Volume 6 - Chapter 61: The Cosmic Hangover and a Ghost from the Past

It took three full celestial cycles for the cosmic hangover to subside. That’s three rotations of the entire divine realm, for the record. For me, it felt like an eternity spent with my head stuck in a black hole. My divine energy, usually a calm, steady river of amethyst light, was buzzing like a faulty neon sign. Every time I tried to focus, the edges of my vision would fizzle into rainbow static. My pristine, white-and-gold office, a sanctuary of order, seemed to tilt on its axis if I turned my head too fast. I spent most of the time slumped in my throne-like office chair, nursing a mug of celestial-grade coffee that tasted suspiciously like condensed nebulae and regret.

“Never again,” I muttered to the empty room, the sound echoing slightly in the vast space. “No more ‘quality assurance’ trips. No more getting involved. And absolutely, positively no more drop-kicking other gods into mortal realms.”

The problem was, my brain wouldn’t cooperate. In the quiet moments between processing the souls of the recently deceased, my mind kept drifting back to Nocturne. Specifically, it drifted back to a pair of intense, dark eyes that had looked at me with a mixture of awe and something else… something I refused to put a name to. I’d see Jin Kageyama’s face, his carefully crafted ‘Zero’ persona slipping for just a second to reveal the earnest, dramatic boy underneath. I’d remember the ridiculous duel, Isao’s infuriating commentary, and the shocked faces of Echo and Kael.

Then, my cheeks would heat up with a fire that had nothing to do with divine power.

“It was professional curiosity!” I declared loudly to a passing cherubic intern, who squeaked and scurried away faster. “I created the world, I am entitled to check on the product! It’s in the celestial fine print!”

It was a lie, and I knew it. A big, fat, goddess-sized lie. I hadn’t felt that flustered, that off-balance, since… well, since one of my early lives, back when I was just a mortal girl dealing with mortal problems. The feeling was uncomfortable. Alien. Annoying. Jin was a character, a piece of code I had brought to life. A mortal. And I was a goddess. The gap between us was literally the size of the universe. Yet, the memory of his earnestness, his ridiculous coolness, and that stupid, heartfelt promise to find me again… it left a weird, lingering pang in my chest.

To quell the internal chaos, I did what any responsible deity would do: I buried myself in work. I threw myself into the reincarnation queue with a vengeance, processing souls with ruthless efficiency. Truck-kun victim? Here’s a fantasy world with swords and magic, enjoy your cheat skill. Overworked office worker? You get a slow-life world with a farm and a cute beast-kin neighbor, congratulations. It was mindless, repetitive work, and it was exactly what I needed.

Soul after soul flowed past my divine monitor, their life stories flashing before my eyes in a blur of triumphs and tragedies. I was in the zone, a well-oiled cog in the great cosmic machine. And then, I saw it. A name. A face. A soul so profoundly irritating that my cosmic hangover returned with the force of a supernova.

Shoujo Akiyama.

The world seemed to freeze. The gentle hum of the celestial servers faded into silence. My hand, poised over the ‘Reincarnate’ button, trembled. It couldn’t be. Of all the billions of souls in the multiverse, it had to be him.

Shoujo Akiyama. My ex-boyfriend from my third life. The one life I desperately wished I could permanently delete from my Akashic records. He wasn’t evil. He wasn’t a monster. He was so, so much worse. He was a walking, talking personification of secondhand embarrassment. He was the kind of guy who wore scarves in the summer, quoted philosophers he’d never read, and thought being “mysterious” meant staring vaguely into the middle distance while talking about the “burden of his own genius.”

My divine mind was instantly flooded with a montage of horrible memories. That time he tried to impress me by ordering coffee in what he thought was French but was actually just gibberish. The time he wrote a fifty-page poem about my “ethereal yet tragic beauty” and insisted on reading it aloud at my birthday party. The time he broke up with me by saying our “cosmic energies were no longer aligned” and that he needed to “walk his path of enlightened sorrow alone.” The breakup had lasted two days before he came crawling back with a ukulele and a terrible apology song.

I had been sixteen. I didn’t know any better. But now, I was a goddess. And I knew everything.

He’d died, apparently, by slipping on a conveniently placed banana peel while trying to take a moody, artistic selfie on the edge of a public fountain. Of course he did. It was the most Shoujo way to go.

A slow, wicked grin spread across my face. The lingering confusion about Jin, the guilt, the cosmic headache - it all vanished, replaced by a singular, beautiful, and incredibly petty purpose. The universe had not made a mistake. It had given me a gift. It had delivered my most-hated ex-boyfriend, gift-wrapped in a soul-orb, directly to my divine jurisdiction.

Who was I to deny a gift from the cosmos?

“Celeste,” I purred, addressing my administrative AI. “Cancel my afternoon appointments. I have a… special project to work on.”

I pulled Shoujo’s soul-orb out of the main queue and placed it on my personal workstation. His soul flickered with an aura of self-importance and unearned confidence. It was disgusting. But it was also the perfect raw material.

Revenge was beneath a goddess. It was petty. It was undignified. But reincarnating a scumbag into a world perfectly tailored to his own personal version of comedic hell? That wasn’t revenge.

That was entertainment.

My fingers flew across my console, my divine energy crackling with newfound excitement. I wouldn’t just reincarnate him. I would give him everything he ever wanted. I’d make him the ‘Chosen Hero.’ I’d give him a legendary destiny, a grand quest, and ridiculously overpowered cheat skills. He would believe, with every fiber of his being, that he was the protagonist of the entire world.

And I would make sure that every single step of his heroic journey was an exercise in absolute, soul-crushing, pants-wettingly hilarious humiliation.

My cosmic hangover was gone, replaced by the intoxicating thrill of a truly inspired idea. This was going to be my masterpiece.