Chapter 2: Rebirth of a God
Crack.
The sound split through him—a deep, wet fracture that shuddered through Vikram’s skull like bone cracking from the inside. It rippled through the darkness, through the nothing, through whatever he was now.
Crack. Crack.
He couldn’t see. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t feel his fingers, his chest, his legs. There was no heartbeat. No lungs expanding. No blood pumping. Just the cracking—sharp, rhythmic, accelerating.
What—
Light punched through the darkness. A seam of blinding white split the void, and Vikram’s consciousness lurched toward it instinctively, violently, like a drowning man clawing for surface.
The shell shattered.
That’s what it was. A shell. He burst through it in a shower of crystalline fragments that dissolved into motes of light the instant they left his... his what? He looked down. He had no hands. No body. He was a point of awareness suspended in a space so vast it made his mind buckle.
Stars.
Billions of them. No—more. An ocean of light stretched in every direction, swirling in spirals of white and gold and violet. Galaxies rotated in slow, silent indifference. Nebulae bled across the dark—crimson, electric blue—like bruises on something vast. A binary star system burned to his left, two suns locked in orbit, their coronas tangling.
Below him—if there was a below—a planet drifted. Green and brown, scarred by mountain ranges and bisected by rivers that caught the light of distant stars. Farther away, another planet, this one a gas giant with rings of frozen debris, rotating in lazy indifference.
The cosmic egg he’d emerged from was gone. Not a trace. As if it had never existed.
I’m dead.
The thought arrived cold and clean.
I died. The truck. The street. The blood on the asphalt. I died.
He tried to breathe. The reflex was there—the instinct to inhale, to fill lungs that didn’t exist. Nothing happened. No air. No body to receive it.
Am I a ghost? Is this the afterlife? Some kind of—
A sound chimed. Soft. Musical. Familiar.
A translucent panel materialized—not in front of him, exactly. It appeared *inside* his perception, floating where his eyes would have been. White text on a dark background. Clean edges. System font.
[ Welcome to the Eldoria Universe. ]
[ You have been chosen as a Candidate for Omnipotent God. ]
[ A Chest has been provided. ]
[ Open it to set your Domain. ]
Vikram stared at the panel.
He stared at it for a long time.
Eldoria Universe. Candidate for Omnipotent God. Chest. Domain.
The words were absurd. They were insane. They were the kind of nonsense you’d find in a bad web novel targeted at teenagers who had never touched grass.
But the panel. The panel.
That chime. That exact chime—the ascending three-note melody that played when a System notification appeared. He’d heard it ten million times. He’d heard it in his sleep. He’d heard it so many times that his brain had stopped registering it consciously, the way you stop hearing the hum of a refrigerator.
That’s a Theos Online notification sound.
He focused on the panel. The font. He examined it the way a forger examines a signature—stroke by stroke, pixel by pixel.
Monospaced. Sans-serif. Square brackets, not rounded. Left-justified with a fixed margin. Background opacity at 70%—he knew, because he’d burned three weeks in Year 2 reverse-engineering the UI specs to optimize his HUD layout.
This is the same interface.
His mind went still. Then everything rearranged.
He wasn’t in the afterlife. He wasn’t a ghost. He wasn’t hallucinating in some hospital bed while doctors pumped morphine into his shattered body.
He was in a live server.
A different world. A different map. But the same engine. The same rules. The same System that he had spent five years dismantling, exploiting, and mastering down to its source code.
Theos Online. The Divine System. Faith Points. Domains. Believers. Miracles.
He scanned the void again. The stars. The planets. The galaxies. All of it rendered in a detail that Theos’s graphics engine could never achieve—but the underlying architecture, the skeleton beneath the skin, was identical.
I know this.
Something moved through him. Not warmth. Not comfort. Something older than both. The feeling a predator gets when it recognizes familiar ground.
I know this system better than anyone who has ever lived.
He looked at the notification again. Candidate for Omnipotent God. In Theos, that was the starting rank. The bottom of the ladder. A nobody. A god with no followers, no territory, no power.
But he wasn’t a nobody.
He was Rank One.
He was the player who had broken every meta, cracked every patch, and fed ten million believers into a weapon that erased two gods from existence in a single move.
Different world. Same rules.
Vikram—no. Zephyr—looked out at the universe. The stars burned. The planets turned. And for the first time since the truck, he felt something that wasn’t pain.
Alright.
He focused on the notification. The chest. The domain selection. The start.
Let’s play.
***
Old habits die hard. Even dead ones.
"Status Window!"
The words tore out of him—not from a throat, not from vocal cords, but from somewhere deeper. Pure instinct. Five years of muscle memory didn’t care that the muscles were gone.
Nothing happened.
Then:
[ System Initializing... ]
[ Please Wait. ]
[ ██████████░░░░░░░░░░ 47% ]
Zephyr watched the progress bar crawl. Forty-seven percent. Fifty-two. Sixty-one.
initializing. Not "unavailable." Not "error." Initializing.
In Theos, the System initialized once—when your account was created. After that, it was always on, always running in the background. If it was initializing now, that meant this was a new account. A fresh install. Day zero.
Seventy-eight percent. Eighty-five.
He waited. Patience was a weapon. He’d won three consecutive championships not by being the fastest player, but by being the most patient. React less. Observe more. Let the enemy make the first mistake.
Ninety-two. Ninety-seven.
[ System Initialization ]
[ ██████████████████████ 100% ]
[ COMPLETE. ]
The panel dissolved.
For half a second, the void went quiet. Stars. Darkness. Nothing.
Then the cascade hit.
Panels exploded into existence around him—not one, not two, but a barrage of notifications that filled his awareness like a slot machine paying out. They stacked on top of each other, overlapping, chiming in rapid succession, each one accompanied by that familiar three-note melody.
[Inventory System: ONLINE]
[Belief System: ONLINE]
[Territory Management: ONLINE]
[Miracle System: ONLINE]
[Quest System: ONLINE]
[Domain Registry: ONLINE]
Six core systems. Same as Theos. Identical architecture.
The chimes kept coming, blurring together into something almost musical.
[Loading Creations from Previous World...]
[Source Account Detected: ZEPHYR]
[Verification: RANK 1 — CONFIRMED]
Zephyr’s attention locked onto the panel like a sniper scope clicking into focus.
Previous world. It’s reading my Theos data.
[Loading Blueprints... 2,847 items]
[Loading Divine Artifacts... 314 items]
[Loading NPC Profiles... 1,206 entries]
[Loading Skill Trees... COMPLETE]
[Loading Combat Formations... COMPLETE]
[Loading Terrain Analytics... COMPLETE]
The numbers scrolled past. Every building schematic he’d ever unlocked—from the Mud Shrine to the Celestial Citadel that had cost six months and three server wars. Every divine artifact. Every NPC he’d ever recruited, trained, or stolen. Generals. Assassins. Scholars. His entire civilization, compressed into a loading screen.
Everything.
[All items have been stored in Inventory.]
[WARNING: Activation requires Faith Points (FP).]
[Current FP: Insufficient for most stored items.]
The warning flashed red, then faded.
Zephyr didn’t flinch. He just read it again, slower.
I have the library. I don’t have the key.
Every blueprint, every artifact, every NPC—locked behind Faith Point costs he couldn’t pay. His entire Theos empire was sitting right there in inventory. He could see it. He just couldn’t touch it.
Generous and cruel. Just like the devs.
The cascade finally slowed. The chiming stopped. The panels consolidated into a single, clean interface hovering in the void before him—his Status Window. The real one.
He focused on it.
[ STATUS WINDOW ]
[ Name: Unknown ]
[ Title: Candidate ]
[ Rank: Neophyte Deity ]
[ Level: 0 ]
[ Main Domain: Empty ]
[ Sub Domain 1: Empty ]
[ Sub Domain 2: Empty ]
[ Faith Points (FP): 100 / 500 ]
[ Divine Power (DP): 0 ]
[ Believers: 0 ]
[ Heroes: 0 ]
Zephyr read every line. Twice.
Name: Unknown. That was standard. In Theos, a god’s name wasn’t chosen—it was given. Your first believers named you based on how they perceived you. If you healed them, they called you the Merciful. If you burned their enemies, they called you the Wrathful. The name was a reflection of your first impression. Until then, you were nobody.
Title: Candidate.* The lowest rung. Below Neophyte. Below everything. A title that said, *"You exist, but barely."
Faith Points: 100 out of 500. Enough to cast one Blessing. Maybe two if he was efficient. Not enough for an Intervention. Not even close to a Smite.
Believers: Zero. Zero income. Zero FP generation. Zero influence.
Heroes: Zero. No champions. No agents. No hands to act on his behalf in the mortal world.
He stared at the profile in the silence of the void. The stars reflected off the translucent panel, distorting behind the text like light through water.
Level zero. A hundred Faith Points. No followers. No domain. No name.
In Theos Online, this was the screen you saw for exactly thirty seconds before the tutorial handed you a pre-built village and walked you through the basics.
There was no tutorial here. No hand-holding. No starter village. Just an empty status screen and an inventory full of weapons he couldn’t afford to draw.
The most experienced god in existence. With the worst starting hand in history.
He almost laughed. Would have, if he’d had a throat. The irony was too clean. The kind of cosmic joke the Theos devs would have hidden as an Easter egg.
But Zephyr didn’t laugh. He cataloged.
One hundred FP. That was the variable. That was the seed capital. Everything—every plan, every strategy, every move from this point forward—would flow from how he spent those hundred points.
Don’t waste it. Don’t rush. Think.
The universe hung around him, patient and vast. The stars didn’t care about his plans. The planets didn’t know he existed.
Not yet.
***
The chest was waiting.
It materialized the moment Zephyr dismissed the Status Window—a translucent cube of light, roughly three feet across, rotating slowly in the void before him. It pulsed with a soft golden glow that cast moving highlights across the nearby star field, like sunlight through stained glass.
He’d seen a thousand of these in Theos. System Chests. Randomized loot containers that determined a god’s starting trajectory. In competitive play, the chest roll was everything. A bad roll at the start could cost you the first hundred hours of gameplay. A good one could catapult you into the meta before your opponents had built their first shrine.
And this is the only roll I’ll ever get.
He focused on the chest. A prompt appeared.
[ DOMAIN SELECTION CHEST ]
[ Contains: 3 Random Domains ]
[ Select 1 as MAIN DOMAIN. ]
[ Remaining 2 become SUB DOMAINS. ]
[ WARNING: This selection is PERMANENT and IRREVERSIBLE. ]
[ OPEN ]
Permanent. Irreversible. Two of his least favorite words. In Theos, the forums were full of players who rage-quit after rolling garbage domains like Dust or Moss. The meta was brutal—certain domains were simply stronger than others, and the community had tier lists updated weekly.
But Zephyr had never relied on tier lists. Tier lists were for players who followed the meta. He created the meta.
He focused on the [OPEN] prompt.
The chest cracked open. Golden light poured out, and three shapes rose from within—not objects, but glyphs. Symbols of raw meaning, hovering in the void. Each one pressed against his awareness differently. Weight. Temperature. Texture. Like standing in front of three open furnaces, each burning a different fuel.
[ DOMAIN SELECTION ]
[ 1. ⚒ FORGE ]
[ Authority over creation, crafting, and transformation of materials. ]
[ 2. ⚡ STORM ]
[ Authority over lightning, wind, and atmospheric fury. ]
[ 3. 📖 KNOWLEDGE ]
[ Authority over information, secrets, and hidden truths. ]
[ Select your MAIN DOMAIN: 1/2/3 ]
Zephyr stared at the three options.
Forge. Storm. Knowledge.
In Theos Online, he could have evaluated these in his sleep. He’d memorized every domain’s scaling coefficients, synergy charts, and counter-matchups. But that knowledge was from a game server with a fixed meta. This was a different server. Different players. Different competition.
What haven’t changed are the fundamentals.
He ran the analysis.
Storm. Raw offensive power. High burst damage. Flashy miracles—lightning bolts, hurricanes, divine wrath. In Theos, Storm was a Tier 1 combat domain. Top-tier for PVP. It attracted aggressive players who wanted to smite first and ask questions never.
The problem with Storm is the same problem that killed Titanus. Pure offense with no economic engine. You can burn cities, but you can’t build them. You win battles and lose wars.
Not the foundation. Storm was a fist. He needed an engine.
Knowledge. Information warfare. Hidden truths. The ability to see what others couldn’t—enemy troop movements, resource locations, hidden quests. In Theos, Knowledge was a Tier 2 support domain. Powerful in the hands of a patient player, but it generated almost no Faith on its own. You couldn’t convert believers with *information*. People didn’t pray to a library.
Knowledge is leverage. But leverage without infrastructure is just trivia.
Sub Domain material. Good for reading the board. But you couldn’t build a religion on secrets alone.
Forge.
He focused on the glyph. The symbol of hammer and anvil burned with a deep, molten gold that pulsed like a heartbeat.
Forge. Creation. Crafting. Transformation of materials. In Theos, Forge was a Tier 1 economic domain—not flashy, not dramatic, but devastating in the mid-to-late game. A Forge god could build structures faster, craft divine artifacts cheaper, and upgrade believer equipment at half the normal cost. The Forge didn’t win the first fight. It won the tenth. And the hundredth. And every fight after that.
Forge is infrastructure. Infrastructure is compound interest. Compound interest is how you turn a hundred Faith Points into a million.
He thought of the 2,847 blueprints sitting in his inventory. Every one of them needed materials. Every one of them needed *creation*. Without Forge, those blueprints were just data. With Forge, they were an assembly line.
Forge synergy with inventory: maximum. Economic scaling: exponential. Storm covers the early-game vulnerability. Knowledge fills the blind spots.
He ran it one more time. Not because he doubted it. Because permanent decisions deserved the extra three seconds.
Forge Main. Storm Sub. Knowledge Sub.
"Domain selected," he said. "Forge."
He focused on [1].
The glyph erupted. The molten gold shattered outward in a ring of light, and for an instant, Zephyr felt *heat*—real, tangible warmth flooding through his consciousness like a current of liquid metal. It surged through him and settled into his core, heavy and ancient and alive.
[ MAIN DOMAIN SET: FORGE ]
[ Grade: Fragment ]
[ SUB DOMAIN 1: STORM ]
[ Grade: Fragment ]
[ SUB DOMAIN 2: KNOWLEDGE ]
[ Grade: Fragment ]
[ Domain abilities will unlock as Grade increases. ]
[ Fragment → Lesser → Greater → Supreme ]
Fragment. The lowest grade. In Theos, a Fragment-grade domain gave you access to the most basic passive buffs—maybe a 5% crafting speed bonus for Forge, a minor damage buff for Storm, a slightly increased detection range for Knowledge. Nothing game-changing. Not yet.
But he didn’t need game-changing. He needed a direction.
And now he had one.
The Status Window updated silently in the corner of his perception:
[ Main Domain: Forge (Fragment) ]
[ Sub Domain 1: Storm (Fragment) ]
[ Sub Domain 2: Knowledge (Fragment) ]
First decision made. Irreversible. No regrets.
He looked at the void. The chest was gone—dissolved into motes of light that scattered among the stars like embers from a dead forge.
Now I need Believers.
He didn’t need to think about the next move. He’d been thinking about it since the Status Window went blank.
Domain: set. Inventory: locked. Profile: empty. The only thing missing was the one thing no System could generate for him.
People.