved. A blinding blue light (like cheap LED strips) flooded Leo's awareness.
"Wait! How do I use those skills?!" Leo's final shout was caught as an unhandled exception, swallowed by the data torrent.
*THUD!*
The back of his head slammed into something hard. Cold. Damp. The air reeked of sour rot—vomit mingled with ancient sweat—making him cough.
"Fucking... hell... what kind of shithole...?" His throat felt charred, the words scraping out like rusted gears.
His head pounded, a million ants chewing on his brain. Worst of all, that damn blue light still danced on his retinas—they called it "Stardust"? He remembered! The crash. Kiki. The useless goddess. The scam Rewind skill...
He raised an arm to rub his eyes, but his vision swam, blurred like oil on water. His right eye was worse, like it was set to its lowest resolution, all noise and static. Vision... glitching? Aftereffect of a past Rewind? Or just new-world bugs? He couldn't recall! Kiki, that bastard, gave him zero docs, just rambling and blame-shifting!
Fear, a cold serpent, coiled around his heart. Instinct screamed to trigger the skill—Rewind! Back to this damn straw pile! Start over! Maybe the noise in his right eye would clear...
Resource Cost: Each invocation randomly damages one core sensory driver...
Kiki's voice echoed in his mind. His hand froze mid-air. His heart hammered against his ribs. Sweat soaked his (phantom) shirt. Trigger it now, what would break? Hearing? Touch? He didn't even know what the first use would cost!
"New fish?"
The rasp came from the corner, grating like rusty metal. Someone sat cross-legged in the shadows. The light scrape of metal on metal.
Leo tried to answer. His throat clogged, only a choked gurgle escaping. He lay on the straw, right eye a blurry mess, the blue light pulsing. Kiki's face, the progress bar, the memory bubble, the "Background Process" warning—they burned into his consciousness like brands.
Rewind? Reload? Fix the worldline?
Fuck.
His new life began with the sour stench of straw. And he knew, deep down, that smell might be gone forever after the next rewind.