If there was one thing Leo had mastered in his thirty-two years of life, it was the art of not being seen. It wasn't invisibility, not exactly. It was something more profound, more elegant. It was the skill of being profoundly, wonderfully unremarkable.
In the buzzing hive of his open-plan office, he was the background hum of a computer fan. At social gatherings, he was the potted plant in the corner—present, but entirely uninteresting to the human eye. He was the man in the movie crowd scene you never noticed, the coworker whose name you consistently forgot, the ghost in the machine of modern life. And he loved it.
His death was, therefore, a masterpiece of mundane irony.
It was a Tuesday. Leo was walking back to his desk, balancing a lukewarm coffee in one hand and scrolling through a spreadsheet on his phone with the other. He was mentally composing an email so bland it could cure insomnia. He didn't see the banana peel, yellow and smug, left on the speckled grey carpet. His foot made contact with a squelching finality.
The world tilted in a slow, graceful arc. His coffee cup took flight, describing a parabolic brown splash against the ceiling. His phone skittered away under a desk. The last thing Leo saw was the horrified face of Brenda from accounting, who was, for one glorious and terrifying moment, actually looking directly at him.
Then, nothing.
He found himself standing in a queue. It was not a dramatic, pearly-gates sort of queue. It was a grim, fluorescent-lit, soul-crushingly bureaucratic line that stretched into a grey, formless infinity. The air smelled of stale paper and faint despair. A sign flickered weakly overhead: COSMIC TRANSMIGRATION & SOUL RECYCLING - WAIT HERE FOR PROCESSING.
Well, Leo thought, this is underwhelming.
After what felt like an eternity (or maybe ten minutes; time was weird here), he reached the front. A harried-looking celestial clerk sat behind a counter, his form shimmering with a faint, pixelated quality. He wore a name tag that read "BOB - KARMIC ACCOUNTING."
"Next!" Bob droned, not looking up from a towering stack of shimmering scrolls. "Name, cause of termination, and preferred afterlife package? We have a special on Nirvana this millennium, very minimalist."
"Leo. Slipped on a banana peel. And, uh, I'd just like more of the same, please. Something quiet."
Bob's fingers flew over a crystalline keyboard that chimed with a sound of pure annoyance. "Leo... Leo... Let's see. Natural causes... war... plague... ah, here. Accidentals. Sub-category: Slip-and-Fall. Organic matter." He looked up, his pixelated eyes wide. "A banana peel? Seriously? We haven't had one of those in centuries. That's a collector's item."
"Glad to be of service," Leo said dryly.
Bob squinted at his screen. "Oh, dear. Oh, this is a problem." He started frantically tapping keys. "Your file... it's been flagged. 'Extreme Anomaly - Profound Mundanity.' Your soul's signature is so faint, the Reincarnation Lobe can't get a lock on it. We can't send you back to Earth, and we can't process you for a standard afterlife. You're a clerical error."
"A what?"
"A clerical error!" Bob repeated, throwing his hands up. "You're cosmically… boring. The system doesn't know what to do with you. I can't have this messing up my quarterly efficiency reports." He leaned in conspiratorially. "Look, I'm going to do you a solid. I'm going to fast-track you. I'll dump your soul into the first available slot I find. It might be a bit… high-resolution for your tastes, but it's better than being stuck in the pending queue for all eternity."
"High-resolution?" Leo felt a trickle of dread that was decidedly more exciting than anything he'd felt in his previous life.
"Don't worry about it!" Bob said with manic cheerfulness, hitting a large, red button on his console. "Think of it as an upgrade! A little adventure!"
"Wait, I don't want an advent—"
But it was too late. A trapdoor Leo hadn't noticed opened beneath his feet. He fell into a whirlwind of screaming colors and distorted sounds, the grumbled complaint of "stupid, glitchy, mortal souls…" echoing after him.
The first thing he was aware of was the smell. It was a complex bouquet of dust, trampled grass, roasting nuts, and unwashed humanity. The second was the noise—a cacophony of hawkers yelling, livestock bleating, and the general roar of a dense crowd. It was the absolute antithesis of quiet.
He tried to open his eyes and found he couldn't. Not in the way he was used to. His body felt tiny, swaddled, and utterly helpless. He was being jostled, held against a warm, soft body. A woman's voice cooed above him, speaking in a language he somehow understood.
"Look, my little Wei, the market is so busy today! So many people come to see the Verdant Cloud Sect's immortal masters!"
Oh, no, Lee Wei thought, the new name settling on his soul with the weight of a tombstone. A cultivation world. The most dramatic, protagonist-infested, noisy type of world possible.
He managed to crack his new, infant eyes open. He was in a bustling ancient-style market, cradled in his new mother's arms. His father walked beside them, a proud smile on his face. It was chaotic, yes, but it was a normal, mortal chaos. He could work with this. He could be a quiet merchant's son. He could fade into the rural landscape. A spark of hope ignited.
'Okay,' he thought, taking in the simple wooden stalls and the honest faces. 'This isn't so bad. I can make this work. Nice and quiet. A peaceful, anonymous life. This is exactly what I—'
The thought was severed by a thunderous BOOM that shook the very air.
Screams erupted. The crowd scattered like startled birds. A stall selling pottery exploded into a thousand shards. Soaring through the air above the market were two figures, trailing streams of brilliant, destructive light. One glowed with emerald green energy, the other with fiery red. They were cultivators.
Sword lights—blades of pure, condensed energy—slashed through the air, shearing through rooftops and sending debris raining down. It was a scene of pure, unadulterated drama, the kind Lee Wei had spent a lifetime avoiding.
"Protect the child!" his father yelled, pulling them towards a nearby alley.
But his mother, frozen in terror, tripped. Lee Wei was flung from her arms, landing with a soft thud in a basket of discarded rags near a wall. He was unharmed, but completely exposed.
The cultivator battle raged directly above him. He saw the red-clad cultivator get hit by a blast of green energy, his sword shattering into a dozen glittering pieces. One of those pieces, a sharp, lethal shard of spiritual metal, spun out of control.
It whistled through the air, t end over end, a spinning blade of death reflecting the panic in the marketplace. It carved through a banner, sheared the horn off a stone statue, and continued its unstoppable path.
Directly towards Lee Wei's face.
He had no time to scream. No time to move. In his previous life, he had been killed by a piece of fruit. In this new one, he had lived for all of five minutes.
'So much for a peaceful retirement,' was his only, very clear, and utterly resigned thought as the killing light filled his vision.