After an untimely death, an unnamed protagonist finds himself in a strange, otherworldly space. Before him appears a goddess who explains that he is to be reincarnated into a new life, and in this universe, the deceased are given the freedom to choose their next form. Eager to finally live a fulfilling existence he never had, the protagonist immediately requests a popular package: to be reborn as a hero in a fantasy world, complete with cheat skills and a harem. To his dismay, the goddess informs him that due to a massive surge in applications for such desirable roles, the waiting list has ballooned to an astonishing 50,000 years.

Refusing to wait that long, the protagonist changes his request on the spot. He abandons the dream of being the hero himself and instead asks to be reincarnated as a single rib belonging to a hero who leads a harem. The logic, as absurd as it is simple, is that as a rib attached to such a hero, he will still be close to the action and the heroines by proxy. The goddess, who is described as rather lazy and unenthusiastic about her job, approves this request with no waiting time, and the protagonist is immediately reborn as the tenth rib of a stereotypical isekai hero.

However, existence as a skeletal body part is far from the fantasy he imagined. Lacking arms, legs, or senses, his new life is a surreal and often ridiculous experience of being a passive observer. After growing tired of this bizarre form, the protagonist returns to the goddess to try again. He discovers that the key to avoiding the massive waiting lists is to choose increasingly strange and undesirable forms. This leads him into an endless cycle of bizarre reincarnations. Over the course of the story, he lives as a hermit crab, a vegetable, an explosive device used to disrupt happy couples, a door to a demon lord’s chamber, and a spearman who famously took an arrow to the knee, among many other absurd concepts.

The narrative unfolds as a comedic series of vignettes following each new life. A notable structural element of the original web novel was its interactive component, where each chapter would end by asking readers what the protagonist should be reincarnated as next, with the author incorporating the strangest suggestions into the following installment. The main cast includes the perpetually dissatisfied protagonist, the lazy goddess who facilitates his transfers, and other recurring entities in the reincarnation waiting room, such as Master Sockeye Salmon, a man named Tanaka, and the God of Creation. The story satirizes the tropes of the isekai genre, focusing not on grand adventures but on the bureaucratic absurdity of the afterlife and the protagonist’s relentless quest to find a satisfactory existence by choosing the absolute strangest options available.