Spirit Zero “A Sci-Fi Regression LitRPG”

I have died ten times.

The empire keeps a file on me. It says: low grade, no aptitude, no market value. It was right about all of that. What it doesn't say — what nobody out here has written down yet — is that when I die, the clock goes backward, and I wake up somewhere before it happened with the taste still in my mouth and the count one higher.

Earth wasn't invaded. Earth was harvested. Garden Seven, surveyed and priced and stripped of everything worth selling, then left to ripen for a second pass. I was in the first haul: twenty-six years old, $2.90 short of a subway fare, and worth less than the paperwork it took to ship me.

Sixteen months until they come back for the rest of it.

⟨ CURSED TIME REVERSAL — ACTIVATED ⟩
⟨ On death, the anchor holds. You do not. ⟩
⟨ Deaths recorded: 10 · Synchronization: 28% ⟩
⟨ Twelve went before you. The system is pleased to note that its asset counts differently. ⟩

Two systems watch me now. A cold blue one that prices me like inventory, and a warm yellow one nobody else can see, that calls me asset like it's trying to be kind. Neither will tell me who's paying.

What I have instead of power: a nine-inch clerk who files everything and is afraid of exactly the right things, a woman who reads the truth off strangers and pays for it out of her own memories, a sword that has eaten gods and reviews their flavor like a restaurant critic, and a cat who was assembled in a laboratory and would like that corrected in the report.

The empire thinks I'm a rounding error. The thing at the bottom of every death has started counting me. And somewhere out there, brokers have been passing the same question hand to hand for ninety years — longer than my planet has been on anyone's map:

Has the Zero been born yet?

I am safe for now.

It isn't a comfort. It's a countdown.

Cover Art was made by AI as a placeholder.

My main Language is Spanish not English.