It was a dreadfully cold, dry, and foul-smelling dream. But he soon realized it wasn’t a dream at all. It was his last memory from before coming here.
Tap, tap, tap, clack.
The office at 3 in the morning. The air in the office was cold with the heater off, and only the glow of a monitor was stabbing at his bleary eyes. Five years as a civil servant — he had kicked that life away because the endless complaints were unbearable, and it had been three years since he’d joined a company’s audit team. His career after switching jobs had soared steadily upward, but the final destination of his tumbling, rolling life was professional overtime slave. Even today, living a life that wasted electricity, he had the illusion that his vision was going blurry.
“Team Leader Yoon, is the embezzlement case breakdown all finished?”
“Almost done.”
“Can you have a report ready by tomorrow morning?”
“……Yes, Chief.”
He had answered reluctantly, but even the time it took to answer felt wasteful. It was the third consecutive all-nighter. The numbers in front of him began to tap dance. The cells of the Excel file started to look like iron bars. He was clearly not in his right mind.
Ah, my chest feels so heavy.
Was it from drinking too much coffee? He wanted to close his eyes for just a moment. He couldn’t tell if his heart was beating too fast or too slow. He really couldn’t hold on anymore.
Just 10 minutes…….
Thud.
His head dropped onto the keyboard. In the moment his body gave out and sounded the alarm, he thought:
Ah, did I hit save?
Ctrl+S needs to become a reflex. That was his last memory.
***
When he opened his eyes again, everything was pure white.
By instinct, he realized he was dead. It wasn’t as shocking as he’d expected. If he had died even five years earlier, he would have wailed and made a scene — but right now he was simply too exhausted. The death threats he used to make as a joke had just become reality, that’s all.
It was a more comfortable space than expected. Soft and fluffy, the temperature just right. He was wondering whether the soul, too, fell asleep in a perfectly calibrated temperature like a hotel room — and was just closing his eyes at that thought.
[Open your eyes, my child.]
At a voice that anyone would recognize as sacred, he opened his eyes — and there stood a being of pure white. It had a human form, yet one could clearly feel it was something entirely different.
It was a strange existence that sent him an extraordinarily warm gaze. I don’t think even my parents ever looked at me like that. In the moment he thought Who is this?, the being said that it was a ‘god’ of a different world from his own. In the natural course of events, he came to hear many things. And then…….
[Save him for me.]
“No.”
He flatly refused the god’s request. He had no desire to keep working even after death. He was a person who had more than earned the right to claim eternal rest, and he was so exhausted that even his soul needed a break.
Sure, it may be an era where trucks mow down office workers and they get reincarnated into other worlds — but that should be reserved for people who still have some drive left. Handing more work to a soul who died of overwork was simply not right.
[Why not!]
The god seemed flustered. First of all, the fact that you’re operating outside your jurisdiction is already a problem. He wanted to say it, but even that felt like too much effort.
“I need to sleep thirty years’ worth of sleep right now.”
[……!]
“There’s a saying in my country — sleep when you’re in the coffin. And I have entered the coffin.”
[What kind of cruel thing to say……!]
“I’m going to sleep.”
[W-wait!]
And it was just as he leaned his body against something resembling a fluffy cloud. The god spoke.
[If you save that child — Luanisiel — I will grant you a wish.]
He was a little intrigued. A wish granted by a god. In a voice that felt like someone grabbing at his trouser leg — though he wasn’t sure whether a soul even had trouser legs — there was the kind of offer whose outcome he had always fantasized about.
[I promise you a life where wealth overflows without you lifting a single finger.]
Now that’s tempting.
[The ‘windfall rest’ you have so desperately longed for.]
A lottery win!
In the end, he had no choice but to open his eyes. It was an extraordinary offer. A wealthy layabout. Wasn’t that the dream he had prayed for every night, lottery ticket in hand?
“There will be conditions, I assume?”
[To become Empress ‘Luanisiel’ and save that child.]
“Deal.”
I’ll live the perfect idle life. Work for a few years and play for the rest of eternity — it was a worthwhile contract. All that rotting away at work had finally paid off.
Of course he had no choice but to stamp the contract for the dispatch position without looking back.
***
[Every time that child’s fate reached its end, I had to scream at the edge of the world, again and again.]
The divine space he found himself in once more was still unrealistically peaceful — but within the eyes of the god looking at him lay a deep sorrow that was difficult to put into words.
[Luanisiel was the purest, most transparent soul I ever fashioned into this world. When I placed the lavender divinity within his eyes, I hoped he would live as a tranquil priest, beloved by all.]
When the god waved a hand through the air, the brief and brutal life of Luanisiel passed by like a panorama.
The day he was forcibly dragged out of the temple by his family’s greed. The nights he spent alone on the cold palace floor, coughing up blood, writhing in agony from his overflowing divine power. The god said he had watched every one of those moments and yet could not intervene.
[The threads of fate are not something even I can cut freely with scissors. That child was destined from birth to be a sacrifice for the sake of completing the Emperor’s and Aiden’s fate. I could not save him, and he gave up on himself.]
The god’s voice trembled faintly. Even for an omnipotent god, it seemed there was no stopping the pain of watching the creature one loved most die miserably beneath the shell of a villain.
[That is why I called for you. You, a soul from another world capable of twisting the law of causality — you could prevent that child’s unjust death and instead live the peace I so desperately wanted to give him.]
“……Knowing that even a god cherished him that much does make my shoulders feel a little heavy.”
His mouth spoke dryly, but there was a deep ache somewhere in his chest. It was probably because the terrible pain and loneliness that the original Luanisiel must have felt still lingered in this body like remnants of ash. He felt he understood why the god — even at the cost of crumpling his all-knowing dignity — had clung on with the outrageous offer of a layabout life.
[Save that child. No — now it is also the path to saving you, who have become Luan. In this life alone, be no one’s tool and no one’s shield — live only for your own happiness.]
Leaving behind the god’s earnest plea, he opened his eyes again.
Rising in a vast and silent space and walking to a mirror — finding himself turned into an exotic, strikingly handsome man with platinum blond hair and lavender eyes — that was a bonus. Since his purpose was to keep this body safe and live in peace, he had no choice but to examine it carefully. It was a little sickly-looking, which was a flaw, but he was handsome enough, so it would do.
The problem was the life difficulty setting of this ‘Luanisiel Requies’ character. Now having become Luan, he rapidly analyzed the original Luanisiel’s memories and the memories of the future handed over by the god — like running data through a spreadsheet. The god had summarized the memories of this world in a simple, novel-like way.
He thought over the methods for surviving in Luan’s body, a body destined for a miserable death.
Try to win the Emperor over?
Rejected in one second. The main lead of the original story is Aiden, the one blessed by the god’s favor. No matter how hard he flew and crawled, the moment true love appeared, it was obvious he’d end up as yesterday’s leftovers. It was a textbook course for getting his head cut off from failing to read the room.
The one who would save the soul of Emperor Kirian, suffering as though bound in iron chains. No matter how hard he flew and crawled, the moment Aiden — the destined partner — appeared, everything would reset back to square one. The oblivious villain caught between the main couple was the number one candidate for a death flag.
Divorce and leave?
Adopted.
He already had plenty of personal assets brought over from the Requies family, and on top of that, the wealth the god had guaranteed was waiting for him. All he had to do was cleanly wrap up the paperwork before Aiden made his full appearance, and fly off to the warm south.
“Not bad.”
To survive. And this time, to finally get some proper, genuine sleep — divorce was not a bad method at all.
Once the decision was made, his body moved first. Luan gripped a pen with trembling hands running low on sugar and sat at his desk. He pulled out the countless official document formats stored in his memory and began sketching out the framework of a divorce agreement draft on a blank sheet of paper.
All the planning and paperwork was complete. All that remained now was the Emperor’s signature.
