Warning: All the story content are original except, AI is used to increase word count. Because I fucking author, don't have experience in writing something in long winded way. I write completely without AI, the fan fiction will end in 10 chapters. Anyway, I am open to hear about how I can improve. If you feel somewhere, it should be wrong or anything do comment. And I hope you like my fan fiction. It's my second work, and 1st work was a flop from my side, so I am using some of ideas from 1st one. And you will not find the 1st work as I have already deleted it, and it's already my dark history. Hope you enjoy.
There is something profoundly unsettling about existing without a body.
No heartbeat. No breath. No weight pressing against a mattress or floor. Just... awareness, floating in an endless dark that wasn't quite dark — more like the absence of everything that makes darkness meaningful. I hung there, suspended in nothing, and tried to piece together what had happened to me. The process was slower than it should have been. Thought without a nervous system to anchor it has a tendency to drift.
I died.
The memory surfaced slowly, like sediment disturbed in still water. I remembered my dormitory ceiling, the peeling paint near the light fixture I'd stared at too many times to count. I remembered the particular quality of my friend's screaming from the bunk across the room — absolutely unhinged, the kind of shrieking that only escapes a person when a gacha addict finally pulls something they've been throwing money at for three hundred consecutive days. I had rolled over to look, genuinely curious despite myself, last thing I registered is some DMC gimmick character from Wuthering waves, Galbrena and then I passed out and found my surrounding was nothing. Just nothing. The ceiling, and then the void.
He pulled a triple golden pull.
I floated there in the formless dark and tried to feel something appropriate about that. Anger, maybe. Resentment. Because I guess I heard my roomie shouting to take my lifespan and my he finally got lucky in a mobile game. But the emotion wouldn't come, and after a while I stopped reaching for it. The truth was that I had been tired for a long time before this — longer than I'd been willing to admit while breathing. The kind of tired that sleeps twelve hours and wakes up still exhausted. The kind that sits in lecture halls and watches other people living their lives with apparent conviction and wonders when the switch gets flipped, when the world starts mattering the way it's supposed to.
I was lonely. That was the word I kept circling around and refusing to land on.
The void was, at minimum, entirely consistent with my previous lived experience.
"Who are you?"
I hadn't noticed her until the words were already out of my mouth, which should have been impossible given that she was the only other thing in an infinite expanse of nothing. She was blurry — not blurry like poor eyesight, but blurry in the way that certain things simply refuse to be looked at directly, like a figure seen through frosted glass or the tail end of a dream already fading into the morning. Feminine in silhouette, that much I could determine, but every time I tried to focus on specifics the details dissolved into themselves and started again.
She didn't answer. The silence stretched out long enough that I began to genuinely wonder if I'd imagined her. Then she laughed.
It wasn't a cruel laugh, which surprised me. It was the laugh of someone who had just watched something genuinely absurd play out in front of them and couldn't help their reaction — full and real and with just a slight edge of unhinged to it, the particular flavour of laughter that only comes from people who have been alone too long and have forgotten how to moderate their amusement.
"Hahaha," she managed eventually, pulling herself back together. "Never thought your friend would pray for a golden pull in a gacha game in exchange for your life."
"So you granted his wish," I said. My voice in this place sounded strange — sourceless, like thinking out loud rather than speaking. "I still don't see any goal behind your motive. You killed me for a gacha pull donation. There has to be more to this than generosity toward someone else's gacha luck."
"Well." She seemed to settle slightly, the blurry edges of her form shifting like smoke finding a new shape to inhabit. "I needed to strike a deal with you. Which is why I had to bring you here like this."
I considered that for a moment.
"You killed me," I said, very carefully, "in order to negotiate with me."
"When you phrase it that way it sounds unreasonable."
"It is unreasonable."
"Business requires bold opening moves."
I looked at the approximate region where her face probably was and tried to locate an appropriate emotional response to this situation. The most accurate emotion appeared to be stunned silence, so I deployed that. It felt justified.
"I genuinely don't see what I have that could be useful to you," I said finally. "I was an ordinary university student who ate instant noodles four days out of seven and had seventeen browser tabs open at all times, none of them serving any productive purpose."
"I haven't seen any ordinary student being this calm after dying. And don't worry about the specifics for now. This is a win-win arrangement. You make a deal with me, I help you reincarnate."
Something in me went very still.
"I've had enough of living," I said, and meant it in a way I hadn't managed to say to anyone while I still had lungs to say it with. "I don't have any particular regrets. I'm genuinely fine staying here."
"Well, well." Her tone shifted into something more careful, the way you shift when you're picking up something fragile and don't want to drop it. "Even if you're tired of living the way you were living — deep down you're still reaching for something. Some kind of thrill. Some reason that makes effort feel worth it. I can give you that. A fantasy world rather than the secular grind. Somewhere the rules are genuinely different."
I opened my mouth to deny it and found the words wouldn't come the way I'd intended them to.
She wasn't wrong. I had spent an embarrassing number of hours reading novels about other worlds — stories about people who got to start over somewhere the rules were different, somewhere power was real and effort had visible consequences. I had always felt that ache of wanting when I read them. Not wanting that particular life, not necessarily, but wanting a life that gave me something to actually push against.
"Fine," I said. "Okay."
"Don't hurry to deny it—" she started.
"I said okay."
Silence. The blurry figure seemed genuinely thrown off, which was modestly satisfying given everything.
"You agreed," she said, sounding as though she was confirming this to herself rather than to me.
"I'm floating in a void with no body and no particular reason to exist. Even if this is a trick and I end up completely destroyed, I'm already past the point where that outcome is especially alarming to me. I'm bored." A pause. "But I want to hear the full terms before anything is binding. All of them."
She collected herself, and when she spoke again there was real weight behind it — the texture of someone finally telling the truth after carrying it alone for a very long time.
"Before I explain the deal, you should understand what I am. You'd recognise me as a System — the kind from the novels and fanfiction you spent entirely too many hours reading on Earth. I am something like that. My previous host..." The blurry edges of her form flickered, and for a moment there was something in it that looked almost like old exhaustion. "He tried to consume me entirely. To tear out my origin energy and use it as raw material for his own power. The confrontation lasted a very long time. I won — barely. I was scattered afterward, lost in the void with no anchor. I've spent what feels like an enormous stretch of time accumulating just enough residual energy to build a contingency plan, to draw in a new host. Helping your friend with his gacha pull was meant to be a simple transaction: his prayer, your lifespan, and — specifically someone else — appearing here for me to work with would have worked for me. But your arriving instead was a genuine accident."
"I'm an accident."
"A fortunate one. Your soul is considerably stronger than I expected. Stronger than my previous host, actually, which means your potential ceiling is higher. Which means you're exactly what I need." She steadied herself. "The deal is this: become my host. We operate as a symbiotic pair — not master and tool, but genuinely mutual. I provide you with an initial ten pulls, with three golden results guaranteed, and afterward we exchange energy in an ongoing cycle to fund further pulls as you grow. You become stronger, I recover. We both benefit. Fair warning: I'll be charging twenty percent above standard rate until my full intelligence recovers — until then I operate on standby, basic functions only."
I thought about it. Turned it over carefully.
"You're already structuring this so that betrayal is unappealing from the start," I said. "The rate increase keeps you valuable. The symbiosis keeps you safe. But what actually prevents you from simply leaving once you've recovered enough to manage on your own again?"
"The bond itself prevents it," she said, and her voice had the particular flatness of something stated rather than argued. "On confirming this deal, we are bound in a way that goes beyond contract. If one of us is destroyed, the other doesn't continue. We end together. We are not two parties with aligned interests. We become, in a genuinely literal sense, one system."
"You'd stake your existence on this."
"I staked it on my previous host too. I'd rather stake it on someone I chose this time."
The void hummed around us, patient and infinite and entirely indifferent.
"I accept," I said.
She exhaled — and it was such a profoundly human sound, so unexpectedly unguarded and relieved, that something in me shifted slightly toward her. She had been holding something very tightly, and she let it go. Then she moved. She dissolved out of that blurry figure form into something finer — a single luminous thread — and I felt her connect into the deepest part of what I could only describe as my soul, somewhere well below thought and memory and the specific tiredness I'd been carrying. Something that had always been there settled into place around her. Or she settled into it. It was hard to tell the difference.
Then everything went white, and warm, and there was nothing for a while, and then there were two of everything — two heartbeats, two sets of lungs breathing, two separate bodies opening eyes into two separate dawns — and the fact of being one person with two of everything was simply the fact of it, as natural and unremarkable as breathing had ever been.