Winter, 2026.
Seeing the digital clock in the bottom right corner of my screen reading [2:14 AM], I let out a deep, terribly heavy sigh.
The last train had long since gone. Only two people remained in the office: myself, and a coworker on the other side of the partition, hammering away at his keyboard as if he were already dead. At the edge of my desk, three empty energy drink cans stood lined up like gravestones.
"...Just a little... more."
A cracked voice escaped my throat. My vision blurred. It felt as though the blue light emitting from the monitor was scraping away my retinas like sandpaper.
I was just an ordinary salaryman.
My only redeeming trait—if you could even call it that—was watching anime and reading web novels during the fleeting free time I had after work and on weekends.
Reality was nothing but a dead rubber match to me; my mind was constantly escaping into the fantasy worlds beyond the screen.
Click, clack, clack, tap.
It happened the exact moment I struck the Enter key hard, sending the final batch of data to the server.
—Thump.
An unpleasant sound, like something bursting, echoed deep within my chest.
My heart throbbed with a violent pain, as if it were being crushed. I couldn't breathe. Air wouldn't enter my lungs.
"Ah..., gha...!"
I collapsed from my chair, my face smashing into the cold office carpet. At the edge of my vision, I thought I saw my coworker stand up in a panic, but his voice was muffled, sounding as if it were coming from the bottom of a distant lake.
It hurts. I'm suffocating. I haven't even... watched the finales of this season's anime yet.
With that terribly petty and lingering thought as my last...
My consciousness faded to black, as abruptly as a power cord being yanked from an outlet.
***
Death was nothingness.
In a space where even the concept of time seemed to have melted away, I vaguely understood only one fact:
"I am dead."
Death by overwork, at that. To think that a word I so often saw on the news would be printed on the final page of my own life.
How much time had passed? It could have been a second; it could have been ten thousand years.
Suddenly, a noise crackled through the darkness.
"—That's why I should be able to tweak this a bit more. The high degree of freedom in customization is YGGDRASIL's main selling point, after all."
I heard a voice.
It was the voice of a man; tired, yet somehow gleeful, speaking with the rapid-fire cadence unique to otaku.
Who is that? Isn't this the afterlife?
"Alright, let's go with this for the base race. It starts out as a simple [Aberration], but I'll dump points into it and upgrade it to an [Elder Aberration]... Yeah, 'non-Euclidean anatomical structure' has a great ring to it. Very Cthulhu-esque."
—What?
The moment that voice echoed, an intense change overcame my supposedly non-existent body.
The illusion of non-existent bones shattering and non-existent flesh melting away.
The contours of my existence began to seep sluggishly into the world, like a single drop of pitch-black ink.
[System Message: Racial Class [Aberration Lv.1] Acquired.]
A mechanical voice echoed directly within my brain.
A game?
No, it's a system sound like the ones I've seen in anime.
Am I hearing things?
"Nice, nice, looking good. Next is the appearance data... Humanoid is too boring. Let's make it levitate. An incorporeal shadow, an amalgamation of dense black fog...
Oh, and it's much creepier with a ton of eyes. Countless eyeballs emitting purple and blue light... Alright, let's go with this."
The crisp clicking sounds of the man typing something echoed around me.
With every click, I could feel my body being created.
I had no legs.
I felt myself floating a few inches above the floor. The concept of skin vanished, and my flesh transformed into a constantly shifting, pitch-black fog.
And then—from within the fog, popping like bursting bubbles, countless eyes began to open.
Purple. Blue.
Dozens—no, hundreds of fields of vision opened simultaneously.
It was an amount of information that would instantly drive a human brain insane, but for some reason, my consciousness processed it with ease.
Through these multiple fields of vision, I saw the outside world for the very first time.
It was a massive stone chamber.
Gigantic bookshelves stretched as far as the eye could see. Parchments and scrolls danced in the air. As if gravity had gone mad, the remnants of immense knowledge floated suspended in space.
And right in front of me, manipulating a translucent console window floating in the air, was a bizarre entity.
A grotesque, fleshy lump of a body with four arms. It was happily tapping away at the window.
[System Message: Racial Class [Elder Aberration Lv.10] Reached.]
[System Message: Special Class [Omniscient Flesh Lv.5] Acquired.]
"Ah..."
I tried to vocalize. I tried to demand answers—what had happened to me, where I was.
But no words left my mouth.
Not because I lacked vocal cords. It was because my will was not being transmitted to my body. Exactly like a video game character whose controller had been disconnected.
"Phew, that should do it for the appearance. I'll make the arms long and thin like ink... alright. Next are the job classes and this guy's flavor text."
The four-armed fleshy abomination continued to hammer at the keyboard, muttering to himself.
"The name of this place is the [Vault of Wisdom]. The place where all the information of the Great Tomb of Nazarick is gathered. So, this guy is its Record Administrator. [Archivist], [Librarian of Forbidden Books], [Sage of Lost Wisdom]... I'm dumping knowledge-based classes into him up to the limit. I'm maxing out his stats for information processing rather than combat."
As the typing progressed, a violently massive amount of data began pouring into my brain—no, into the Omniscient Flesh itself.
Systems of magic, item drop tables, mythical lore, martial arts compositions, the history of the world—.
It hurts.
My head is splitting open.
No, I don't even have a physical head, yet the torrent of information was stretching and expanding my very existence.
"...Did I write too much lore? Oh well. The guild members will probably find it faster to just ask this guy than checking the Wiki every time anyway."
The man nodded in satisfaction.
I stared at him intently with hundreds of eyes.
I couldn't move.
I couldn't speak.
I couldn't even blink unless the system permitted the timing.
This is no dream.
The words he had just spoken.
YGGDRASIL. Nazarick.
As an anime lover, there was no way I wouldn't recognize them.
But, am I inside a VR game? Did I log in as a player?
No. If I were a player, I'd be able to move of my own free will.
"Alright, it's done. Your name is..."
The man typed characters into the final blank space on the console and struck the Enter key with force.
"—From today on, you are [Tawil Balah]. Guardian of the Vault of Wisdom on Nazarick's 8th Floor. Nice to meet you, my ultimate masterpiece."
At that exact moment, a rigid core was driven into me.
Who I was.
To whom I must pledge my loyalty.
The chains of an absolute god known as the System bound my soul tightly.
I was Tawil Balah, possessing the memories of a man who used to be a salaryman.
And the four-armed aberration standing before me was my absolute master and creator; one of the Forty-One Supreme Beings, Bellriver.
I was tasting jubilation and an equal amount of despair all at once.
I had worked myself to the bone, died, and the place I reincarnated into was...
...As a piece of data called an NPC, utterly incapable of moving a single fingertip or uttering a single word of my own free will.