Quite the screw-up, then. That was why Hiroto thought he heard his name being called.
“But Hiroto Amemiya has gone,” the god continued. “I can’t get your powers back. We don’t keep backups lying around either. Same with your fate and fortune.”
“What does that mean? I get nothing? I’m the only one starting from zero?” Hiroto asked, with some trepidation.
“Nope, you’ll be starting in the negative. Coincidence and the whims of fate will never come to your aid. You will never be blessed with luck of any kind.”
Not zero, but minus? That almost sounded like too much.
“No thanks, then. I’ll take the normal resurrection that you gave the other guy,” Hiroto said. If being reborn in a new world was going to only bring him suffering, best to just give up on that dream.
But the god was already shaking his head.
“The time for that decision has passed,” he said.
“You’re kidding?” Hiroto missed his chance, before he even realized he needed it. Hiroto was about to complain about all this red tape getting in the way of his fate and fortune, but a red light had already started to envelop his body. His felt his consciousness fading.
“The time for your resurrection has come,” the god said.
Hang on! Hiroto thought. How could I just receive nothing? That’s ridiculous!
“Unlike the other resurrected, this will leave your soul with a vast empty space. Rather than any special power, this empty space will fill your body with a massive volume of magical power. As you won’t have any affinity for magic, however, you won’t be able to learn the attributes of magic that exists in the world of Origin, to which you are being sent. So it’s pearls before swine, in the end.”
Is that supposed to make me feel better? Because it doesn’t! He would have magical power but be unable to use magic? That’s worse than pearls or swine!
“I really am sorry,” the god said. “Without your powers, your fate, and your fortune, you are sure to suffer. You will be raised in hardship. Being unable to use magic will severely restrict your future. You will be even lonelier than in your previous life, and more confined, and suffer so much. But please, don’t let yourself hate others. Try to live a positive life.”
That was easy for him to say! But Hiroto Amamiya didn’t even get to shout that before he was plunged into the start of his second life.
The god—Reincarnation God Rodocolte—sent Hiroto and the others to a world called “Origin.” It was a lot like Earth, but operated on a fusion of science and magic. The 100 heroes born into the world of Origin struggled with the differences from Earth and their new parents. But fortune served and saved them. They made use of their special powers, and fate conspired to bring them all back together. They achieved respect and fame. They kept the truth of their reincarnations just among themselves, but before long they become officially recognized as the “100 Heroes.”
Without anyone knowing there should have been 101.
Rodocolte was the god of reincarnation for Earth, Origin, and multiple other worlds. People didn’t believe in him directly, or become priests in his service, and he couldn’t manifest in the world to make miracles happen or otherwise interfere with the course of events. All he could do was reincarnate souls and sometimes, very rarely, give something a nudge. But Rodocolte was by no means a nudger. The reincarnation system was well conceived and Rodocolte rarely had to make any tweaks at all.
A problem had started to present itself recently, however. One of the worlds he managed reincarnation for was falling behind the others in terms of progress.
While the other worlds flourished, this one world still struggled with all sorts of problems. Magic, warfare, literacy, science, engineering, art, cuisine. All sorts of fields saw an ebb and flow of development and degradation. The nations were the same, fighting endless wars, with no country managing to last a thousand years. Sometimes the emergence of a great hero would allow one nation to defeat its neighbors and become larger in size, but eventually it would fly apart at the seams and crumble back into smaller fragmented nations. Those that managed to achieve peace suffered attacks from powerful monsters, which caused more damage than even warfare.
There were other gods who managed this world directly and worked to lead the people. But when an insane demon king from another world arrived, those gods had been forced to summon heroes from a different world and fight alongside them to protect the stricken world. That fight had drained them of their powers. Some had fizzled out completely, while others clung to the barest fragments of their former divinity.
This world had to advance, somehow. It was simply stagnating at the moment, but that could lead to complete collapse at the drop of a hat. This was not a situation that Rodocolte could overlook. A reduction in the number of worlds he managed would mean a reduction in souls to reincarnate.
As he considered what action to take, Rodocolte had heard murmurings from the gods managing other worlds: that allowing souls to be reborn with their memories of their precious lives, what one might uncouthly called “cheating,” had allowed their worlds to make prodigious, proactive advances in almost every field.
He found that somewhat hard to believe. Giving just one person memories of their previous life surely couldn’t have such a powerful effect. And yet it also seemed worth giving a try. The world in question already had numerous heroes from other worlds summoned to it in order to fight the demon king. This summoning involved taking living people directly into the separate world. It was an advantage that fell somewhat short of “cheating,” but it was enough to defeat the demon king. While most of them had perished in the fighting, they had left numerous successes behind.
If he was going to give this a try, now was the perfect time, as the remaining evil gods subordinate to the demon king were not present. If the reincarnated didn’t need to fight some kind of supernatural battle against god-killing beings, having them bring fully installed cheat-powers would surely result in even greater change and development in the world.
Luckily for him, his authority easily allowed him to send the souls of the dead to the problem world and have them reborn there. Letting them keep their previous memories wasn’t difficult either. Producing cheat powers wasn’t a problem, with all the divine energy he had saved up.
That said, just sending one person wasn’t going to put his mind at ease. He decided to send 100, just to be on the safe side. And then, just as his preparations were completed, just over 100 people happened to die in a country called Japan, on a planet called Earth. According to rumor, these “cheat” souls had previously lived on an island nation with a unique culture, enjoying scientific and economic benefits. Japan fit the bill there perfectly.
Rodocolte didn’t have anyone to call him out, so he plucked out the bad apples from those who died on the ferry and decided to use these Japanese souls in his reincarnation plan.
However, he decided not to send them to the problem world, but to a different one—to Origin. Rodocolte selected Origin as a testing ground, in order to allow the souls to gather experience and knowledge and be ready for anything. Once they had finished their second lives on Origin, he would make adjustments with new powers and fates, and then reincarnate them in the problem world. He had accounted for everything, and so he was sure it would work.
However, Rodocolte was himself inexperienced at things like this and so he made one small mistake. A mistake that even he, a god, could not foresee the impact of upon the entirety of his grand design.