The voice echoed again in his ears.
Please... help me.
Help me, and I will grant your wish.
Before Roshan could even understand what was happening, the ground beneath him gave way. A pitch-black hole swallowed his body whole, dragging him down into an endless abyss.
Darkness.
Then nothing.
When consciousness slowly returned, the first thing Roshan felt was pain — a dull, throbbing ache behind his eyes, like he'd been asleep for years instead of minutes. His eyelids felt heavy as stone before they finally cracked open.
What he saw made his breath catch.
This wasn't the ceiling of his cramped Mumbai apartment. No flickering tube light. No traffic noise bleeding in through a thin window. No smell of dust and concrete and exhaust.
Instead, there were flowers.
Roshan blinked, sat up too fast, and immediately regretted it. He was in a garden — an actual garden, the kind he'd only ever seen in movies — and behind him loomed a mansion big enough to swallow his old apartment building whole.
Okay. Okay, think. Where the hell am I. Is this hell? Heaven? Why are my hands so—
He stopped.
His hands were small. Too small. Pale in a way his hands had never been pale.
Wait. I can breathe. and I can also feel the sun rays. That means I'm not dead, right?
He looked back at the mansion, at the manicured hedges and the marble fountain catching the afternoon light, and his stomach turned over with a different kind of dread.
I think somebody rich as hell lives here. Why am I—
A spike of pain lanced through his skull, sharp enough to white out his thoughts entirely. He pressed both palms against his temples and groaned.
That was when he heard the voice.
"Young master! Young master, where are you?" A woman's voice, growing closer, edged with worry. "Ahh, young master, what are you doing out here? Young master—!"
"Argh, so loud. Shut the fuck up," Roshan muttered, and then the world tilted sideways and went black.
He woke a second time to soft golden light spilling across an unfamiliar room. The walls were carved with symbols he didn't recognize, and the air carried a faint, unplaceable fragrance — something floral, something old.
Roshan shot upright.
"Where the hell am I now?" His own voice came out louder than he meant it to, echoing strangely off the high ceiling.
As if summoned by the shout, the door creaked open.
A woman stepped inside, dressed in long flowing fabric stitched with intricate, almost regal embroidery — nothing like anything he'd seen back home. Her hair was pinned neatly, her posture deferential, bordering on submissive. She bowed at the waist.
"Are you alright now, my lord? Is something the matter?"
Roshan froze.
He didn't understand a single word coming out of her mouth, and nothing about the situation made sense together. His heart hammered against his ribs as his mind scrambled for an explanation that didn't exist.
"Hey — hey!" The panic won out over reason. "Where the fuck am I? And who are you?"
The woman flinched like he'd struck her. Confusion flickered across her face, quickly chased by fear, and she took a hesitant step back — clearly thrown by the sudden venom in the young master's voice.
Roshan's breathing turned ragged. His eyes swept the room, cataloguing anything within reach that could pass for a weapon, and landed on a metal lamp resting on a side table. He snatched it up and held it out in front of him like a club.
"Listen." His voice shook, but he kept it loud, kept it sharp. "I'm gonna ask one more time. Where the hell am I? And who are you?"
The color drained from the woman's face. She looked at him the way you'd look at something that shouldn't be standing in front of you.
"Y-young master...?" Her voice had dropped to a whisper.
Before Roshan could push further, the pain came back — worse this time, like something tearing through the inside of his skull.
"Agh—" He doubled over. Not again.
The room spun. His thoughts fractured into static. White flooded his vision, and then there was nothing at all.
Roshan's body hit the floor and didn't move.
Darkness pressed in around him, formless and total.
He had no sense of how long he stayed there before the voice returned — closer now, clearer, almost gentle.
Wake up. Please. We don't have much time. Please, wake up.
The words pressed against him, again and again, until his eyes flew open.
Something was wrong immediately.
There was no body beneath him. No weight. No breath. No heartbeat thudding in his ears.
He looked down — or tried to — and the truth hit him like a second fall. He wasn't in that body anymore. He was floating, a translucent outline of himself glowing faintly like mist caught in moonlight. When he tried to touch his own hands together, they passed straight through.
"My body—" His voice came out wrong, thin and far away. "What the fuck is happening to me?"
Before the panic could fully take hold, the space in front of him folded in on itself, and a presence emerged from the fold.
She was enormous — far larger than anything human — yet every line of her was elegant, almost unbearably so. A green aura moved around her like a living current, calm and absolute, and her eyes held the particular stillness of something that had watched entire worlds rise and fall.
She looked down at him.
"Are you conscious now?" Her voice was warm, but it carried weight, like a mountain choosing to speak gently. "May I have a word with you, traveler from another world?"
Roshan recoiled instinctively. He couldn't understand a word of what she'd said, but the sheer pressure radiating off her made something in his soul want to curl up and disappear. A hole in reality. A strange body. And now this.
He backed away, wary, every instinct screaming at him to run — but there was nowhere to run.
Sensing it, the woman raised a hand, not in threat, but in something closer to an apology.
"There is no need to fear me," she said gently. "I am the Goddess of Peace and Natural Order. Please. Remain calm."
Then her eyes flickered with understanding.
He hadn't understood a word.
She paused, considered him for a moment, and extended her hand. A simple ring rested on her palm, radiating a quiet, unfamiliar power. She gestured to it, then to him.
Roshan hesitated — every rational part of him screaming not to trust a glowing ring offered by a giant divine woman in the middle of an out-of-body experience — but something underneath the panic told him she meant no harm.
He reached out and slipped it on.
The moment it touched him, everything flooded in at once.
Languages. History. Geography. Bloodlines, kingdoms, social order, names of places he'd never heard a second ago and now somehow knew like his own street. It came in a wave that should have drowned him, and for what felt like an hour, it nearly did — his soul straining under the weight of knowledge that had never belonged to him.
Then, slowly, the chaos began to settle.
When clarity returned, Roshan gasped.
He understood. The language. This place. This world.
He looked up at the towering figure before him, and this time, when she spoke, the words landed clean.
"Now," she said, voice still carrying that quiet divine authority, "can you understand me?"
A pause.
"Please. Person from another world. We need your help."
Roshan stared at the ring on his finger, still half-convinced he'd wake up any second back in his old apartment.
"That ring," the woman said calmly, her aura pulsing like something breathing, "is one of the divine artifacts of the Old Gods. To be precise — it once belonged to my mother."
Roshan blinked.
"...Whoa. Hold on." He held up both hands. "First you crash-course an entire civilization's worth of language and history straight into my skull, and now divine artifacts? Old gods? What is happening? Why am I here?" He squinted up at her. "And who exactly are you again?"
She didn't look offended. If anything, she looked amused.
"There is no need to worry," she said, in a voice so steady it almost felt unfair. "I will answer everything. Just breathe."
She pressed a glowing hand to her chest.
"I am the Goddess of Peace and Natural Order, one of the Nine Gods of the Nine Worlds. My name is Sylvara Eonveil."
Roshan swallowed hard enough to hear it.
"...So you're telling me you're an actual god. And there are eight more of you. Just out here. Existing."
"Yes," Sylvara said with a small nod.
Roshan rubbed both hands down his face. "Great. Fantastic. I could barely manage my own life and now there's a whole divine council involved in it."
He straightened suddenly, pointing at himself. "Wait — 'human from another world'? I have a name, you know. It's Roshan." He crossed his arms. "So why am I here? Why was I dragged into whatever this is?"
Something shifted, briefly, across Sylvara's expression.
"I was not the one who summoned you."
Roshan went still. "...You weren't?"
"No." Her gaze grew distant. "It was the work of another being. One who claims to be who you are searching for."
"Another god?"
She shook her head slowly. "No. Not a god."
"...That's somehow worse." Roshan scratched the back of his neck.
"I felt a presence similar to ours," Sylvara continued, "but it was not divine."
"So let me get this straight." Roshan held up a finger for each point. "I got yanked across worlds by a mystery not-god, handed a godly family heirloom, and now I'm apparently tangled up in something big enough to make actual gods nervous."
"Yes."
"...Okay." He exhaled slowly. "Okay, I think I've got the shape of it now. So — any chance you can send me back? I've got some unfinished business where I came from."
For the first time, Sylvara smiled — small, but real.
"Roshan of another world—"
"Just Roshan is fine, Miss Peace God."
She tilted her head, the smile staying put. "Very well. Just Roshan. You may call me Sylvara."
He made a face up at her. "Wow. Casual first-name basis with an actual deity. My parents would've been so proud."
Her aura flickered, dimmed slightly.
"I would like to know more about you," she said, softer now. "But we don't have much time. The others will be here soon."
"The others. As in — other gods."
"Yes."
Roshan exhaled through his teeth. "Yeah, no. I don't think I want to meet more of you right now."
Sylvara began to fade, her form thinning at the edges like smoke catching wind.
"I will see you again, Roshan." Her voice was already growing distant. "Until then — be careful. Trust no one in your current household. Or in this world."
His chest went tight. "Wait — what do you mean by that—?"
But the green light had already vanished, and he was alone again, staring down at the ring still glowing faintly on his finger.
"...I knew today was gonna be weird." He let out a long breath. "But this is a whole new level."
Before the other gods arrived, Roshan slipped back into the body waiting for him — the young master's body, with all its strange new weight and unfamiliar reflexes — and let the question settle in alongside everything else he now carried.
Is this new life going to bring me peace?
Or is it just a different flavor of chaos?
To be continued...