Godborn

Description

What if the afterlife was a startup accelerator — and you were the product?

Anthony Rivera spent twelve years as a social worker trying to save people the system had already abandoned. Then he died on the floor of a halfway house in northeast Minneapolis, three blocks from a Dairy Queen, and discovered that death wasn’t the end. It was an interview.

Pulled from the reincarnation stream with perfect recall of all 813 of his past lives, Anthony is offered godhood by a divine council that operates less like a celestial court and more like a venture capital firm. The catch: divinity runs on belief. Every miracle costs power. Every prayer answered is an investment. And if your follower count hits zero, you don’t die — you’re erased from existence entirely.

Reborn as Kairos, he chooses twenty-three refugee women in a Kenyan camp as his first believers — not because they’re strategically optimal, but because he’s been them. He remembers what it feels like to pray and hear nothing back.

Now he has to build a faith from the ground up while navigating divine bureaucracy, territorial gods, a rival treating godhood like a tech IPO, and the growing realization that the system he’s joined might be as broken as the ones he tried to fix when he was alive.

Godborn is Book 1 of an upcoming divine progression series that combines LitRPG-style power systems with sharp social commentary and a protagonist who refuses to play the game the way it was designed.

Topics Explored

• Progression fantasy and divine power systems — leveling up as a god, with belief as XP and miracles as abilities
• LitRPG-adjacent mechanics — follower counts, divine resource management, and the economy of worship
• Reincarnation and past-life memory — 813 lives of context informing every decision
• Faith, religion, and what people actually need from gods — building a belief system from genuine compassion, not manipulation
• Social justice in a fantasy framework — a former social worker applying real-world ethics to a divine system built on exploitation
• Startup culture as divine satire — venture capital gods, metrics-driven divinity, and the commodification of belief
• Refugee experience and humanitarian crisis — grounded, respectful portrayal of displaced communities
• Systemic corruption — questioning whether a broken system can be reformed from inside
• Identity and transformation — who are you when you remember every life you’ve ever lived?

Perfect For Readers Who Love

Progression fantasy with substance. If you enjoy power-system worldbuilding like Cradle by Will Wight, the divine politics of Small Gods by Terry Pratchett, the moral complexity of The Poppy War, and the “what if gods were accountable” premise of American Gods, Godborn sits at the intersection. It’s for readers who want to watch a character grow in power without losing their humanity — and who like their fantasy with real-world teeth.