Darkness.
Not the kind you see when you close your eyes in a lit room, where shapes still drift behind your eyelids. This was absolute — no up, no down, no sense of a body to orient with. I couldn't tell if I'd been floating there for seconds or centuries.
I am Ryan. Or I was Ryan, back when "was" and "am" still meant something different.
Twenty-three years old. Fresh out of college, still hunting for a job that would pay enough to help my family stay afloat. I wasn't one of those people with a five-year plan and a vision board. Honestly, the idea of clocking in every morning, sitting through the same grinding routine until retirement, then dying somewhere in a hospital bed having done nothing — that thought used to sit in my chest like a stone. My only real joys were the small ones: a good movie marathon, a binge-worthy anime, a novel that kept me up past 3 a.m., a manga chapter that dropped right when I needed it.
Then a truck didn't stop at a red light, and neither did I.
That was the last thing I remembered before the dark.
The darkness didn't fade so much as it was replaced — one moment weightless nothing, the next, the plush give of carpet under dress shoes I didn't remember putting on. I was standing in an office. Not just any office — the kind of office that made you feel underdressed just for existing in it. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on a skyline that didn't belong to any city I recognized, all chrome and impossible light. A mahogany desk. Bookshelves that seemed to go up forever. And behind the desk, a middle-aged man in an immaculate suit, watching me with the patient, faintly amused expression of someone who had done this exact thing a thousand times before.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"Where—" I managed. "Who are you? Why am I here?"
The man folded his hands on the desk. "You may call me ROB," he said, in a voice that carried the weight of something far older than the body it came from. "As for where you are — you're dead, Ryan. And I am the reason you're not staying that way, if you play your cards right."
"Dead," I repeated. It didn't feel real. None of this felt real. "So this is — what, the afterlife? Judgment?"
"Neither." ROB's mouth curled, not quite a smile. "Consider this a courtesy. You've been selected — don't ask me by what criteria, it's above your pay grade — to receive three wishes. Anything you want, within reason. Then you'll be sent somewhere new to use them."
Three wishes.
I want to say I reacted with dignity. I did not. Somewhere behind my ribs my mind was doing cartwheels, running through every fantasy, every isekai premise, every power-fantasy novel I'd ever devoured at 2 a.m. — and my face, mercifully, was too stunned to show any of it. I forced my voice level.
"What are the limits?"
ROB's eyes glinted, like he respected the question more than the excitement. "There are no limits on how big a wish can be," he said. "But you may not wish for more wishes. And you may not wish for omnipotence. Everything else is negotiable."
"Give me a minute."
"Take your time," ROB said, in the exact tone of a man who did not mean it.
I thought. Really thought. Not about power for power's sake — I'd read enough stories to know that raw strength without a way to use it, without a way to keep collecting more of it, was a dead end. I needed tools. A foundation. Something that would keep giving long after this conversation ended.
"Alright," I said. "I'm done."
ROB checked a watch that hadn't been on his wrist a second earlier. "Finally. Go on, then."
"My first wish: Creation. The ability to create anything — items, abilities, skills."
"Granted," ROB said, without hesitation. "Restriction: you cannot create living beings from nothing. Anything you create obeys an equivalent exchange of matter and materials — you'll need raw resources to work with."
Fair enough. I nodded and kept going.
"My second wish: Travel. The ability to move between the worlds of movies, TV series, anime, and manga."
"Granted. No restrictions on destination — you may go wherever you like, in whatever era of that world you like. One caveat: it cannot be used as instant teleportation within the same world. Point-to-point travel there, you'll need to manage the old-fashioned way."
That made sense — crossing entire worlds and timelines was probably drawing on some different, far more potent kind of energy than simply walking from one room to the next ever would.
"My third wish: A System. Something to track my growth, my inventory, my abilities — and a personal space. Somewhere I can keep resources, and eventually, a place to live for the people who join me."
For the first time, ROB's expression flickered — something like genuine interest. "Granted. Your space will function like a solar system: a central hub with several 'planets,' each capable of housing different resources, biomes, and populations. All are habitable. Nothing enters or leaves without your explicit permission." He rose, straightening his jacket. "That concludes the wishes. Spin the wheel for your first world."
"Wait." My pulse spiked. There was one more thing I needed settled before any wheel got spun. "I don't want to be reincarnated. I don't want to relive eighteen years of diapers and homework and puberty before I actually get to do anything. Please — skip that part."
ROB studied me for a long moment, then exhaled through his nose like a teacher humoring a persistent student. "Fine. I'll admit, most of you ask for that eventually anyway. Here — you'll design your own vessel instead."
A panel of soft light unfolded in the air in front of me, humming faintly — a full-body display, like a character creator pulled straight out of a game menu, except every slider and dial responded to nothing but a thought. I didn't overthink it. I'd always had a very specific picture in my head of what I'd want to look like if looks were ever mine to choose: not bulky, not cartoonishly huge, but lean, sharply defined, the kind of build carved by genuine hard work rather than vanity. Dark, slightly unruly hair. A face with enough edge to be taken seriously and enough warmth not to be threatening. I adjusted, refined, adjusted again, until the figure in the display matched exactly what I wanted (looks like Hrithik Roshan from Bang Bang)
"Done," I said.
ROB glanced at it, unimpressed, the way a man who'd seen a thousand avatars judged the thousand-and-first. "Adequate. Now — the wheel."
A wheel the size of a small carousel materialized between us, its rim segmented into dozens, then hundreds of glowing panels, each one a title. Movies. Shows. Anime. Manga. Names flickered past faster than I could read them, a blur of familiar and unfamiliar worlds spinning in slow orbit.
"Give it a spin," ROB said. "Wherever it lands, that's where you start."
I didn't hesitate. I reached out and gave it everything I had.
The wheel screamed into a blur of color and light, spinning long enough that my earlier confidence started to waver — what if it landed somewhere I couldn't survive a single day in? What if—
It began to slow.
Panel by panel, the blur resolved back into readable names, ticking past one at a time now, the momentum bleeding out of it. My stomach tightened with every click.
Then it stopped.
ROB glanced at the wheel, then back at me, that same faint, knowing almost-smile returning to his face.
"Well," he said. "It seems fate has a sense of humor. Your first world—" he gestured, and the winning panel pulsed once, bright and final—"is the television series The Walking Dead. Alternate universe."
I stared at the glowing title, a slow grin spreading across my face that I didn't bother to hide.
The Walking Dead.
A world of scarcity, of dead men walking, of people who broke or hardened depending on what they were willing to do to survive — and what they were willing to do to the people standing in their way. A world with no gods watching, no rigid laws of narrative keeping the story on its rails, where nothing I changed would ripple outward unless I was the one who pulled the thread.
A blank page. My page.
"Ready?" ROB asked, already reaching for something on his desk that looked distinctly like a door handle floating in midair.
I flexed my new hands, felt the unfamiliar strength settle into unfamiliar muscle, and let the grin widen.
"Born ready."
The light swallowed everything.