“It’s you,” I say.

“It’s me.”

After all these hours, the figure from before stands before me just as tall as before, just as intimidating.

Well...

Tall may not be the right way to put it.

It is clear to me that, like every other time my consciousness has drifted off into the nether realms, I have ended up here, in this place. This place where the very image that haunted my previous dream again facs me.

“I’ve waited here for five hours!” the figure shouts. “You’re so inconsiderate.”

“My apologies,” I say. “I am dealing with many things on Earth.”

“What in the great hells is Earth?”

“Um...”

You see...

Right now, I am deep in a great forest. Its name is unknown, and its features are vague. That is similar, if not the same, as my personal predicament—my body is gone, and I feel like I am merely floating on thin air.

That is because I actually am floating on thin air right now.

The wild experience I am having right now must be a dream... It literally is a dream. But I know it is much more than that.

I am dreaming, and I am floating.

And I am...

.......................

...dead.

It should have been so obvious to me this entre time. I am dead. My feelings draining from my body, asleep or awake, are not due to any normal phenomena. This is supernatural. This is beyond the grave.

Because I am beyond the grave.

Not on Earth...

But on Mystix.

“I’m a ghost,” I say.

My voice echoes slightly even with no effort on my part. It is quiet but reverberates like I am, well, a specter of the night.

“Yes, you are indeed a ghost,” the figure in front of me says.

“And I’m going to have to assume you brought me back and led me here to this deep part of the forest,” I say.

“No. Even I am not that powerful. You seem to have come back all on your own. That, or there is a force at work that even we don’t know about.”

“A force at work... I cannot think of any force but my own destiny.”

“And perhaps your destiny is all it is.”

I smile.

The figure smiles back.

“It’s good to see you again,” I say. “Miss M.”

The three foot tall imp, Miss M, is the figure in front of me.

The former demon queen, the short-tempered, devilish, ancient being who has been a member of Team Fanghook since before I even accepted the Destiny Deck system within myself.

She is the last person I would have expected to have met as a ghost wandering the forests of Mystix. She is, however, the first one to find me.

“I wish I could say the same,” Miss M says, “but I have not a positive feeling right now. I don’t know why you are back. It shouldn’t be possible.”

“And yet, it is,” I say. “I am a ghost.”

“But... people with the system can’t become ghosts. It’s one of the fundamental aspects of reality,” Miss M says. “It’s true, and yet what it means could change the laws of destiny forever. The Destiny Deck system is supposed to determine which Hell we are sent to. I myself once ruled over a Hell, you know.”

“Oh yeah, North Spirans don’t go to Hell or something like that,” I say. “The Goddess reincarnates us in a new world instead, I believe.”

“...Huh?”

“Yes. And I now live on Earth, a new world with no system at all. The only kind of magic is a force known as electricity.”

“...You...”

“Yes?”

“You’re a ghost, but you’re also living, reborn, on another Earth?”

“Yes. And what’s more,” I say, “is that I kept my system when I was reborn, as well as all of my memories, and even my inventory.”

“You were reborn on a systemless world, with a system, and with all our loot that you essentially stole from us.”

“Um... Yes. I apologize for that, you know. I still have the monster loot with me. If you wish to have it, perhaps I could find a way to...”

“No,” Miss M says.

“...?!”

Miss M poofs into her hands her main weapons—dual scabbards. “An abomination like you must not live.”