“Is that alright?”

“Of course. Having lessons surrounded by books will help you concentrate even better.”

A history lesson taught to a young child. How difficult could it possibly be?

I told Annie I wanted to have the lesson in the library, less out of any scholarly mood and more because I couldn’t be bothered to walk all the way back to my room.

As expected, the history lesson was practically at the level of a read-aloud fairy tale.

I had to suppress the urge to ask the teacher to please just use a normal lecture tone, and sat through the class.

After spending the day in such a blur and falling asleep, I met a god who came to me in a dream.

***

[Good grief, it’s all tangled up. Here too, and here…… Oh d*mn, here too?]

The strange rabbit, roughly the size of a person, which had been frantically prodding and examining my head, claimed to be a god.

The god of this world.

I thought, what kind of nonsensical dream is this, but then again, the very fact that I had been dropped into a fantasy world was already nonsensical.

So a rabbit god wasn’t too hard to accept.

My tolerance for absorbing unreasonable things had apparently risen enormously in the span of a single day, without my even noticing.

The fluffy front paws of the self-proclaimed god pressed carefully and methodically against my head.

[No good, it’s the same here!]

It had said it noticed something off about my condition while watching me throughout the day and wanted to take a look. From my perspective, it just felt like getting a head massage.

Right. Let’s just see how far this absurd situation goes.

With that mindset, I gave up resisting and waited, and the rabbit, which had been examining my head and body for some time, finally took a step back.

[I’m sorry. It seems the overwrite went wrong.]

“What?”

The rabbit, a rabbit of all things, heaved a heavy sigh. The ears that should have been standing upright drooped down toward the floor on both sides.

[It’s too complicated to explain fully…… Anyway, it was my mistake, but it wasn’t intentional. In the process of patching errors and restoring damaged data, I overwrote your soul and it seems that ended up causing yet another unforeseen error.]

An engineering rabbit, apparently. Still, it was comparatively more familiar than a fantasy world, which made it easier.

But while it was easy to follow, that made it even harder to understand. What was overwritten that caused an error?

“When you say overwritten, you mean my soul?”

[Yes. Or, um? Should I say “yes” differently? Anyway, the phrasing isn’t what matters. For some reason, when I was initializing your soul, half of the information values that had been erased came back to life.]

Information values?

“I need a bit of an explanation. By information values, do you mean my memories?”

I had been puzzling all day over why this possession, which had no place in my fate, had happened and this was the reason?

The grim reaper I met on the forty-ninth day after my death had said it clearly. You will forget all your memories and be reincarnated.

And yet here I was, with my memories fully intact, not only shoved into the body of a girl I had never met, but thrown into a world I had never seen in my life.

It truly made no sense, but listening to this rabbit that claimed to be a god, I was starting to feel the pieces fitting together in a baffling way.

[That and several other things, collectively. The specifications assigned to a soul, and various other things…… You probably won’t understand even if I explain. Anyway, I definitely erased all the memories and overwrote your data here in a clean state and that shattered completely. I’m truly sorry.]

The rabbit, which had casually rattled off that it had initialized someone’s soul and stuffed it into yet another person’s body, repeatedly apologized in a deflated voice and gave me a small bow.

It looked like someone doing a theme park mascot costume job, but no matter where I looked, the back of its bowed head, the neck, the back, there was no zipper.

Hey, “good grief” is something I should be saying.

“Does this make sense?”

[I know. I think it makes no sense, too, but what can I do? It’s already happened.]

What are you so calm about?

[Anyway, well…… I came in because I spotted an absurd error and wanted to fix it, but this won’t do. I can’t fix it.]

“What?”

[I’m sorry, I said. There are circumstances that prevent me from touching it further. I’m not the creator here.]

What is that supposed to mean now?

I clenched my fist and raised it sharply, and the rabbit took two more steps back and said:

[Really! I am a god, but I’m, well, an emergency stand-in who was dispatched in a hurry.]

“A staaand-iiin?”

[Yes. The original creator and administrator of this world is someone else. But that one is currently missing……]

“What kind of nonsense is that? How does a god go missing?”

[From the circumstances, it looks like they fled.]

I have absolutely no desire to know. In fact, I’d rather not.

[But a world that has lost its administrator collapses quickly. If it were naturally reaching the end of its lifespan and fading away, that would be one thing, but when a world that was perfectly fine suddenly explodes, the damage to other connected worlds is enormous. To use the world you originally lived in as an example, fragments flying off from here would hit your world and suddenly dragons would appear there. I was dispatched urgently to prevent that kind of chaos.]

“……Wow.”

[Right. Wow indeed.]

The rabbit said talking about it made it tired all over again and let its ears droop back down.

[In my opinion, the creator here was probably a newcomer, kept failing to catch errors, and ran away. When I tried to sort things out, the errors were endless. I caught as many as I could within the limits of my ability, but some parts were missing components. Creating new ones from scratch would take too much time and energy, and minor components that are slightly off-spec can be patched in from another world, so that’s what I did.]

The rabbit pointed at me with its soft front paw.

[You were one of them. The body you entered was riddled with critical errors, so I inserted you to restore it, but how did it end up like this. Even with strong errors, I’ve never seen a case like this before.]

“Is it alright to use someone’s soul so carelessly?”

[The same process happens in the world you originally came from too. A soul can be recycled up to seven times after an initialization in any world. You had lived once, so you had six more uses ahead of you, and you died at a relatively young age so the initialization didn’t take much time either.]

Wow…… recycling someone else’s soul. What remarkable character.

[I have no way to further adjust your body, your physical form, that is. It’s not a lack of ability on my part; to disassemble and restructure a body made by a different administrator, I need to understand its structure, and right now I have no way of knowing that at all. That would be like remodeling without blueprints. Maintenance and upkeep I can manage somehow, but……]

Even knowing it was a dream, my head was throbbing. I hope I’m not about to wake up.

I carefully shook my head, but the scenery didn’t change, and my bedroom ceiling didn’t suddenly appear.

To communicate with this wretched god, I had no choice but to use the bleak, clinical language the rabbit itself had used.

“Then can’t you just do that initialization one more time?”

[Your soul has already fused with the body, so no. It’s not that the initialization didn’t happen at all.]

“It clearly didn’t, though? I remember perfectly well that I died in my previous world.”

[It did proceed. Just partially. Tell me, do you remember your name?]

“Of course. I’m-”

Hm?

“I’m…… um…… wait a moment.”

I can’t remember my name.

How? I remembered going on that backpacking trip.

It’s exactly like when you can picture the exact page of a textbook during an exam, including the content above and below, but the one part you actually need won’t come back.

And it’s not just that. It was so natural I hadn’t noticed. I remember being Korean, but I can’t think of my parents.

I wasn’t born alone, so I must have had parents. I went to school, so I must have had friends…… As an adult, I worked. I remember cursing the minimum wage printed on my bank statement and being happy about it anyway.

I remember learning how to froth milk while working a part-time job at a cafe, but I had no memory at all of who I worked alongside.

Who was I? What kind of person was I? Who did I spend my time with?

When I went blank and couldn’t continue, the rabbit spoke in a tone that wasn’t particularly surprised. Truly infuriating.

[The initialization of a soul is, above all else, a process that makes you forget yourself. Your sense of self has to be erased before you can live another life.]

“……Isn’t that too cruel?”