Chapter 1: Death by Vending Machine
~1.8k words · 2026-06-22
The vending machine killed Zhang Wei.
To be fair, it was a spectacular death—the kind that would've gone viral if anyone had been around to film it. The machine had been malfunctioning for weeks, its screen flickering between "Insufficient Funds" and "System Error 0x7A3F." Zhang Wei, mid-level accountant and connoisseur of cheap instant noodles, had given it exactly two frustrated kicks.
The machine toppled forward like a felled tree.
Eight hundred and forty-seven cans of chrysanthemum tea, thirty-two bags of spicy beef jerky, and one poorly maintained vending machine weighing four hundred pounds landed directly on top of him.
His last thought, surprisingly, wasn't about his unfinished TPS reports or his mother's upcoming birthday. It was: *At least I don't have to finish that quarterly audit.*
Then everything went black.
---
"Name?"
Zhang Wei blinked. Or tried to. His eyes didn't seem to be working properly—or rather, they were working, but they were receiving input that made absolutely no sense. He appeared to be standing in a waiting room. The walls were beige. The carpet was gray. There was a water cooler in the corner, and it made the exact same gurgling sound as the one in his old office.
Behind a desk that looked like it had been purchased from the same budget catalog as every other desk he'd ever seen, a woman in a business suit stared at him with the dead-eyed patience of someone who had asked the same question approximately ten thousand times.
"I said, name?" She tapped a keyboard that glowed faintly gold. "We don't have all eternity. Well, technically we do, but my shift ends in forty-seven cosmic minutes."
"Zhang Wei," he said. His voice sounded strange. Hollow. Like he was speaking through a long tube. "Did I... did I die?"
"Congratulations, you figured it out." The woman didn't smile. "I'm Sun Wanying, Senior HR Coordinator, Department of Mortal Reclassification. You've been flagged for standard reincarnation processing. Unless..."
She squinted at her screen. Her expression shifted from bored to annoyed.
"Oh, for the love of—" She hit the keyboard with more force than strictly necessary. "Another system error. Hold on."
Zhang Wei stood there, very dead, while an immortal HR representative wrestled with what appeared to be the celestial equivalent of Windows Vista. The water cooler gurgled. Somewhere in the distance, someone was arguing loudly in a language that sounded like Mandarin but wasn't—the words bent at angles that human vocal cords shouldn't have been able to produce.
"Is there a problem?" he asked.
"The problem," Sun Wanying said through gritted teeth, "is that your file has been auto-assigned to Department 47. That's the Department of Mortal Affairs. Which means you're not getting reincarnated."
"Wait, what? I'm not getting reincarnated? But I was a good person! I paid my taxes! I never cheated on my wife!"
"You were an accountant."
"I was a *good* accountant!"
Sun Wanying rubbed her temples. "Look, I don't make the rules. I just process the paperwork. The Celestial Management System flagged your soul for clerical reassignment. Congratulations, you're now a civil servant in the afterlife."
Zhang Wei stared at her. "I died and got a *job offer*?"
"More of a conscription, really. But yes. Welcome to the Heavenly Bureaucracy. Your orientation starts in fifteen minutes. Take the elevator to Floor 47, Section B, Desk 3,134. Your supervisor's name is Li. He'll explain everything."
"This can't be right. There must be a mistake."
"There's always a mistake." Sun Wanying's laugh was hollow. "This is heaven. Mistakes are the only thing we do consistently."
She pressed a button on her desk. The wall behind her slid open to reveal an elevator bank that stretched impossibly far in both directions—up into clouds that crackled with golden lightning, down into depths that Zhang Wei's newly dead eyes couldn't quite comprehend.
"Next!"
A shimmering figure materialized behind him—a middle-aged woman in hospital scrubs who looked even more confused than Zhang Wei felt.
"Name?"
Zhang Wei found himself shuffling toward the elevator, carried by a current of other confused souls. The elevator doors slid open with a cheerful ding, and he stepped inside, joining a dozen other recently deceased individuals who all wore the same expression of existential bewilderment.
The elevator panel had buttons numbered from -999 to 9,999. Several were labeled with characters that hurt to look at directly. One button simply read: "DO NOT PRESS (Regulations 47.3a-12)."
A disembodied voice announced: "Floor 47. Department of Mortal Affairs. Please mind the gap between life and administrative eternity."
The doors opened.
---
If Zhang Wei had expected pearly gates and clouds, he was sorely disappointed. Department 47 looked exactly like the open-plan office he'd worked in for fifteen years—cubicles, fluorescent lighting, the faint smell of burnt coffee and desperation. The only difference was that some of the employees had wings.
Others had halos that flickered like faulty neon signs.
One woman at a nearby desk had three heads, all of which were on different phone calls simultaneously.
"New meat?" A voice barked from behind him.
Zhang Wei turned to find a man who looked to be in his late fifties, with a permanent scowl etched into his face and a coffee mug that read "I SURVIVED THE HEAVENLY TRIBULATION AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY MUG."
"Zhang Wei. You're my new clerk. I'm Li Feng, Senior Supervisor of Destiny Documentation." He didn't offer a handshake. "Follow me. I'll show you your desk."
Li walked through the cubicle maze with the practiced efficiency of someone who had navigated this particular hell for centuries. Zhang Wei followed, trying not to stare at the paperwork stacked on every surface—scrolls that glowed with inner light, tablets that displayed shifting text, and in one case, a literal stone tablet that looked like it weighed four hundred pounds.
"Here." Li stopped at a cubicle that was exactly as depressing as every other cubicle Zhang Wei had ever occupied. "This is yours. Computer login is your soul-ID. Password is 'changeme123'. Change it. Everyone keeps it as 'changeme123' and it's a security nightmare."
Zhang Wei sat down in the chair. It was uncomfortable. That, at least, was familiar.
"Your job is simple," Li continued. "Every mortal action generates karma. Good karma, bad karma, neutral karma. This karma needs to be recorded, categorized, and filed in triplicate. You receive incoming reports from the Observation Division, you process them through the Karma Classification System, and you submit your completed forms to the Destiny Adjustment Committee."
"That sounds..."
"Mind-numbingly boring? Yes. Welcome to heaven." Li drained his coffee mug. "The good news is that you can't die again. The bad news is that this is your existence now, for the rest of eternity. Any questions?"
"Can I quit?"
"No."
"Can I transfer departments?"
"Not for the first three thousand years."
"Can I—"
"Your computer is booting up. Start working." Li walked away.
Zhang Wei stared at the monitor. It was displaying what appeared to be a login screen made of pure jade, with characters that flowed like water. He typed his soul-ID—a string of numbers and symbols that he somehow knew by heart—and the password.
The screen flickered.
A window appeared:
```
WELCOME TO THE CELESTIAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
USER: Zhang Wei (Soul ID: 0x7A3F9C2D)
POSITION: Junior Clerk, Department 47
PERMISSIONS: Level 1 (View Only)
PLEASE SELECT YOUR DEFAULT WORKFLOW:
[ ] Karma Entry (Standard)
[ ] Destiny Adjustment (Requires Level 3)
[ ] Soul Reassignment (Requires Level 5)
[ ] RECORDS ADMIN (LOCKED)
```
Zhang Wei selected Karma Entry. The screen shifted to a form that was remarkably similar to the accounting spreadsheets he'd spent his mortal life filling out. Name, action, karma value, classification. Checkboxes for "Intentional/Accidental," "Beneficial/Harmful/Neutral," and a dropdown menu for "Cosmic Significance" that ranged from "Negligible" to "Apocalyptic."
He started working.
For what felt like hours, Zhang Wei processed karma reports. He learned that Mrs. Chen from Shanghai had generated 0.3 units of good karma by giving directions to a lost tourist. He learned that Mr. Johnson from Ohio had generated -1.7 units of bad karma by cutting off another driver in traffic. He learned that a cat in Cairo had somehow generated 12 units of neutral karma just by existing, and he filed it accordingly.
The work was repetitive. Mind-numbing. Soul-crushing.
But Zhang Wei's mortal brain, shaped by fifteen years of accounting, found patterns in the chaos.
The system was sluggish. Forms that should have auto-populated required manual entry. Dropdown menus took three seconds to load. There were error messages that appeared for no apparent reason—"Karma Value Out of Range," "Invalid Soul Signature," "Temporal Paradox Detected (Please Contact Your Supervisor)."
And then, during his fourth hour of data entry, Zhang Wei noticed something.
A karma report from the Observation Division had been flagged with a curious error: "INVALID KARMA VALUE: 999,999.9"
That was impossibly high. The highest karma value Zhang Wei had seen all day was 47, and that was for a doctor who had saved three lives in a single shift. 999,999.9 was the kind of karma that belonged to a Buddha. Or a demon king.
He clicked on the error message.
A dropdown appeared.
It wasn't supposed to appear. The dropdown menu was grayed out for his permission level. But the system had glitched, and for a single, beautiful moment, Zhang Wei had access to the RECORDS ADMIN panel.
He saw:
- The complete database of every soul in existence
- The source code for the Karma Classification System
- A file labeled "REALITY_CONFIG.exe"
- And, most interestingly, a button that read: "GRANT USER LEVEL 99 PERMISSIONS"
His finger twitched.
*Don't do it,* a rational part of his brain screamed. *This is heaven. The gods are watching. You'll be smited. Or worse—you'll get a performance review.*
But Zhang Wei had been a mid-level accountant his entire life. He had followed the rules. He had filed his paperwork on time. He had never taken more than his allotted fifteen-minute break.
And he had died because of a broken vending machine.
He clicked the button.
The screen flashed white.
When his vision cleared, a new message was displayed:
```
PERMISSIONS UPDATED
Current User: Zhang Wei
Current Level: 99 (ADMINISTRATOR)
WARNING: Unauthorized access detected. Heavenly Security Division has been notified.
Estimated time until termination: 00:04:59
```
Zhang Wei's newly dead heart, which hadn't beat in hours, suddenly remembered how to pound against his ribs.
Four minutes. He had four minutes before the cosmic police showed up to delete him from existence.
He looked at the RECORDS ADMIN panel. At REALITY_CONFIG.exe. At the source code for the very system that governed life, death, and everything in between.
And for the first time since he'd died
To be fair, it was a spectacular death—the kind that would've gone viral if anyone had been around to film it. The machine had been malfunctioning for weeks, its screen flickering between "Insufficient Funds" and "System Error 0x7A3F." Zhang Wei, mid-level accountant and connoisseur of cheap instant noodles, had given it exactly two frustrated kicks.
The machine toppled forward like a felled tree.
Eight hundred and forty-seven cans of chrysanthemum tea, thirty-two bags of spicy beef jerky, and one poorly maintained vending machine weighing four hundred pounds landed directly on top of him.
His last thought, surprisingly, wasn't about his unfinished TPS reports or his mother's upcoming birthday. It was: *At least I don't have to finish that quarterly audit.*
Then everything went black.
---
"Name?"
Zhang Wei blinked. Or tried to. His eyes didn't seem to be working properly—or rather, they were working, but they were receiving input that made absolutely no sense. He appeared to be standing in a waiting room. The walls were beige. The carpet was gray. There was a water cooler in the corner, and it made the exact same gurgling sound as the one in his old office.
Behind a desk that looked like it had been purchased from the same budget catalog as every other desk he'd ever seen, a woman in a business suit stared at him with the dead-eyed patience of someone who had asked the same question approximately ten thousand times.
"I said, name?" She tapped a keyboard that glowed faintly gold. "We don't have all eternity. Well, technically we do, but my shift ends in forty-seven cosmic minutes."
"Zhang Wei," he said. His voice sounded strange. Hollow. Like he was speaking through a long tube. "Did I... did I die?"
"Congratulations, you figured it out." The woman didn't smile. "I'm Sun Wanying, Senior HR Coordinator, Department of Mortal Reclassification. You've been flagged for standard reincarnation processing. Unless..."
She squinted at her screen. Her expression shifted from bored to annoyed.
"Oh, for the love of—" She hit the keyboard with more force than strictly necessary. "Another system error. Hold on."
Zhang Wei stood there, very dead, while an immortal HR representative wrestled with what appeared to be the celestial equivalent of Windows Vista. The water cooler gurgled. Somewhere in the distance, someone was arguing loudly in a language that sounded like Mandarin but wasn't—the words bent at angles that human vocal cords shouldn't have been able to produce.
"Is there a problem?" he asked.
"The problem," Sun Wanying said through gritted teeth, "is that your file has been auto-assigned to Department 47. That's the Department of Mortal Affairs. Which means you're not getting reincarnated."
"Wait, what? I'm not getting reincarnated? But I was a good person! I paid my taxes! I never cheated on my wife!"
"You were an accountant."
"I was a *good* accountant!"
Sun Wanying rubbed her temples. "Look, I don't make the rules. I just process the paperwork. The Celestial Management System flagged your soul for clerical reassignment. Congratulations, you're now a civil servant in the afterlife."
Zhang Wei stared at her. "I died and got a *job offer*?"
"More of a conscription, really. But yes. Welcome to the Heavenly Bureaucracy. Your orientation starts in fifteen minutes. Take the elevator to Floor 47, Section B, Desk 3,134. Your supervisor's name is Li. He'll explain everything."
"This can't be right. There must be a mistake."
"There's always a mistake." Sun Wanying's laugh was hollow. "This is heaven. Mistakes are the only thing we do consistently."
She pressed a button on her desk. The wall behind her slid open to reveal an elevator bank that stretched impossibly far in both directions—up into clouds that crackled with golden lightning, down into depths that Zhang Wei's newly dead eyes couldn't quite comprehend.
"Next!"
A shimmering figure materialized behind him—a middle-aged woman in hospital scrubs who looked even more confused than Zhang Wei felt.
"Name?"
Zhang Wei found himself shuffling toward the elevator, carried by a current of other confused souls. The elevator doors slid open with a cheerful ding, and he stepped inside, joining a dozen other recently deceased individuals who all wore the same expression of existential bewilderment.
The elevator panel had buttons numbered from -999 to 9,999. Several were labeled with characters that hurt to look at directly. One button simply read: "DO NOT PRESS (Regulations 47.3a-12)."
A disembodied voice announced: "Floor 47. Department of Mortal Affairs. Please mind the gap between life and administrative eternity."
The doors opened.
---
If Zhang Wei had expected pearly gates and clouds, he was sorely disappointed. Department 47 looked exactly like the open-plan office he'd worked in for fifteen years—cubicles, fluorescent lighting, the faint smell of burnt coffee and desperation. The only difference was that some of the employees had wings.
Others had halos that flickered like faulty neon signs.
One woman at a nearby desk had three heads, all of which were on different phone calls simultaneously.
"New meat?" A voice barked from behind him.
Zhang Wei turned to find a man who looked to be in his late fifties, with a permanent scowl etched into his face and a coffee mug that read "I SURVIVED THE HEAVENLY TRIBULATION AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY MUG."
"Zhang Wei. You're my new clerk. I'm Li Feng, Senior Supervisor of Destiny Documentation." He didn't offer a handshake. "Follow me. I'll show you your desk."
Li walked through the cubicle maze with the practiced efficiency of someone who had navigated this particular hell for centuries. Zhang Wei followed, trying not to stare at the paperwork stacked on every surface—scrolls that glowed with inner light, tablets that displayed shifting text, and in one case, a literal stone tablet that looked like it weighed four hundred pounds.
"Here." Li stopped at a cubicle that was exactly as depressing as every other cubicle Zhang Wei had ever occupied. "This is yours. Computer login is your soul-ID. Password is 'changeme123'. Change it. Everyone keeps it as 'changeme123' and it's a security nightmare."
Zhang Wei sat down in the chair. It was uncomfortable. That, at least, was familiar.
"Your job is simple," Li continued. "Every mortal action generates karma. Good karma, bad karma, neutral karma. This karma needs to be recorded, categorized, and filed in triplicate. You receive incoming reports from the Observation Division, you process them through the Karma Classification System, and you submit your completed forms to the Destiny Adjustment Committee."
"That sounds..."
"Mind-numbingly boring? Yes. Welcome to heaven." Li drained his coffee mug. "The good news is that you can't die again. The bad news is that this is your existence now, for the rest of eternity. Any questions?"
"Can I quit?"
"No."
"Can I transfer departments?"
"Not for the first three thousand years."
"Can I—"
"Your computer is booting up. Start working." Li walked away.
Zhang Wei stared at the monitor. It was displaying what appeared to be a login screen made of pure jade, with characters that flowed like water. He typed his soul-ID—a string of numbers and symbols that he somehow knew by heart—and the password.
The screen flickered.
A window appeared:
```
WELCOME TO THE CELESTIAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
USER: Zhang Wei (Soul ID: 0x7A3F9C2D)
POSITION: Junior Clerk, Department 47
PERMISSIONS: Level 1 (View Only)
PLEASE SELECT YOUR DEFAULT WORKFLOW:
[ ] Karma Entry (Standard)
[ ] Destiny Adjustment (Requires Level 3)
[ ] Soul Reassignment (Requires Level 5)
[ ] RECORDS ADMIN (LOCKED)
```
Zhang Wei selected Karma Entry. The screen shifted to a form that was remarkably similar to the accounting spreadsheets he'd spent his mortal life filling out. Name, action, karma value, classification. Checkboxes for "Intentional/Accidental," "Beneficial/Harmful/Neutral," and a dropdown menu for "Cosmic Significance" that ranged from "Negligible" to "Apocalyptic."
He started working.
For what felt like hours, Zhang Wei processed karma reports. He learned that Mrs. Chen from Shanghai had generated 0.3 units of good karma by giving directions to a lost tourist. He learned that Mr. Johnson from Ohio had generated -1.7 units of bad karma by cutting off another driver in traffic. He learned that a cat in Cairo had somehow generated 12 units of neutral karma just by existing, and he filed it accordingly.
The work was repetitive. Mind-numbing. Soul-crushing.
But Zhang Wei's mortal brain, shaped by fifteen years of accounting, found patterns in the chaos.
The system was sluggish. Forms that should have auto-populated required manual entry. Dropdown menus took three seconds to load. There were error messages that appeared for no apparent reason—"Karma Value Out of Range," "Invalid Soul Signature," "Temporal Paradox Detected (Please Contact Your Supervisor)."
And then, during his fourth hour of data entry, Zhang Wei noticed something.
A karma report from the Observation Division had been flagged with a curious error: "INVALID KARMA VALUE: 999,999.9"
That was impossibly high. The highest karma value Zhang Wei had seen all day was 47, and that was for a doctor who had saved three lives in a single shift. 999,999.9 was the kind of karma that belonged to a Buddha. Or a demon king.
He clicked on the error message.
A dropdown appeared.
It wasn't supposed to appear. The dropdown menu was grayed out for his permission level. But the system had glitched, and for a single, beautiful moment, Zhang Wei had access to the RECORDS ADMIN panel.
He saw:
- The complete database of every soul in existence
- The source code for the Karma Classification System
- A file labeled "REALITY_CONFIG.exe"
- And, most interestingly, a button that read: "GRANT USER LEVEL 99 PERMISSIONS"
His finger twitched.
*Don't do it,* a rational part of his brain screamed. *This is heaven. The gods are watching. You'll be smited. Or worse—you'll get a performance review.*
But Zhang Wei had been a mid-level accountant his entire life. He had followed the rules. He had filed his paperwork on time. He had never taken more than his allotted fifteen-minute break.
And he had died because of a broken vending machine.
He clicked the button.
The screen flashed white.
When his vision cleared, a new message was displayed:
```
PERMISSIONS UPDATED
Current User: Zhang Wei
Current Level: 99 (ADMINISTRATOR)
WARNING: Unauthorized access detected. Heavenly Security Division has been notified.
Estimated time until termination: 00:04:59
```
Zhang Wei's newly dead heart, which hadn't beat in hours, suddenly remembered how to pound against his ribs.
Four minutes. He had four minutes before the cosmic police showed up to delete him from existence.
He looked at the RECORDS ADMIN panel. At REALITY_CONFIG.exe. At the source code for the very system that governed life, death, and everything in between.
And for the first time since he'd died