The first time. People invested a lot of importance in the concept of the first time.

Jade never even saw the bus that hit him. He wasted time on the irrelevant thought that people must have somehow mixed things up, and that it shouldn't be the first time that mattered, it should be the last time.

The notification that popped up after everything went black didn't surprise him as much as the bus had. The pain that had pierced his body had vanished with the light. Unfortunately, this wasn't the first time he had failed. Fortunately, it hadn't been his last chance.

He wasn't transported to another world. He didn't meet any god or devil. Instead, after he dismissed the notification, the system replayed the footage of the accident from the perspective of a nearby traffic camera. It showed him what had happened, as though the knowledge would prevent repetition.

Jade watched it with a feeling of resignation. It wasn't as though he had purposefully jumped out in front of the moving vehicle, or been unaware of the consequences.

Because of the existence of the system, he was never certain if he experienced sleep in the way that people experienced it, but he slept until his new body was ready. Then he woke up again, in the same place that he always woke.

The only thing that was different was that the clothes Jade had worn to work that morning were gone. He checked the date and time before he called in. Sometimes it took longer than others for his body to be replaced, but only a day had elapsed this time.

While he dressed, he made profuse apologies for having missed his shift the day before. He already knew that only the few actual witnesses of the accident, and the system that apparently only existed within his own head, would be aware of his previous demise. There were never any authorities waiting, or hospitals missing patients.

It was almost as though his life were a game.

--

Jade finished cleaning the last toilet, put away the cleaning supplies, and then joined Emily at the counter.

He was fairly certain that Emily had never had any contact with the system. It was a point of pride with her that she had never wasted any of her life on video games. Since she worked the same shift with him here at the convenience store, he wasn't certain what it was about her life that she deemed made it such a meaningful existence untainted by electronics.

There was a lot about how other people lived that Jade had difficulty understanding. He was certain that his own main quest was to see the world through a human perspective. He knew because it was written at the top of his quest log, and it never changed, no matter how many hundreds of sub quests he finished. Jade was also about 99% certain that most people did not have a quest log.

Emily at least didn't shirk her own duties, and was one of the most reliable people that Jade had worked with so far. She hefted a box full of candy that a less fit person of her stature would have struggled with more easily than Jade could have managed, and she placed each one as neatly into its row as if she were a machine.

Whatever else she was, she was good at this job, and Jade respected that. Other people might look down on service jobs like this, but no one wanted to live without the services they provided.

It was an important job, in its own way. He rang up the five different beverages the scruffy man with the instrument case ordered without asking any questions. Perhaps he belonged to a band.

--

When Jade returned home that evening, he logged onto the game that he'd been named after. There were already hundreds, if not thousands of "Living World" games running on the enormous computers that orbited Earth in this century, but there was something nostalgic about playing the first one.

Jade was fairly certain that 'Living Jade Empire' had been created by someone who could also see the system that seemed to reside within his own mind. The menu structure was exactly the same. Although since the system also had access to almost every electronic device that he had ever encountered, perhaps it was merely connected to him.

He had even speculated that the game system was somehow connected to his own mind, but… there were other things that didn't line up. Even though the game was structured similarly, there were so many differences. Magic, for example. Magic didn't exist in reality.

--

Within the game, Jade's dwarf nimbly assembled the final piece of the steam engine that he had been building. It wasn't powered by coal, or wood, but its enchantment would burn slowly through the gemstone that it was written on.

The Empire's magic was an oddly physical thing, if you looked at it right. Overhead a tiny cloud sparkled too brightly, betraying the swirl of elementals that crowded it.

He hopped into the strange craft that the engine was attached to as neatly as if his dwarf were a world-class athlete. Despite his short stature, his powerful dwarven legs gave him enough boost to jump at least three times as high as his ordinary human body in real life.

If Jade's coordination in real life had been as excellent as that of his dwarf, he would never have been hit by that bus. If he had been able to jump as powerfully, he could simply have jumped over it. Reality sucked. Even if his own did have quest logs.

He launched his sand skimmer into the desert with practiced motions, and flew across the sand. His course was set on the city that had been built the year he'd been born, assuming of course that he had ever been born. Or that something constructed within a game system could be regarded as having been built.

Words could be complicated. Like life.