Chương 24: [That Time I Met the Goddess and She Forced Me to Watch 42 Hours of Subbed Anime on her Phone]

"Ah shoot you died." A comical 'pop' would herald my arrival to the world between lives, where a goddess of some name and description was seated opposite me. There were more goddesses than people knew what to do with these days, so as a courtesy they often wore name tags. This one had labeled herself as a series of increasingly frustrated scribbles. To describe her would be to describe impatience itself. She had the lifeless, joyless gaze of the DMV's Employee of the Month eighteen years running.

Her lip had been wrung dry by the many, many scowls that twisted themselves on her face over the countless eons and she had long replaced her elegant robes of flowing silks and ornamentations with some sports shorts and a coffee-stained sweater. She smelled like the winner's circle at a local MTG tournament and had more leg hair than a European gorilla.

"Also, your narrator is a dick," she continued, her eyes briefly flashing in a way that suggested she might be inclined to do something about it.

"I don't think he has any kind of body, actually." I stood up, having immediately done push-ups on arrival to try and impress her. It probably worked.

"Hi. I'm Jake. I just wanted to say I'm a big fan of your work."

"The feeling ain't mutual champ," she sighed as she flicked her wrist and conjured up a small screen, which she could scroll with a wave of the finger.

"I gotta say I'm not loving what I'm seeing in your Record of Life."

"Ah beans, you mean my various misdeeds and irredeemable self-obsession are going to be a problem?"

"Probably later, but I'm talking about your watch list dude. You had ten years as a professional NEET and you spent it on Rent-A-Girlfriend and friggen' FIFA 13? What the heck kind of backlog is this?"

"Uh-""- Odd Taxi motherflipper, have you heard of it? Flippin' Gurren Lagann? Of all the Final Fantasies why did you only play 2 and Itadaki Street?! Why did you spend over three hundred and twenty-six hours on ' Dance Praise'?"

"I-""-Your genre literacy is trash. For a guy who wants to be Isekai'd so bad you've only watched My Life as Inukai-san's Dog and technically Digimon. You didn't even watch Re: Zero man. Re: Zero. That is mandatory watching."

"I was really just trying to pass the time."

"Well you passed all right. Passed away. And now you're here." The goddess flicked her wrist again and the screen was flung the other direction before hitting the opposite wall with a wet slap.

"Making your lack of redeemable media consumption my problem."

"Is it a problem? Really? Can't you just shoot me into some world where-""-I wasn't being hyperbolic, shit-for-toes, Re: Zero is mandatory! Sit down!" Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. -42 hours of watching subbed anime on her phone later-"Okay, now I can Isekai you."

"Yay."

"But since you clearly weren't paying attention I'm going to reincarnate you into a cultivation world."

"Awww."

"Don't complain. It's still a power fantasy or whatever." She conjured up another screen and tapped it a few times before dismissing it with the same wet slap.

"This just means you'll have to put in a smidge of effort if you plan to excel in everything you do."

"Effort was exactly what I was trying to avoid here. Do I at least get some kind of cheat skill or gift or something?"

"Technically I'm obligated to give you one since you're the protagonist, but I don't like you very much so I'm gonna give you a real bad one." My genre literacy might be total butts. But I had absorbed enough knowledge of Isekais and the like through cultural osmosis that I was keenly aware that the really bad and weak powers were actually the most overpowered. This was, indeed, exactly what I wanted to happen. It was all part of the plan from the very start.

I smiled knowingly and complacently as she fell right into my trap. As it turns out, I could even make a goddess a pawn with my incredible social manipulation skills.

"We established exactly 543 words ago that I can read the narration why would you think that? What's wrong with you?"

"Honestly, when I get my first stat screen that's the first thing I'll check."

"Cheaper than a psychologist I guess. And you'll need to pinch those pennies, considering how much medical debt you still have."

"Dang. I hoped that was a bit."

"Nope. Anyway we're just about done here. One last thing: you might have just enough genre savviness to think that your objective in this new world is to, like, defeat the Demon Lord or something like that, right?"

"Yeah. I need a mission I can either use to advance the plot or I can ignore in an effort to undermine audience expectations."

"Yeah, look, here's the thing…" she slumped in her chair, fishing a lit cigarette out of her pocket and popping it into her mouth like a smoldering skittle.

"... there's nothing."

"Oh, like how Natsuki Subaru didn't get any kind of prerogative after arriving in his new world and had to exercise the autonomy he failed to fully utilize in his old life to intentionally combat the emotional and mental atrophy that had-""-no, no. I mean like we're literally out of things for you freaks to do," she clarified.

"Literally every single thing has been tried already. Every single thing. I sent the seagull who came before you on a mission to roll around in wet moss. I can't think of a single thing I need you to do in this world or any others. Nothing that a more capable person isn't already working on, anyway."

"Oh."

"So your mission will be real simple. Just… be better. You wasted 28 beautiful years of life making a bad world even worse on the selfish hope you could be reborn into a different one where all your work would be done for you. But the whole reason we have this Isekai system is because every life and every soul is valuable beyond words and we don't want to throw away a single, precious one. Even at your worst, you deserve this much and so much more — so be better.

And once you get your head out of your own ass and you see the world around you for what it is instead of what you imagine it could be, you'll see why you and everyone else gets these new chances." I take a second to absorb her words. Unfortunately I am not very absorbent because I majored in Impermeability in University. But one thing did manage to punch through the wall of context obfuscation I deliberately put up for comic effect: I had to be better. And to that, I shook my head.

"... I'm sorry, unnamed goddess. But I just can't do that."

"Jesus, here it comes…"

"... I can't be better. Because I'm going to be the best. The best damn protagonist you've ever seen in all your years reincarnating losers!"

"Yeah, sure, okay, whatever," she gave up.

"Go away now. Byeeeeee." And with that, my new life in a new world was about to get started!