It was 3:42 a.m.
I hadn't slept. Or maybe I had. I couldn't tell anymore if I was awake or dreaming with my eyes open and my hands still on the keyboard. Either way, the fan was spinning like it owed me money, the monitor light was soft enough to lie about my bad posture, and the glow from my phone screen had become a second sun—one that offered radiation sickness instead of warmth.
The room smelled like old instant noodles, fresh self-loathing, and something I hadn't identified yet but was probably evolving.
My name is Ishiguro Sōma. I was twenty-something. I had nothing going on.
This is not a redemption story.
It's not even a tragedy. It's more like a footnote. A cosmic typo that the universe accidentally hit "post" on.
I didn't have friends. I didn't have enemies. I had internet tabs—open ones, old ones, frozen ones that refused to die like the haunted regrets of my browser history. I had quiz results from spiritual alignment surveys that told me I was a "Divine Cactus with Repressed Star Potential." I had an inbox full of job rejection emails that all started with "Unfortunately…" and ended with "…best of luck in your future endeavors," which is just HR-speak for "Good luck dying alone, loser."
I wasn't suicidal. That would require effort.
I wasn't angry. Anger requires expectation.
I was just... logged in.
To life. To myself. To all of it.
Barely.
Scrolling through forums at night is a kind of spiritual possession. You don't think, you don't question, you just let the content pour in like sand through a hole in your skull. I was on a site called FaithCrash—which, in fairness, was not a dating site for priests (though some people definitely thought so).
FaithCrash was a black hole of theological fanfiction, miracle breakdowns, conspiracy theory sermons, and a surprising number of fake product reviews for "blessed" skincare routines.
Someone had posted a video of a fish levitating over a minor shrine. The caption read: "Proof of divine favor." But the audio in the background was just the wind whispering "Subscribe for more" in a voice that sounded suspiciously like an AI text-to-speech filter set to "gentle monk."
I clicked Like. Not because I liked it. But because I understood it.
I ended up in a thread titled:
"If You Could Design a God from Scratch…"
It had three hundred replies.
Most were... weird. Some were beautiful. A few were stupid enough to be honest.
One guy wrote: "A god who never dies, never sleeps, and always listens." Someone replied to him: "Sounds like a therapist with immortality. No thanks."
Another post read: "A goddess of loyalty who removes all doubt from relationships."
I didn't reply to that one. I didn't need to. It was already a horror story.
And then there were the edgy ones:
"A god of pain."
"A god who punishes only the kind."
"A god who never existed, but was still disappointed in you anyway."
Cute.
Edgy.
A little too tryhard.
I was about to close the thread. I was about to go back to watching a ten-hour loop of a miracle dog saying "Amen" in seventeen languages. But something—maybe sleep deprivation, maybe divine intervention, maybe just spite—held my fingers over the keyboard.
And I typed.
I didn't think about it. I didn't draft or edit or second-guess. It wasn't poetry. It wasn't revelation. It was just this:
If gods exist, they're useless.
That was the first line. True, right? It felt true. No, not true—accurate. There's a difference. "True" is for people with hope. "Accurate" is for people with receipts.
I kept going.
I'd rather have one that doesn't care if I believe in it. Just give me results. Just… be what people need, and leave them alone.
I stared at it. Then I hit Post. And it was done.
No applause. No enlightenment. No lightning bolt judgment from the heavens telling me I'd crossed a line. Just a blinking cursor and a reply count that didn't go up.
It got buried under twenty more posts within minutes. Someone below me said "make a god that turns your ex into a frog." That post got twelve likes.
Mine got none.
Fair.
I forgot about it within an hour.
You can't remember every breath you take. Every pixel you waste. Every moment you type something just to feel real, for one second, even if the only thing listening is the server that's going to crash next Tuesday when the admin forgets to pay their hosting bill.
I closed the tab. Turned off the screen. Drank warm tea that had once dreamed of being cold. And lay down on my bed, arms spread out like a martyr too lazy to get nailed to anything.
I didn't pray. I didn't hope. I didn't believe.
I just went to bed.
Because what else do you do when you run out of noise?