Reincarnation is a sacred rhythm in the great life cycle of the Omniverse.
Souls ebb and flow through the infinite tides of existence—some are judged and cast into realms of pure torment, where fire and brimstone sear away sin and self alike. Others ascend to higher planes, welcomed into lives of serene beauty and eternal ease.
But most? Most return. Reincarnated as something—someone—new.
On exceedingly rare occasions, a mortal soul proves so potent, so exceptional, that it transcends the mortal wheel entirely. Such a soul is elevated—enfolded into the very machinery of reincarnation itself, to serve as guide, as keeper, as part of the vast and holy apparatus that governs death and rebirth.
It is a delicate system, vast beyond mortal comprehension. A divine construct of perfect precision, with countless moving parts, all turning in harmony.
And in all its celestial grandeur, it has never erred.
…Until today.
At the highest tier of existence—beyond the reach of shinigami, beyond the ranks of grim harvesters, and even above the high gods of reincarnation—sits the Supreme God of Life and Death.
The Sovereign of Souls.
SOS, for short.
Though he prefers a simpler name: Sam—a casual twist on Samsara, the eternal cycle he oversees.
Ironically, Sam wasn't always his name. Once, it belonged to a lesser deity of reincarnation, one of his own subordinates. But after a brutal contest of divine warfare—a cosmic gamble played with the living's fates as chips—Sam won the title in the narrowest of victories. It cost a world war to settle the game.
A small name for such a large price.
His role, at a glance, seems straightforward: watch over the grand mechanism of rebirth and death. Ensure the eternal cycle spins without friction.
But simplicity, in this realm, is always a lie.
Grims, reapers, and lesser death gods traverse the lower realms, harvesting souls from across the endless tapestry of mortal worlds. Their task is grim but vital—escorting the dead to be weighed, judged, and processed by the high gods of reincarnation.
At the center of it all lies the Omni-Plane of Souls, a realm of incomprehensible scale. And at its heart churns a colossal vortex known only as the Well of Souls—a divine centrifuge that grinds, purifies, and distills raw essence from the dead. From there, these refined souls are funneled down through a cosmic spiral—the Bridge of the Omniverse—and cast into the stream of rebirth, ready to begin again.
But this system does not govern itself.
Sam is the mind above the machine, the unseen spine of the cycle. He ensures the grims do not backlog, that the high gods judge in accordance with true karma, and that the Well never falters in its rhythm. He oversees the metaphysical gears and cogs of existence itself—where even a momentary delay could ripple into catastrophes spanning galaxies.
Every soul, every life, every afterlife—all flow through a process that must be precise beyond measure.
A single misstep could trigger loops of suffering, paradoxes in time, or the collapse of entire reincarnation threads. Sam doesn't merely manage this—he guarantees it. He is the one being trusted with the alignment of cause, consequence, and continuity across the Omniverse.
And so he watches.
He observes.
He adjusts.
Flaws are rare. Errors, rarer still.
For longer than time has memory, the system ran with divine perfection.
Which is why Sam didn't notice the intruder at first—the anomaly that dared breach the silence of his sacred solitude.
...
In a place where time convulses like a dying god and reality mimics itself in broken reflections, something shoulderless and impossible happened.
A soul emerged.
It did not arrive through a gate, nor fall from a world above. It was not summoned, called, or conjured.
It simply was.
One moment: utter stillness.
The next: violation.
It appeared in defiance of every law Sam upheld—not born, not ferried, but manifested where manifestation was impossible. No trace of source or sequence, just the jarring presence of being in a place that tolerates none.
And this was no ordinary soul.
It hovered—barely. A mass of spiritual matter so violently shattered that it resembled a glass corpse held together by spite and entropy. Cracks veined its surface like a spiderweb etched in starlight, each fracture pulsing with a sickly, volatile fire that licked outward but found no air to burn.
It was not stable.
It wasn't even coherent.
Then came the convulsions—violent spasms that distorted its shape with every pulse, twisting it in and out of symmetrical wrongness. The space around it bent and recoiled, like the plane itself tried to reject this thing's presence, as though the very concept of it offended the foundations of reality.
And then it screamed.
Not with a mouth, not with a voice—but with soul-sound, a cry that shattered the silence of eternity.
It wasn't just heard. It was felt—like an explosion within the marrow of creation. A note of such raw, primordial agony that the Omni-Plane itself quivered in recognition.
A scream that could only come from something that should never have lived, but did.
A soul that had been broken so thoroughly, so cruelly, and for so long, that its very existence had become a curse etched into the folds of reality.
The scream yanked Sam out of his cosmic meditation like a black hole collapsing mid-mantra.
He blinked—not from shock, but as a divine reflex, the way existence flexes when touched by anomaly.
Nothing made sound in this realm.
Not since the Dawning Spiral had a single note echoed through this space.
Sound here was not a vibration but an intrusion—a trespass.
A whisper was a shudder across dimensions.
A scream?
A tremor in the foundation of continuity itself.
Sam stirred, a ripple of awareness stretching across layered planes like a god adjusting his throne across all timelines at once.
"Who dares manifest in the Hollow Before Breath?" he murmured, voice like a sunbeam through a prism of silence.
He turned to face the interloper.
And then he saw it.
It was... incorrect.
A soul unhinged from definition, splintered beyond karmic context, rotating through the sacred and the profane like a wheel of paradox with no hub.
It wasn't broken.
It was oppositional to harmony.
A fracture given thought.
An ego cracked open and slathered in its own shadows, twisting through impossible angles, contorting across philosophies not yet imagined.
Worse, it writhed not in agony—but in intent.
It sought not peace, nor rebirth, but integration.
Corruption through assimilation.
A jagged shard trying to wedge itself into the gears of the eternal cycle and demand redefinition.
Sam narrowed his infinite gaze.
"You are not a soul," he pronounced. "You are a heresy wearing the mask of one."
The thing responded with a convulsion that rippled through fundamental law, as if trying to rewrite the scripts of spirit by sheer density of madness.
And it almost succeeded.
Even obliterated, its essence clung—feral, stubborn, metabolizing meaning like carrion.
It wanted to nest in the divine code, like mold in a holy text.
To infest the structure of reincarnation, and rewrite itself by corrupting the software of existence.
Sam exhaled—a breath that rang like a chime through the spheres.
"You reach for the sacred and bring with you rot," he said. "You do not seek salvation. You seek to colonize the cycle."
His hand rose, ancient and nameless, and with a gesture unbound by direction or speed, the entity was undone.
Dismantled from all facets of time and substance.
But the ashes still breathed.
Residual will.
Insatiable.
A quiet, pulsing throb of 'I still am.'
Sam tilted his head.
"Even scattered, you wish to persist? You cling with the teeth of a starving godling."
A pause. Then, softly:
"So be it."
He extended his palm once more, and gathered the seething remnants—more infection than identity—and cast them down.
Down past the Judgment Arcs.
Down past the Luminous Courts.
Down into the Well of Souls, where spirit is stripped to marrow and truth, and only that which may begin anew survives.
"Let the furnace remember you," he intoned. "Let the current cleanse what was never whole."
And then… silence again.
Almost.
For deep beneath the vortex, where raw essence churned, the Well hiccupped.
Just once.
Like something ancient had tasted ash… and didn't quite like it.
As Sam turned from the dissipating echoes of obliteration, his gaze settled once more on the aftermath—a crater in the weave of existence where the chaos had unraveled.
But something remained.
Amid the scattered residue of corruption, where tainted shards had twisted and screamed, now lay a single soul—fractured beyond mortal comprehension, yet undeniably whole in its suffering.
It pulsed faintly.
Barely coherent.
A silhouette of consciousness held together by nothing but stubborn essence.
Sam's presence loomed over it, timeless and still, and in that moment, a memory surfaced—not one summoned, but one etched into the marrow of his existence.
A directive.
Old as his first breath.
Spoken before language.
Carved into the law of his being.
"Bring me a rupturing sentient soul."
His eyes widened—not in surprise, but in recognition.
This was it.
This was the fulfillment of a cosmic request cast into the void long before the stars began to speak.
"So… this is why you have come," he whispered, each syllable echoing like an edict across the inner folds of the plane.
A flood of feeling washed through him.
Dread, at the impossible convergence that led to this moment.
Fear, not for himself—but for the implications such a soul could carry.
Exhilaration, at the appearance of a soul matching his primeval command.
Grief, for the purity that may have once inhabited this vessel, now likely lost.
And finally... Curiosity.
Endless, unshakable curiosity.
For this soul—this impossible wretch—was not merely wounded.
It had been ground down, eon by eon, across lifetimes.
The magnitude of damage told a tale no chronicle could contain.
This was no singular tragedy.
This was a soul that had been reborn and butchered, again and again—days apart, perhaps hours—reaped before it could root, shredded before it could remember, millions of times over.
A cosmic loop of torment.
Natural law would not permit such recurrence. Probability refused it.
And yet—here it was.
Before him.
Whimpering beneath the gravity of its own history.
Cracked, incomplete... and unreasonably alive.
Sam studied it, the air thick with reverence and trepidation.
"This should not be," he murmured. "And yet, it is."
And that fact alone threatened to rewrite everything.
"What befell this soul…"
Sam's voice rolled like thunder hidden behind silk, measured and low.
"…was no accident."
"This was deliberate—shaped by unseen wills, guided by threads tangled too tightly for time to unwind. I know not the full breadth of your suffering, not yet. But the fault is mine, as much as the system's. You passed into my dominion and were left adrift—unseen, unsheltered… abandoned in a place where no soul should linger, not even in theory."
He lowered his gaze to the trembling fragment of being before him.
"I cannot speak to the wounds you bore before your arrival. But what I can speak to—what I cannot ignore—is what deepened them. Exposure to the raw essence of Verl Makia—that ancient, volatile strata of metaphysical entropy—has torn through your spirit with impunity. It is a force forbidden to mortal senses, corrosive to divine touch. No lesser god would dare approach you now."
"They would call you forsaken," he said, softly. "A soul unanchored. Broken beyond recursion. They would cast you to the Void and call it mercy."
He stepped closer.
"But I…"
He paused. And the silence bent in reverence.
"…I am not as they are."
"I am the Hand that stirs the Wheel.
The Judge whose word carves the next turning.
The Flame that reignites even the dimmest ember."
He raised his arm. Light coalesced in his palm—not harsh, not radiant, but gentle, as if made from the first warmth of creation itself.
"You are not lost to me.
You shall not fade."
His voice rose—not loud, but final, the kind of sound that reality reshapes itself around.
"I hereby claim you—once more and forever—under my mantle, within my sight, bound by my decree. Let this be etched into the firmament and the deep:
By my will, you shall rise again.
So is my word.
So it is done."
With care befitting eternity, Sam lifted the broken soul into his arms—gently, as one might cradle a star on the verge of collapse—and turned from the hollow where entropy still whispered.
Then, in silence, the Sovereign of Souls walked the long path back to his throne.
To mend an error that should not have been possible.
To tend to a wound that defied repair.
To honor a vow spoken long before even gods were born.
...
A fragile soul stirred in a space that defied reason.
There was no earth beneath him, no sky above—only a boundless expanse where direction was a lie and dimension bent like soft metal under a celestial flame. Vision did not return so much as happen—as if reality was slowly remembering how to exist. Shapes bled into one another like paint dissolving underwater, drained of color and sanity both. Not quite a Da Vinci sketch. Certainly not a Van Gogh. More like a collaborative piece by an unmedicated Daril Pus-Eye from the third astral psych ward and a blindfolded god trying surrealism for the first time.
Disoriented, the soul dropped to his knees.
Or tried to.
There was no "ground"—only the idea of one, and even that seemed to recoil from his presence. Perception collapsed. Thought unraveled. And in that moment, where cognition failed to keep pace with sensation, the soul began to plummet.
Downward? Upward? Inward?
There were no answers.
"W-where am I!? W–WHAT IS THIS PLACE!?"
The cry reverberated—not through air, but through being, rippling through the emptiness like a scream into a still lake that forgot how to ripple.
Desperate, he shut his eyes and reached inward. Not with limbs—he had none—but with intent, raw and unformed. He thought of solid ground, of gravity and shape, of something real to hold on to.
And the void obeyed.
When his eyes opened again—if they could be called eyes—he found himself standing upon a featureless white plane, endless and silent. No sky, no horizon, no landmark. Just the echo of thought made into form.
Here, time stretched and folded like silk caught in a breeze. Seconds bled into minutes, minutes into possibility. He stared into the nothing until the nothing stared back, offering neither comfort nor terror—only the weightless absence of context.
He didn't know how long he stood there.
Could have been a heartbeat.
Could have been a century.
And somehow… both felt too short.
He reached out—not with hands, but with awareness. A gentle probing of the space around him, seeking something to anchor to.
What he discovered, however, was overwhelming.
It wasn't just that he could sense the space—it was that the space could sense him.
"This is... strange," he thought, or perhaps simply felt. "I'm part of this place, like my thoughts echo through its very fabric. But I'm still… me. Separate. It's like I'm watching myself from outside myself."
The moment hung in stillness, a breath held by a cosmos without lungs.
Then came a voice.
Not loud. Not soft. Simply there.
[I see that you're finally awake.]
It didn't come from the front or back, from above or below. It arrived from behind only because he expected it to.
A man stood before him, draped in a robe of immaculate white—so pure it defied shadow. The garment shimmered with threads of gold, their embroidery so elaborate it seemed less like decoration and more like scripture made manifest. Ancient symbols looped and danced across the fabric, shifting as if alive, whispering meanings too vast for mortal comprehension.
He tried to focus—just for a moment—on the symbols, to decipher their purpose.
That was a mistake.
The space around him shuddered, dimmed, as if recoiling from the very notion of understanding. Cracks of distortion rippled through the airless void, warping sight, sound, and thought alike. It was as though reality itself disapproved of his curiosity.
Then the pain struck—sharp and relentless—a migraine of cosmic proportions, as if his mind had been dragged across a thousand sleepless nights in a single heartbeat.
He fell forward, gasping, clutching at a head that barely felt like his own.
"[You would do well not to attempt that again,]" the figure said, voice calm yet resonant—like a bell tolling across the boundary of thought and dream. "[Your soul is already strained past what should be possible. Peering into another's soul-script, especially one woven from divine law, is... unwise. Even the most intact of mortal spirits would unravel at the first syllable. You, in your current state, would simply cease to be.]"
As he spoke, the gnawing pain began to recede. The searing knowledge—whatever ancient truths had clawed their way into his consciousness—dissolved like fog at sunrise, leaving behind a strange sense of calm, as if it had never existed.
The soul slowly looked up again.
This time, the robe had changed.
Gone were the impossible scriptural weavings that danced on the edge of comprehension. In their place, simpler sigils marked the fabric—arcane but inert. The most prominent among them was emblazoned at the figure's chest: a great, radiant Tao symbol, shifting gently between shadow and light.
It pulsed—not with power, but with meaning.
One he could almost grasp.
Almost.
After hearing the figure's words, the soul—tentatively, foolishly—tried once more to focus. This time, not on the intricate robes or maddening scripts, but on the man's face.
At first glance, it was the face of perfection—eerily so. Well-trimmed brows crowned deep sapphire eyes with pupils like polished ivory. A flawless jawline framed lips pale as snow, and porcelain skin bore no blemish, no wrinkle, no trace of time or imperfection. His silver-grey hair, tied back in a gentle ponytail, cascaded down the back of his robe like liquid moonlight.
It was a visage worthy of reverence. Of awe. One might call it divine, if such a word had not already been diminished by overuse.
The soul, caught in that reverie, made the fatal mistake of focusing.
Reality blinked.
No—recoiled.
The alabaster expanse twisted into a pitch-black void, and the being before him was no longer a priest, no longer a porcelain statue from the firmament. Now, standing in his place, was a man of tan, earthy complexion, hair cropped short and gray like aging starlight, flashing a grin of teeth too white, too perfect.
Where divine serenity once stood, there now stood... a negotiator. A broker. A shady merchant of miracles. His golden eyes shimmered with too many layers of meaning, and his pupils were so dark they seemed to swallow light—and questions—with equal indifference.
'Yep,' the soul thought dryly, 'All he needs now is a pair of shades and maybe a couple earrings and—oh, naturally…'
His eyes fell to the man's ears, only to find a small, delicate earring glinting in the gloom. In its center: a tomoe—curved and coiling like an eternal question mark.
As if cued by the thought, the robes were gone.
In their place, a sharply tailored black suit emerged, stitched with gold embroidery so fine it might have been spun from sigils. The symbols from before now adorned his cufflinks, and just beneath the breast pocket, a miniature Tao gleamed, nested in golden thread.
Subconsciously, the soul lowered his gaze.
It wasn't reverence. It was reflex.
This wasn't a god that could be seen clearly. This was a presence that adjusted to the eye's refusal to understand—a truth so absolute, perception itself rerouted to keep from fracturing.
Before the soul could even open his mouth, the transformed figure snarled—his voice sharp, unfiltered, and brimming with disdain.
[You... YOU DARE ATTEMPT TO COMPREHEND ME? Me? A Supreme?]
He took a step forward, presence pressing like collapsing dimensions.
[I thought you were merely slow before, but now I see—you're absolutely deranged. Is your annihilation some kind of hobby? Shall I cast you headfirst into the Abyss and save us both the trouble? You're already halfway there!]
"Wh-What did I even do?! I haven't said a word!"
[You don't need to speak, you fragmented sack of ignorance!] the being barked. [This realm isn't bound by lips and lungs. Here, every flicker of thought bleeds across the walls. I hear you as clearly as if you screamed it across the stars.]
"…What?"
A pause.
A very long pause.
[…I loathe mortals.]
"Can you, uh… repeat that?"
[I am literally reading your thoughts.]
"!!!"
Startled, the soul squeezed his eyes shut, trying to think of nothing, which of course only made him obsess over not thinking anything.
[…Oh great. Now you're actively thinking about not thinking.]
"I'm sorry! I panicked!"
[Tch.] This is getting spiritually aggravating. I ought to patch this idiocy before I start hemorrhaging divine patience.
He snapped his fingers.
Somewhere, reality flinched.
The moment the figure spoke those last words, the soul felt the world shift again—like thought becoming architecture. He opened his eyes for the third time.
The void was gone.
In its place stood a sleek, monochrome corner office. Black-and-white furniture laid out with sterile precision, accented only by two lively ferns perched beside vast, angular windows. Through them, the view defied mortal vocabulary: floating islands drifted in perfect rhythm, stars waltzed across a velvet sky, and light spilled like spilled ink across a kaleidoscope of colors. A massive celestial whirlpool churned far below, and beyond that—an endless field of flowers blooming in every hue ever imagined and a few that hadn't been.
In the center of the office sat a grand marble desk—polished, oversized, and suspiciously spotless. A laptop hummed quietly atop it, open and already logged in (though to what, the soul dared not ask). Two chairs faced each other across the desk. The figure from before sat in the manager's chair, legs crossed casually, as if they hadn't just threatened eternal obliteration a few minutes prior.
But the figure had changed again.
He still bore the same immaculate facial structure and ponytail as before, but now his hair shimmered in a salt-and-pepper gradient—white streaks flowing from front to back like brushstrokes on sacred parchment.
His left eye now gleamed with that ethereal sapphire hue, its white pupil encircled by a glowing Seal of Solomon—spinning slowly, like a divine gyroscope. His right eye, still golden, bore a dark inverted pentagram etched just beneath the iris, pulsing faintly with something ancient and ambiguous.
As for his attire, it fused the past iterations into something new. The white priestly robe returned, but now the left half was drenched in shadow—black as mourning silk. Seven distinct symbols ran down that darkened side, each representing one of the seven cardinal sins, but stylized with artistic reverence, like divine warnings etched into scripture.
Earrings—each a different symbol of reincarnation from across time and cultures—dangled from his ears, and a necklace strung with fragments of forgotten cosmologies hung against his chest.
He was no longer just divine.
He was duality incarnate.
The priest and the pragmatist. The holy and the heretic. The wheel and the fire beneath it.
And he looked very, very pleased with himself.
"Ahhh, much better," the figure sighed, his voice now a calm ripple on a deep pond. "Apologies for the earlier theatrics. Normally I don't need to go through all these formalities when meeting someone. Most who encounter me do so because they've earned it—either by climbing the celestial hierarchy or by already existing somewhere near my metaphysical weight class, if that makes sense."
He poured two cups of steaming green tea from a cast-iron kettle that hadn't been there a moment ago, the scent strangely nostalgic, as if it remembered a home the soul had never known.
[You really caught me off guard, to be honest. Crashing in like that? Unexpected. But... given the circumstances,] he gestured vaguely, possibly at the soul's shattered essence, possibly at existence itself, [I suppose it was inevitable.]
He handed one cup across the desk, then leaned back in his chair, fingers interlaced. [Anyway, I imagine you've got more questions than functioning soul matter right now, so go ahead—ask. We've got a bit of time before things get... procedural.]
The soul quietly took his seat across from the godlike being, unsure whether to trust, question, or simply stare.
"..."
[...]
They sat in mutual silence. One trying to find the right words.
The other… waiting like eternity had nowhere better to be.
Taking a deep breath that filled his lungs to the brim—if such things still mattered in this strange place—the soul finally opened his mouth, and the dam burst.
"Okay, what the actual fuck is going on?! The last thing I remember is falling asleep in bed next to my wife—my wife—and now I'm here?! What even is this place?! And who the hell are you supposed to be?! First I wake up in some kind of psychedelic fever dream with swirling black stains everywhere, then I meet this guy in a glowing monk-priest getup—your getup, actually—who looked like some celestial beauty pageant winner! He started rambling about soul stuff while I was basically half-comatose, then everything blinked out and suddenly I'm being cussed out by some mind-reading mob boss version of the same guy who blamed me for stuff I didn't even do and—"
"[Whoa, whoa, slow down there, turbo.]" The man raised a hand, half amused, half exasperated. "[Yeah, I guess I should've seen this coming. Been a long time since I had to handle front-desk duties. Usually the Grims handle this kind of post-mortem intake.]"
"Post-mortem? Wait... are you saying I'm dead?!"
"[Well, yeah. This is Limbo, the space between. When a soul's vessel—your body, I mean—reaches its limit and stops functioning, the soul disconnects and ends up here. Usually, souls pass by the—]"
"STOP! Just—STOP! Don't just casually drop 'you're dead' and then keep explaining like you're reading off a damn brochure! I don't even know how I died!!"
The man sighed, dragging a hand down his face. "[Rude. Here I am giving you my undivided attention and generously offering answers, and you won't even let me finish one sentence.]"
"THAT WAS WAY MORE THAN ONE SENTENCE! And I deserve to freak out a little here, don't you think?! I—"
"[WILL YOU JUST SHUT UP?! One more outburst and I'll grind your soul into celestial mulch and yeet it into the Eternal Abyss myself! Seriously, what is wrong with you? I was told you'd take all this with poise and spiritual maturity... Wait.]"
Something in his tone shifted.
The man vanished from behind the desk and reappeared directly in front of him in a blink. Before he could react, the being jabbed his thumbs—one into the center of his chest, the other to his forehead—with terrifying speed and precision.
A GONG like struck metal echoed through his entire being, followed by a surge of energy—pure and violent—crackling through him like lightning through a power line.
He screamed. A raw, guttural sound wrenched from his throat as his body convulsed uncontrollably, limbs jerking like a marionette in a storm.
"[Shit,]" the figure muttered under his breath.
Without hesitation, the god began flashing through hand seals—hundreds of them—his hands a blur of practiced divinity. With a sudden pivot and a crushing kick, he sent the soul's astral form flying across the office. The body slammed into the floor, rolled, and skidded to a stop on its stomach, limp and twitching.
Wasting no time, the being straddled the soul's back, pinning its arms beneath his knees. As the final seal snapped into place, his right index finger ignited with a pale golden glow.
With unnerving precision, he began etching glowing sigils—resembling the divine scriptures once woven into his robes—along the spine. Each symbol seared into the soul's essence like branding iron to flesh.
A scream tore from him—so piercing it didn't echo, it split the space around them. His eyes rolled back. His body went still.
As darkness swallowed his consciousness once more, the last thing he heard was the divine's muttered sigh:
"[...This session's gonna be a long one, isn't it?]"