"Welcome to the space under my jurisdiction."
A voice—unfamiliar yet edged with a frantic urgency—pulled Kaito's consciousness from the fog.
He looked around to find himself adrift in a peculiar void. Countless crystalline shards floated in zero gravity, each flickering with disjointed, flickering images. The sheer volume of information hit the threshold of what his brain could process; it took several long seconds to even begin to register his surroundings.
He had been transmigrated. There was no doubt about it.
"Right... that voice..."
Kaito looked straight ahead. A massive sphere of light hovered before him, suddenly shattering into luminous particles that reassembled into the holographic form of a young woman.
"I am the Core Administrator. I manage the worlds within this sector. You can think of me as the Architect—the supreme authority of this system. Hey! No need to bow!"
She coughed, her form flickering. "Listen, my energy is critical. My consciousness is about to undergo a total wipe, and I need a successor. After some... meticulous searching, I've settled on you. Kaito, right?"
Kaito stared at her, stunned. Then, a spark of excitement lit up his chest. I'm becoming an Architect? Is there actually such a thing as a free lunch?
The joy didn't last. Kaito knew his own history. He was a man whose luck was so abysmal he once pulled a back muscle just reaching for a remote, and spent a month hospitalized after a freak electrical short in a water dispenser. Survival was the only "luck" he had ever known.
Wait. If he was here, did that mean he was already dead?
Looking at the Administrator's glitching face—and the faint look of relief she couldn't quite hide—Kaito realized he wasn't a "meticulously selected successor." He was a sacrificial lamb grabbed at random.
"You're leaving something out," Kaito said, narrowing his eyes.
"Er... let me think..." Her gaze darted away. "Oh, right. In a few years, the Void will breach this sector. If they succeed, this entire space is history. Poof!"
"Hey—!"
"Ah! My con—scious—ness is fa—ding! The manual is on the console. The rest is up to you, Kaito—"
With a final, digitized hum, the light vanished. The silence that followed was absolute.
"Don't you dare log off now, you bastard!" Kaito roared, but the void offered no reply. He suspected her energy hadn't run out at all; she just didn't want to deal with the incoming disaster.
Left with no way back, he rubbed his temples and walked toward the floating console. A thick tablet sat there. He picked it up and began to scan the operational protocols. It was a standard interface, but at the bottom, he found a section of "Administrator Tips."
[System energy can manipulate any variable within the world-lines, but reserves are at 0.04%.][The Void is a universal deletion command, hostile to all organized matter.][A single world-line lacks the processing power to repel the Void.][Fusion Protocol: If the collective consciousness of a world-line genuinely believes it exists within a higher-power reality, the 'Simulation' becomes 'Reality.' The two worlds will merge to resolve the paradox.]
"Merge the worlds?" Kaito rubbed his chin.
If he could convince the inhabitants of a mundane world that they were actually part of a reality with a higher power system, the world's physical laws would naturally elevate.
"First, I need to see what kind of world I've inherited."
He manipulated the console, bringing up the registry for the primary world-line. His brow furrowed, his fists clenching as the names scrolled by:
Hachiman Hikigaya, Rikka Takanashi, Yumeko Jabami, Sora and Shiro...
"You've got to be kidding me."
These were all characters from the "Slice of Life" archives of his memory. Ordinary students. No superpowers. No advanced tech. The Administrator had handed him a death sentence wrapped in school uniforms.
"No... I'm not going down like this."
Kaito's mind raced. To force a global "Fantasy," he needed a catalyst. He would use the remaining system energy to generate a "Trans-Dimensional Broadcast"—a live feed of a different, more powerful world—and beam it directly into the minds and devices of everyone on the planet.
"I need a target world. Something with a high power-ceiling."
He swiped through the shards of the Singularity until he found a match. A world of kingdoms, magic, and absolute lethality.
"Every broadcast needs a protagonist. A face the people can latch onto."
As the names flickered across the screen, his finger stopped.
"Kiyotaka Ayanokoji..."
Advanced Nurturing High School.
Sae Chabashira stood at the podium, her black suit sharp and her legs encased in sheer black hosiery. She tapped her pointer against her palm, scanning Class 1-D with the precision of a security camera.
Her gaze settled on a student in the back row: a boy with a handsome, unremarkable face and amber eyes that reflected a persistent, weary boredom.
"Moving on..."
Before she could finish, the digital whiteboard—usually reserved for lecture slides—flickered to black. Then, it erupted into a high-definition image of a swirling star cluster.
It wasn't just the school. Across the globe, every smartphone, billboard, and television screen bypassed its lock screen to display the same cosmic vista.
"A technical error?"
Suzune Horikita, seated next to Ayanokoji, frowned at the screen. She turned her head, her jewel-like eyes landing on him.
"No idea," he murmured.
Ayanokoji was already dissecting the situation. From Chabashira's dilation of her pupils, this wasn't a school event. This was a total breach of global networks. He checked his own phone. The "Star Stream" was playing there, too.
Fine. I'll observe for now.
The stars faded. The screen shifted to a crystal-clear view of a classroom. The "camera" moved with cinematic fluidity, zooming in on a student sitting by a window.
It was Ayanokoji.
"Ayanokoji? Why are you on the screen?" Horikita's voice was sharp with shock. The classroom on the screen was an exact replica of their own.
"I'm not sure," Ayanokoji replied, his tone flat.
Internally, he was calculating. The angle was wrong for the ceiling cameras. The lighting was slightly off. It was a recording, yet he had never seen a camera in that position.
He felt the weight of forty pairs of eyes turning toward him. This was a catastrophic failure of his "invisible student" policy.
"I... truly don't know what's happening," he said, injecting just enough hesitation into his voice to sound appropriately confused.
Then, text began to scroll across the global broadcast.
[Is the world you live in truly what you believe it to be?]
[The boundaries of your reality are shifting. The truth is far more complex than your senses suggest.]
[This is a System Revelation. A Record of the Near Future.]
[Watch closely.]
The screen cut to a new environment.
On a bustling, cobblestone street, Kiyotaka Ayanokoji stood holding a simple grocery bag. He didn't move. In under a second, his brain processed the architecture—medieval, yet structurally impossible for Earth's history. The people passing him weren't human; they had the ears of wolves, the scales of lizards. He understood their speech perfectly, yet the phonetics were alien.
Ayanokoji, a man who had memorized the entirety of human biological and historical records, reached a singular conclusion: This was not his world.
He pinched the skin of his arm. The pain was sharp and consistent. Not a dream.
"A spontaneous relocation?" he mused internally. Even in the face of a complete breakdown of physical laws, his face remained a mask of indifference. He didn't panic. He simply began to analyze.