Chapter 34: The Problem with Paperwork

The silence was glorious. For a full week, I had my sanctuary back. No witty banter, no sarcastic commentary, no cosmic coffee spills. I worked with an efficiency that was the envy of the entire celestial bureaucracy. I processed souls, designed afterlives, and even managed to clear out my entire backlog of 'Miscellaneous Reincarnation Requests,' which included a soul who wanted to be reincarnated as a sentient, particularly comfortable armchair.

I was a well-oiled, divine machine. I was at peak performance. I was also, if I was being completely honest with myself, a little bit bored.

The quiet of the office seemed louder now. The predictable hum of the servers, once a comfort, now felt monotonous. I found myself glancing at the armchair where Isao had sat, half-expecting to see him materialize with a fresh cup of snark.

To distract myself, I decided to tackle a project I'd been putting off: a full diagnostic of the Divine Reincarnation System itself. The glitches I'd noticed before my unscheduled trip to Mundania—the random monster appearances, the weird weather patterns—were still happening, and it was my job to find out why.

I dove into the system's core programming, a place few deities ever went. It was a universe of pure data, a shimmering matrix of infinite code that governed the life, death, and rebirth of countless worlds. It was here I found the problem.

It wasn't a virus or a bug. It was… paperwork.

Metaphorical paperwork, but paperwork nonetheless. Over the eons, millions of tiny exceptions, overrides, and special requests had been hard-coded into the system. A prayer answered here, a miracle granted there. A minor deity bending the rules for a favorite mortal. Each one was a tiny patch on the system's code. Alone, they were harmless. But accumulated over millennia, they had created a tangled, chaotic mess. The system was choking on its own bureaucracy. It was becoming unstable, unpredictable. The barriers between worlds were fraying, not because of some great evil, but because of cosmic red tape.

The Dragon of Gluten hadn't been an attack; it was the result of a clerical error from the Third Era that had accidentally merged the soul of a dragon with a baker's fervent prayer for a better wheat harvest.

The Evil Lord that Sir Gideon had mentioned wasn't a being; it was a system process. A 'Defragmentation Protocol' that had been initiated to try and clean up the mess. It was an automated program that was trying to 'fix' the corrupted code by simply deleting it—along with the worlds, souls, and realities attached to that code.

The great, ancient evil threatening the multiverse was a janitor program. A cosmic cleanup crew that saw entire civilizations as corrupted data to be purged.

I leaned back from my console, a cold dread washing over me. This was a problem far bigger than a Pastry Overlord. This was a fundamental flaw in the nature of reality itself.

And I, the goddess who had just punted the only other being who seemed to know what was going on out of her dimension, had to figure out how to stop it.