The alarm clock screamed at 6:47 AM with the enthusiasm of machinery that had never contemplated the weight of cosmic existence. Light reached across sheets that cost more than most people's monthly rent and silenced it with the casual precision of someone who'd once coordinated the movement of celestial bodies but now applied that same attention to quarterly earnings reports.
Victoria Bay spread beneath his apartment window like a promise written in glass and steel, twenty-three floors of vertical distance between him and the lives of people who believed Monday mornings were their greatest existential challenge. Light stood naked in the filtered sunlight, looking down at a city that had no idea it was being protected by someone who'd grown tired of being worshipped across dimensions where worship was considered the baseline currency of consciousness.
His reflection in the window showed him what ten years of humanity had created: a man who looked twenty-five despite existing for millennia, dark hair that caught morning light like ink spilled across velvet, a body maintained through the kind of casual control over biology that made gym memberships seem quaint. Handsome in the way that suggested good genes rather than cosmic manipulation of fundamental forces.
Another day, Light thought, of pretending that market analysis requires more than the ability to perceive causality patterns across probability matrices.
The coffee maker — a machine that cost three thousand dollars because Light had discovered that the best way to hide transcendent wealth was to spend it on things rich humans considered reasonable luxury — produced its morning offering with mechanical devotion. Light added cream and sugar with the precise measurements of someone who'd learned that small consistencies created the illusion of ordinary humanity.
The first sip carried the bitter satisfaction of a ritual maintained despite its fundamental inadequacy. Caffeine meant nothing to his enhanced physiology, but the taste meant everything to his commitment to being small enough to be overlooked by cosmic forces that had spent the past decade trying to locate their missing king.
His phone buzzed with the morning's coordination: seventeen emails from colleagues who believed his marketing insights came from natural talent rather than the ability to analyze human behavioral patterns from perspectives that included entire civilizations as data points. Three notifications from social media accounts he maintained as part of his elaborate performance of baseline humanity. One text from Cloud asking if he wanted to grab lunch later, because apparently little brothers operated on the assumption that successful older brothers had flexible schedules rather than carefully constructed facades that required constant maintenance.
If you knew, Light thought, scrolling through messages from people who had no idea their colleague could reshape local reality with focused intention, that your biggest concern about market volatility comes from someone who's witnessed the birth and death of economic systems spanning galactic trade networks.
He started the shower with water heated to exactly 104 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to feel luxurious, not hot enough to require explaining why temperature extremes didn't affect him. The bathroom filled with steam that carried his scent: expensive cologne layered over something deeper that baseline human noses couldn't quite identify but that made people subconsciously trust him during business negotiations.
Light washed his hair with shampoo that cost two hundred dollars a bottle and reminded himself that maintaining human routine was the price of remaining invisible to entities that measured time in geological epochs. The alternative — revealing himself, accepting whatever cosmic responsibilities would inevitably follow — seemed less appealing every year he spent discovering that grocery shopping could be more satisfying than governing the fundamental forces that held reality together.
Though, he admitted to the mirror as he shaved with the careful precision of someone who'd once carved his will into the structure of space-time itself, some mornings the performance feels heavier than the crown ever did.
His reflection showed him the face he'd learned to wear: confident without being arrogant, successful without being intimidating, charming in the way that suggested good upbringing rather than centuries of practice reading the desires of beings whose consciousness spanned dimensions where emotion was considered a form of weather.
The suit he selected — navy blue, tailored to perfection, expensive enough to signal success without suggesting wealth that would invite investigation — fit him with the fluid grace of someone whose body existed at the intersection of human aesthetics and cosmic optimization. Light adjusted his tie with movements that looked casual but were calculated to project the kind of professional competence that made people assume he belonged in rooms where important decisions were made.
Ready, he thought, checking his appearance one final time, for another day of being Kai Sterling, Senior Marketing Strategist, whose greatest achievement is a twelve percent increase in customer engagement metrics.
The name still felt strange in his mouth sometimes. Light had been his chosen designation during his years as transcendent ruler, a reference to his ability to illuminate possibilities that others couldn't perceive. Kai was what he'd become when he decided that being someone's son mattered more than being everyone's god.
His apartment reflected the careful balance he'd struck between comfort and anonymity: expensive enough to justify his salary, tasteful enough to suggest good judgment, bland enough to avoid memorable details that might inspire curiosity about how a marketing executive had developed such sophisticated understanding of human psychology and probability theory.
The only personal touch was a bookshelf containing his published fiction — stories that readers praised for their "impossibly detailed worldbuilding" and "hauntingly authentic descriptions of cosmic conflict." If only they knew that every dragon he wrote about had once bowed to his authority, that every magical system he described was something he'd helped forge in the foundries of reality itself.
Light grabbed his keys, his phone, his carefully curated identity as someone small enough to be overlooked, and prepared to step outside into a world where his greatest challenge would be pretending that quarterly projections mattered more than the heat death of universes.
His hand paused on the doorknob as something that felt like cosmic attention brushed against his awareness — not the System's patient notifications that he'd been ignoring for years, but something more immediate. More personal.
Strange, Light thought, his enhanced senses analyzing disturbances in local reality that suggested forces operating beyond baseline human comprehension. Almost like...
He opened the door and stepped into a hallway that looked exactly as mundane as it had every morning for the past three years, dismissing the feeling as residual paranoia from dreams that had been more memory than fantasy.
Behind him, his apartment settled into the silence of spaces that held secrets too large for their architecture to contain comfortably.
Outside Victoria Bay waited, unaware that its most ordinary resident was about to have a day that would challenge his decade-long commitment to being smaller than his nature demanded.
The elevator descended toward a lobby where Light would smile at neighbors who had no idea they were exchanging pleasantries with someone who'd once held the dying breath of stars, carrying him toward another day of proving that cosmic transcendence was no match for the simple miracle of being part of something larger than individual power.
Just another Monday, Light told himself as the elevator doors opened onto his carefully constructed life.
The lie was becoming harder to believe.