3:07 a.m. in Tokyo was a silent predator. It crept through the slats of the automated blinds, clung to the soundproof glass of the 88th floor, and watched its prey: Kenji Tanaka.

Kenji, however, was an apex predator.

His office was a shrine to minimalism and ruthless efficiency. A single slab of polished obsidian served as his desk, devoid of any personal items—no family photos, mementos, or plants. There was only a curved holographic screen displaying a dozen data windows and the haggard faces of his management team, scattered across the planet’s time zones. The air smelled of incense and single-origin coffee that a hundred-thousand-dollar machine brewed with surgical precision.

“Run that by me again, David.” Kenji’s voice was calm, almost sedate, yet it cut through the digital ether with the precision of a diamond scalpel. “Explain to me again why the Hamburg team has failed to meet its supply chain efficiency targets.”

The pixelated face of David, a man who hadn’t seen sunlight in forty-eight hours, wavered. “Mr. Tanaka, it was a storm… a force majeure event. The port was closed for seven hours.”

“Unacceptable,” Kenji replied without raising his voice. “A force majeure event is a failure in planning. The performance targets were clear, David. We don’t measure excuses; we measure results. The ‘Odyssey’ plan doesn’t account for weather as an obstacle, but as a variable to be predicted. I need you to anticipate problems, not justify failures after they’ve occurred. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Mr. Tanaka.”

“Good. Implement the rerouting to Rotterdam and absorb the costs. I don’t want to hear about this again.”

Kenji muted David’s channel and moved to the next face. “Sarah, status on the Singapore implementation.”

It continued like this for another hour. Kenji didn’t run a company: he orchestrated a symphony of global logistics. He was a conductor whose instrument was the flow of capital, goods, and data across the planet. And “Odyssey,” his project for the last three years, was his masterpiece. A total restructuring of the corporation, a system so perfectly optimized that, in theory, it could run without human intervention. A self-sufficient, value-generating machine.

It was his legacy. His sole creation.

Finally, at 4:13 a.m., the last call window closed. The silence in the office transformed, growing dense and heavy. Only the soft hum of the servers broke the stillness.

It was finished.

He opened a new email draft. The recipient: the Board of Directors. He attached the final “Odyssey” report, a two-hundred-page document with charts that were, in their own way, works of art.

Subject: Project Odyssey: Implementation Complete. New Operational Tier Achieved.

His finger hovered over the trackpad. Three years of his life. One hundred and fifty weeks of eighteen-hour workdays. Relationships sacrificed, health ignored—all for this moment. For the creation of a perfect system.

He pressed “Send.”

The email was gone. The monitor’s light confirmed its delivery.

Kenji leaned back in his ergonomic chair, an engineering marvel that monitored his vital signs. He expected… something. A surge of triumph. A wave of relief. The profound satisfaction of a job well done.

Instead, what he felt was a void. A silent, absolute abyss. The machine was complete, and he, its creator, was no longer necessary. He was a redundant part.

That was when the first pang shot through his chest.

It wasn’t a dramatic pain, but a notification. A red alert flashing on the control panel of his own biology. Kenji frowned, annoyed. Now? What inopportune timing.

*

The universe shrank to the blink of a red alert on the control panel of my own biology.

One moment I was in my 88th-floor office, admiring the perfection of “Odyssey”—the global logistics system that was my masterpiece, my legacy—and the next, an icy claw was squeezing my heart.

Karoshi. Death by overwork.

My last thought wasn’t of a lost love or an unlived life. It was a scathing critique, a final report directed at my own existence: “Catastrophic biological failure. Reliability below minimum standards. Unacceptable.”

The darkness wasn’t a void. It was a system shutdown awaiting a reboot.

My consciousness, or what was left of it, floated in a programmatic nothingness. As the CEO I was, I expected an orderly transition process. My analysis of narrative patterns in fiction—consumed, of course, as a time-optimization exercise for rest periods—suggested three possible new venture proposals:

• Proposal A: Reassignment to the Villain’s Castle. A classic. Reincarnation into a fantasy world with a clear hierarchy (heroes, villains, minions) and a defined organizational chart. Structurally sound, though with a high risk of hostile liquidation by the “hero.”

• Proposal B: Divine Merger and Acquisition. An encounter with a higher entity that would offer a package of skills or advantages. An attractive welcome bonus for new employees, though with the risk of poor negotiation of the terms and conditions.

• Proposal C: System Implementation. My preferred option. A clear user interface, with stats, quests, and rewards. A gamified world is, in essence, a world governed by measurable objectives. Quantifiable. Manageable.

What I definitely didn’t expect was the stench.

That was the first sensory input. It wasn’t the scent of incense and single-origin coffee from my office. It was an olfactory assault, a nauseating mix of exotic spices, rotten fish, damp earth, and the unmistakable reek of a lack of sanitation.

Then, the light. Not the artificial glow of an LED or the divine radiance of a celestial being. It was the sunlight, brutal and direct, stabbing at my eyelids.

I opened my eyes.

There were no gothic castles, no ethereal goddesses, no blue screen floating before me.

I was lying in an alley, my head resting on a burlap sack that stank of cloves and something vaguely fecal. The stone ground was cold and sticky. Above me, the curved roofs of dark wooden buildings were silhouetted against an impossibly pure blue sky. The architecture was elegant, with interlocking beams and gray ceramic tiles that gleamed in the sun, but they betrayed a clear lack of structural maintenance.

Environmental Analysis: Southeast Asian aesthetic, low technological level. Untapped market potential, but with deficient infrastructure.

The shock wasn’t cultural. It wasn’t the panic of a modern man thrown into the past. It was the frustration of a top-tier CEO waking up in the middle of a disorganized startup with no clear business plan.

“Hey, you! Street trash!”

A voice, as rough as sandpaper, pulled me from my analysis. A shadow loomed over me. It smelled of stale sweat and cheap onions.

I looked up. A city guard, or so his threadbare leather tunic and the spear he held with insulting laziness indicated, was looking down on me with contempt. He had the belly of a man who enjoyed bribes in the form of food a little too much and a beard that looked like an abandoned bird’s nest.

“Are you alive or just taking up valuable space? If you’re dead, the corpse cart doesn’t come by until dusk. If you’re alive, pay the ground tax or get lost.”

I sat up with a groan. The body I now inhabited was young, maybe fifteen or sixteen, and painfully thin. A quick assessment revealed a rough, patched-up tunic. It was, to use the proper terminology, a zero-value asset. An outcast.

The voice that came from my throat was weaker than I expected, a pathetic croak.

“Ground tax?” I asked.

The guard let out a dry laugh.

“Of course, philosopher! You think you can use my alley for your beauty nap for free? Nothing in this life is free. Either you give me two copper coins, or I’ll give you a relocation incentive with the tip of my spear.”

Situation Assessment: Low-level extortion by a corrupt public official. My current capital: zero. My negotiating power: nil. My physical condition: deplorable.

A strategic retreat was the only logical option.

“Understood,” I said and, with an effort that drew a creak from my new, weak joints, I stood up. The world swayed for a moment. Severe malnutrition. This hardware’s performance was abysmal.

The guard seemed disappointed by my submission. He probably expected a fight or a plea.

“That’s right. Go die somewhere else,” he grumbled, leaning back on his spear.

I dusted off my tunic, my mind already processing the new reality. There was no panic. Panic was for middle management. I was a CEO. CEOs don’t panic; they pivot. And the first pivot was clear: I needed a competitive analysis of the environment to identify opportunities for resource acquisition.

That’s when I saw it. The first serious anomaly in my environmental analysis.

In the main square, about twenty yards away, two men were arguing heatedly. They were burly, dressed in better quality clothes than the other passersby. One was accusing the other of theft.

The argument escalated. And then, the first man, red with rage, took a strange stance, his legs bent and his hands at his waist.

He shouted something unintelligible, and his fists lit up, wrapped in an internal luminescence, a milky white glow like energy gloves.

My brain didn’t process amazement. It didn’t feel wonder. It felt a pang of irritation as sharp as the heart attack that had brought me here.

I began to analyze the combat technique in a hoarse whisper. The guard, who hadn’t left yet, looked at me as if I had gone mad.

“What are you muttering about, worm?”

I ignored his question. My focus was total.

“Inefficient,” I said aloud, unable to contain myself. “A total waste of energy. His stance is unstable; it compromises his balance by 12%. The light emission is completely useless, an energy expenditure with no practical benefit in combat. It only serves to alert the opponent, eliminating the element of surprise. The presentation is flashy, but the return on investment is negative. If he had simply thrown a punch, the move would have been 40% more efficient. This isn’t a fight; it’s a bad business presentation. All flash, no substance.”

The second man, instead of taking advantage of the obvious opening, responded in the same way. His hands also began to glow, but with a pale yellow hue. The two began to circle each other, their luminous fists held high, in a display of power that only served to exhaust them before a single blow was thrown.

“They’re crazy,” the guard said, though there was a spark of excitement in his eyes. For him, it was a show. For me, it was torture.

“Absurdly inefficient,” I corrected, rubbing my temples. My head ached, not from my recent death, but from the overwhelming stupidity that surrounded me.

A group of children ran by, chasing a creature that looked like a cross between a chicken and a lizard with iridescent feathers. The chase was chaotic. With a simple pincer tactic and the use of nets, they could have easily caught it. These children need a supervisor.

“What the hell are you talking about?” the guard asked, now genuinely confused.

At that moment, an ethereal vision crossed the square. A woman, with the bearing of a noble, glided on a gleaming sword a few inches off the ground. Her face was serene, and her robes billowed with an otherworldly grace. She was a moving painting that would have inspired poets.

Personal levitation transport. Impressive. However, the platform is unstable, and its shape must create enormous air resistance. The energy cost to stay airborne must be extremely high. A flatter, more aerodynamic design would reduce consumption and improve stability. Furthermore, traveling while standing is an unnecessary safety risk. It needs a harness, at the very least.

“Hey, are you okay?” The guard’s voice now held a note of genuine concern. He probably thought sunstroke had fried my brain.

I stood up, ignoring him, my mind already on the next planning phase. My body was weak, my resources nonexistent. I was on the lowest rung of a society I didn’t even understand. In my past life, I would have delegated this disaster to a team of specialists. But there was no team here. No specialists. Only me.

A strange feeling began to bubble in the void that Project Odyssey had left behind. It wasn’t joy, nor excitement. It was something much more familiar: the irrepressible urge of a perfectionist manager facing a broken system.

Frustration was transforming into… purpose.

This world was chaos. A failed project. A company on the verge of bankruptcy from sheer incompetence. And if there was one thing Kenji Tanaka couldn’t tolerate, it was an inefficient system.

“This place…” I said, my voice still weak but with a new edge of steel. “It’s a managerial disaster. An emerging market with no leadership, no strategy, and not the slightest knowledge of resource allocation.”

A dry, cynical smile touched my lips for the first time. It was an expression that didn’t fit on the face of a young beggar, but it was the signature of a CEO about to launch the largest hostile takeover in history.

I looked at the guard, who was now watching me with a mixture of fear and fascination.

“Do you know what your problem is?” I asked, my tone shifting from beggar to consultant.

“My… my problem?”

“Your post. It’s static. Reactionary. You wait for problems to happen. Your surveillance radius has a 37-degree blind spot to your right because of that fruit stand. You don’t watch the rooftops. I could list three ways to neutralize you before you could react. Your security protocol is a joke.”

The guard took a step back, his hand tightening on his spear. The color had drained from his face.

Initial situation report, I thought, as my eyes scanned the square with a new intensity. Current assets: a young but weak body and a mind optimized for management. Liabilities: literally everything else.

Short-term objective: survival and resource acquisition. Long-term objective: apply management principles to optimize this environment and secure a position of power.

My eyes fell again on the two idiots who were still showing off their glowing fists like peacocks.

Initial Project: “Personal Development Optimization Protocol.”

And the first test subject, the first “investment” in this new, absurd market, would have to be me.

First, I needed data. I needed to understand the rules of this ridiculous game.

The Immortal CEO had just found his new project. And may the Heavens help anyone who stood in the way of his efficiency.