Sent into my favorite game with cheat codes on

I woke with a start, as in I was literally face to face with a giant floating “START” button. This was exactly as the scraggly, old, god in his dreams had said. This was the tutorial so to speak. The room I’d woken in was constructed like a simple log cabin. There wasn’t much to the room itself: a bookcase with a sparse amount of books, a desk with a map on it, and… nothing else. There was little to no personality or history here.

I stared at the floating button. It wasn’t quite time to press it, I needed to ensure that everything the scraggly god said was true. I rolled off the comforter and swung my feet to the floor.

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 “So you want to reincarnate? Heh.” The voice sounded as though it had been smoking a pack a day for 50 years.

I was in a field, dozens of dirt paths sprawled out from where I was in the center. All the paths zig-zagged in seemingly random directions. Before me was a tree only about five feet taller than myself and underneath it an old man in a swing holding a banjo.

The old man’s face had lines deep as canyons and his body as frayed and sinewy as twine. His posture was as taught as the strings of his banjo. He would have seemed like a weathered old man, perhaps a farmer who’d spent his life under the harsh afternoon sun, but it was clear as a cloudless day that he was not in fact human. His eyes were missing, it’s place were two holes which bore straight into me and seem to grow larger the longer I stared.

I flinched.

“Reincarnation. It’s what all the young’uns are inta nowa days.” He spoke without opening his mouth but the voice was definitely his, “you want that, right? Don’ta want the party ta end. Heh.”

I didn’t know how to answer, almost no one actually wanted to die, it’s just something that kind of happens at a certain point and being given the opportunity to continue living in one form or another even if it’s not on Earth or even as a human being, well I’m not sure anyone could pass that up. Reincarnation is probably the most optimistic answer to “what comes next?”

“I’m fergettin myself, I’ma god. Heh. I’m yer personal god. No, that ain’t quite it. I guess I’ma fragment of a fragment of a god. Heh. I only exist here in this-ah moment. I’ll still judge ya though. All of ‘em other gods er sendin’ humans out in the multiverse, givin’ way there power for a bit-ah entertainment. Heh.”

I wasn’t sure how I should feel or where he was going with this. It might make him mad if I decided he was about to say he was doing the same with me. I didn’t want to assume or put words in my mouth but I felt a little giddy at the prospect of experiencing all the tropes I’d read about.

“This god ain’t like that. I’ma few hundred million years older than the rest of ‘em. I don’t got long left here.”

Is he saying gods die?

“Heh. That is a whole can-ah worms we ain’t got time fer. Itsa beside the point anyhow.” He gave his banjo a strum. “I’m not sure ya got what it takes to inherit my power, so I want ya ta prove yerself in a relatively controlled environment. Yer goalsta become strong. The strongest, the best. Just like in the days of olde, I’ma bestowin upon ya a trial.”

A smile crinkled the man’s stoic face. A wind blew through his thin scraggly beard and caused the swing to sway.

“I’ll give you a boon, we’ll play on yer home turf using yer rules, but it’s my game. Heh. Now, I’ll explain exactly what I mean.

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 I opened my inventory. It was something of a long forgotten memory that just came to the surface. I was never a big gamer but I did once play a game, in fact I was pretty obsessed with it. It was an addictive game that involved hunting for fantasy creatures and capturing them with spherical storage devices then using them to fight against other creatures and people.

My progress however had been fairly slow until one day I heard about a device that allowed you to get the max amount of any and every item in the game, the device was called EZ Life and it worked. I used it to beat the game several times. It was fun having pretty much free reign and being able to get your monster to max lvl right at the start, it meant I could do pretty much whatever I wanted and explore all the other bonus mechanics of the game at my own pace and then clear the game whenever I felt like it.

Some might say that cheating like that ruined things but as a kid it was just as fun to just make your own rules and play how you wanted.

All of that was to say that, yes, I was now inside that game, and amazingly it seemed that this game would be played with EZ Life: Cheats On.

I would be playing this game from the start with 999 of every single item in the game in my inventory. Hell yeah!