The last thing Yamiro Kageyama saw was column G.
Not a sunset. Not a loved one's face. Not even the ceiling of a hospital room with its sterile white tiles and the distant beeping of machines. Just column G, row 47, where the quarterly logistics projections refused — for the third consecutive hour — to balance with the import figures in column D. The office was empty. It was always empty at 23:47 on a Thursday. The fluorescent light above his desk had been flickering since Tuesday, and Facilities had not responded to his ticket. The coffee in his mug had gone cold somewhere around 22:00 and he had kept drinking it anyway, because the ritual of lifting the cup and setting it down again gave his hands something to do while his brain ground against the numbers.
He was thirty-one years old. He had not taken a vacation in four years. He had eaten vending machine onigiri for dinner every weeknight for the past six months. He owned two suits, both grey, and a plant on his windowsill at home that he suspected had been dead since October but which he had not had time to confirm.
He felt the pressure first in his left arm — a strange, insistent weight, like someone had placed a hand there and was squeezing with polite but unmistakable firmness. Then his chest. Then the world tilted approximately fifteen degrees to the left, and column G blurred, and Yamiro Kageyama had exactly one coherent thought before everything went dark.
Is this really necessary?
The darkness lasted what felt like either three seconds or several geological epochs.
Then there was light — warm, amber, the particular gold of late afternoon filtered through paper screens — and the smell of cedar wood and something floral he couldn't name, and Yamiro was sitting in a chair that was considerably more comfortable than anything he had encountered in the past four years, facing a low table on which sat a ceramic flask, two small cups, and a man who looked approximately fifty-five years old and deeply, profoundly unbothered by everything.
The man was wearing a kimono the color of sunrise — not metaphorically, but literally, as though someone had taken the gradient of an actual sunrise and woven it into fabric. His hair was silver-white and loosely tied. He had the face of someone who had found everything mildly amusing for a very long time and had stopped being surprised by his own amusement. He was pouring sake with the unhurried precision of a person who had nowhere else to be, which, Yamiro would later understand, was entirely accurate.
"You're dead," the man said, without looking up from the flask. "Cardiac arrest. 23:52. Your coffee was still warm when they found you, so that's something."
Yamiro looked at his hands. They appeared normal. He pressed one palm against the table surface. Solid. Real-feeling. He looked around the room — shoji screens, a single scroll painting of a sun rising over mountains, tatami flooring, no windows that he could see, a quality of light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.
"Okay," he said.
The man looked up then, and his eyes were the same color as his kimono — that impossible sunrise amber — and he seemed genuinely pleased by the response. "Most people cry," he said. "Or argue. One man last century threw his cup at me. Good arm. Terrible accuracy."
"I figured arguing wouldn't change it."
"Smart." The man pushed one of the cups toward him. "Drink. It's not poisoned. I'm Taiyo Amateru, in case the aesthetic didn't make it obvious."
Yamiro picked up the cup. The sake was warm and tasted like sunlight probably would if sunlight were drinkable — clean and golden and faintly sweet. He set the cup down. "You're a god."
"The god, for our current purposes. I built the world I'm about to send you to. From scratch, mostly. It took a while." Taiyo tilted his head slightly, with the expression of a man recalling a mildly interesting home renovation project. "I modeled it on Japan. Not this Japan — older Japan. The mythological one, with the texture and the light and the names I missed after I was exiled. I've been adding to it for several thousand years. It's called Kagamikai."
"The Mirror World."
"You know your kanji. Good." Taiyo refilled both cups. "Here's the situation. I send souls there occasionally. Japanese souls, mostly — people who died before they were finished, people who never really lived, people whose particular kind of mind fits a gap in the world I've built. You fit a gap." He paused. "Several gaps, actually. I've been watching your personnel file for about six months."
Yamiro considered this. A god had been watching his personnel file. "Was it interesting?"
"It was depressing. You're wasted in logistics accounting." Taiyo reached beneath the table and produced a scroll, which he unrolled with practiced efficiency. On it were two columns of text, written in a script that Yamiro's brain processed somehow as Japanese without technically being Japanese. "In Kagamikai, every soul receives a Class upon arrival. The Class determines your foundational abilities, your growth trajectory, and your relationship to the System that governs the world's mechanics." He tapped the scroll. "Most souls get something respectable. Warrior, Mage, Merchant, Healer. Occasionally something genuinely impressive — we had a Hero Legendary last month. Young man, very enthusiastic, killed a basilisk with a spoon at age twelve, remarkable constitution."
"And me?"
Taiyo looked at him with the careful expression of a man choosing his words. "You have two options." He indicated the left column. "Hero of Destiny, Class SSS, full combat progression, prophecy attached, world-saving arc, the usual package. High mortality rate during the first arc, but strong narrative momentum if you survive."
Yamiro looked at the right column.
"Primordial Farmer," he read.
A silence settled between them. Somewhere beyond the shoji screens, something that sounded like wind moved through trees.
"It's the rarest Class in Kagamikai," Taiyo said, with the tone of a man who was absolutely telling the truth and was also aware it wasn't helping. "It's only appeared twice in six thousand years. The System attached to it — the Gaia System — operates on an entirely different logic from combat Classes. It rewards creation, growth, connection. The progression ceiling is, theoretically..." He paused. "I've never seen anyone reach it."
"Because it's weak."
"Because everyone who received it chose the other column." Taiyo folded his hands on the table. "You are the third soul to receive this choice. The first two both chose Hero of Destiny. One died in the third arc. One is currently ruling a mid-sized kingdom and complaining about tax administration, which I find ironic."
Yamiro looked at the right column again. Primordial Farmer. Below the title, the System description was brief: Cultivate. Nourish. Grow. The land remembers everything you give it.
He thought about column G. He thought about the flickering fluorescent light and the cold coffee and the four years of vacation days he had never taken. He thought about the spreadsheet that had been open on his screen when he died and whether anyone had saved it.
"Does the Farmer class have to fight anyone?" he asked.
"Not inherently."
"Does it have a prophecy?"
"No."
"Can I sleep regular hours?"
Taiyo's expression shifted into something that might, on a less composed face, have been delight. "That is entirely up to you."
Yamiro picked up the cup, finished the sake, and set it down with the quiet finality of a man closing a spreadsheet he never intended to reopen. "Right column," he said.
Taiyo Amateru looked at him for a long moment. Then he smiled — not the mild, amused smile he had been wearing since Yamiro arrived, but something warmer and more genuine, the smile of a person who has been waiting a very long time for something and has finally, quietly, received it.
"I was hoping you'd say that," he said. He reached across the table and pressed his thumb to the center of Yamiro's forehead — warm, steady, like a coal that didn't burn. "Welcome to Kagamikai. The Gaia System will introduce itself when you land. You'll start with forty bronze coins, a broken hoe, and a parcel of land no one else wanted." He paused. "It's barren. Possibly cursed. The previous owner left owing several people money."
"Excellent."
"One more thing." Taiyo was already beginning to blur at the edges, the amber light of the room rising to fill the space where solidity had been. His voice remained perfectly clear. "I'll be watching. I watch everyone I send through. But I want you to know —" and here the god of a mirror world sounded, for just a moment, almost sincere — "I have been building Kagamikai for six thousand years and I have never once been genuinely curious about what a resident was going to do next."
"And now?"
The light was everything. The cedar and flowers and sake were fading into something green and open and alive.
"Now I'm curious," said Taiyo Amateru, and the world swallowed Yamiro Kageyama whole.
He landed on his feet, which surprised him.
He had expected something dramatic — a flash, a fall, the cinematic drop from a great height that seemed standard for this kind of thing based on the light novels his college roommate had read obsessively. Instead there was simply a shift, like stepping from one room into another, and then he was standing in a field.
It was late afternoon. The sky above Kagamikai was a specific shade of blue that existed somewhere between the blue of deep ocean water and the blue of woodblock prints — saturated and clean and slightly unreal, the way a sky looks in a memory of childhood summer. Around him, stretching in every direction, was land. Not good land. Not even interesting land. Brown, dry, cracked earth with the defeated posture of soil that had been asked to produce things for too long with no care in return. Three dead trees stood at the far edge of the parcel at irregular intervals, like punctuation in a sentence that had given up.
In his right hand was a hoe. The handle had been repaired at some point with a wrap of leather cord that was now fraying. The blade was intact but dull.
In his left hand was a cloth purse that clinked when he shifted it — forty bronze coins, exactly as promised.
He stood in the silence of a world that was not his, holding a broken hoe and a small amount of currency, on land that appeared to have personal issues.
Then a sound like a soft chime — not external, but interior, the way a thought sometimes arrives with a particular clarity — and text appeared at the edge of his vision, translucent and amber-gold, written in the same impossible script he had read on Taiyo's scroll.
[Gaia System — Active]
[Class : Primordial Farmer ✦]
[Current Prosperity Points : 0 / 100]
[First Task : Introduce yourself to the land.]
[Taiyo's Note : I'm serious. Talk to it. It's been through a lot.]
Yamiro Kageyama looked at the cracked, exhausted earth beneath his feet. He looked at the dead trees. He looked at the sky. He looked at the hoe in his hand.
He crouched down, pressed one palm flat against the dry soil, and said, in a perfectly normal voice, "I'm Yamiro. I'm going to try not to make things worse."
The earth said nothing. But somewhere beneath his palm, very faint and very deep, something shifted — like a sleeper turning over at the sound of a familiar voice.
[Prosperity Points : +5]
[The land is listening.]