The Demon Overlord's Retirement Plan

Book 0: A Gentle Apocalypse

by M. H. Foster

Genres: Fantasy; Humorous Fantasy

Synopsis

The Demon Overlord retires to farm turnips in peace, only to find life in a small village far more chaotic than he ever could have anticipated in this laugh-out-loud debut cozy fantasy with teeth. Includes an exclusive bonus adventure coming 8/25/26! 

When destroying the world and killing the hero grows boring, what's a Demon Overlord to do but quit while he's ahead?

Galornus Prime was the Scourge of Nations, Ender of Hope, and Master of the Cardinal Sins. He had done everything worth doing. Some of it more than once.

His retirement plan was simple: get a goat, farm quietly, and avoid accidentally conquering anything. The plan didn't include soul-crushing town halls, after-school combat lessons with children, and a war with perhaps his most worthy nemesis yet: the rose-growing, seventy-three year-old widow next door. 

Even in retirement, evil never sleeps...but it does plant turnips.

When corrupt officials and greedy merchants threaten his infuriatingly loveable neighbors, Galornus faces a new kind of challenge: saving the village without revealing he is the monster parents invoke to make children eat their vegetables.

The Demon Overlord’s Retirement Plan is a cozy fantasy with teeth, where the hardest battle isn’t defeating heroes—it’s staying retired and learning how to live after 444 lifetimes of villainy.

Release date: August 25, 2026

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 256

Sample

My commitment to anything I tried had always been one of my greatest strengths.

While this was true of all magic users, I carried that commitment to entirely new levels of brilliance. It enabled me to live through four hundred and forty-three gruesome deaths without falling into insanity. Well, more accurately, it enabled me to regain what passed for my sense of sanity now after I lost my mind upon my sixtieth death. I’d certainly spent a number of my reincarnations as nothing more than a mindless mass of death and destruction without any purpose beyond hate and confusion.

Magic is bound to one’s core sense of self and purpose. I’d learned that during my thirty-seventh death (or was it the seventy-third?), the one with where a particularly powerful and idealistic hero had tried to redeem me with theology and faith. He’d pursued me across the continent with idealism. It was the first time (but not the last) a hero had chased me with a scroll rather than a sword. Those wars usually ended with my sanity as the major casualty. My conclusion that time was that the human definition of divinity and demonic, of Good and Evil, was a fundamentally flawed construct.

It really didn’t matter what type of magic you wielded. What mattered was your intent.

That’s how I’d finally managed to wield both Demonic energies and Divine power simultaneously. My goal was to create by destroying. I was going to preserve the lives of untold billions by annihilating the role of the Demon Overlord forever.

My purpose aligned with both divine preservation and demonic transformation. I believed it with every fiber of my being.

Which was why I was currently walking along a dusty road like a common biped, developing what I could only describe as ouches on my feet.

Could I have used my power to teleport? Certainly. Could I have sprouted wings and flown? Without question. Could I have summoned a chariot pulled by hellhounds wreathed in flames? Yes. I’d done it thousands of times before. And stylishly.

But all magic is bound to one’s core sense of self and purpose. I was powerful because I never lied, not even to myself. Because when I committed to something, I committed.

I had committed to being Willem the porter. Willem walked. Therefore, I walked.

Simple. Logical. Agonizing.

My journey to Lower Middleton—yes, Lower Middleton, the armpit of the back end of nowhere—stretched three hundred and fifty miles. An eternity by foot. By my fourth hour of walking, I’d begun to understand why humans had invented so many words for suffering.

“Ow,” I said aloud, testing the word as my left boot found another sharp rock. It felt insufficient. “Ow ow ow ow ow.”

Better, but still lacking nuance. Perhaps I should invent new pain descriptors. Flizzark for the sharp shock of stepping on stones. Grumph for the dull ache spreading through my calves. Whispendale for whatever was happening to my lower back.

A merchant’s cart rumbled past, the driver giving me the universal nod of acknowledgment between travelers. I nodded back, then had to consciously stop myself from incinerating him when road dust billowed into my face.

Willem’s muscle memory wanted to wave. My muscle memory wanted to eviscerate. We compromised on a violent sneeze.

“Bless you!” the merchant called back cheerfully.

Bless me? Bless me?! I was a Demon Overlord. The Demon Overlord. Former Demon Overlord, I corrected myself. I could bless myself, thank you very much. Although technically, given my current divine-demonic hybrid nature, any blessing I gave myself might create a theological paradox that could—

No. Stop. Willem wouldn’t think about theological paradoxes. Willem would think about… What did aspiring farmers think about? Turnips?

I spotted the shadow of a succubus flying overhead. Rajani. She was definitely looking for me. Not all my former followers would believe that I was really dead. Being the Archbishop of Deception had its downsides. Every act I took could be interpreted as a devious plan of some sort.

I ducked into the trees to hide from her. Eviscerating the merchant was not worth discovery. I needed to be careful in retirement. One slip and either the Divine Order or the Armies of Hell would discover I was still alive.

Blending in would be critical. I couldn’t just be retired. I needed to think more… mortal… common. Hide blatantly in plain sight.

I tried imagining turnips as I walked. Root vegetables. Purple-white. Grew in dirt. Could be mashed, roasted, or fermented into surprisingly potent alcohol. I knew everything about alcohol. It was one of the few commonalities shared by the forces of Good and Evil.

If Rajani happened to look down at my pitiful human form and scan my surface thoughts, she would get a mind-full of turnips and dismiss me as irrelevant. I doubted she could conceive of Galornus Prime and turnip farmer in her wildest nightmare.

My feet hurt. This was novel. In my demonic form, I’d once tap-danced on molten lava for three days straight to mock a particularly pompous fire elemental. Now, simple leather boots on a dirt road produced sensations I could only describe as aggressive discomfort.

The afternoon sun beat down mercilessly. Sweat—actual mortal sweat—trickled down my back. In past lives I’d bathed in solar flares. Now, ordinary sunlight was making me feel like a slowly roasting turnip.

I’d retained my power, of course. My body had been reinforced to demonic standards. I could shatter mountains with a sneeze, part seas with a whistle, or rewrite local reality if I felt particularly motivated. But I’d deliberately kept human sensory input and basic anatomical responses.

If I wanted to blend in, I needed to react like them. The last thing I wanted was some busybody priest noticing that I didn’t blink, sweat, or use the bushes for necessary biological functions.

Those damned priests of the Divine Order. They’d been thorns in my side for centuries, meticulously recording every detail about my incarnations. No matter how thoroughly I’d tried to stomp them out during my periods of dominion, they always managed to preserve crucial information.

The worst incident was during my two hundred and third incarnation, when they’d encoded my allergy to blessed silver into a drinking song. Within a generation, every tavern from here to the Ice Wastes was bellowing:

Idiotic doggerel, but effective. By my two hundred and fourth resurrection, every peasant hovel had strategic silver cutlery placed by the doors. Silver was harmful to lower-level demons.

To me it was more like a minor allergy.

My ruminations were interrupted by another cart passing, this one loaded with cabbages. The smell hit me like a physical force. When had I become able to differentiate between fresh cabbage and slightly wilted cabbage? This level of olfactory detail was both fascinating and mildly disturbing.

“Evening, traveler!” the cabbage merchant called. “Need a ride? You look about done in!”

I was about to respond with something cutting about his presumption when I realized he was right. I was done in. My legs shook. My back screamed. My feet had developed what I believed humans called hot spots, the precursors to blisters.

Blisters. Me. The being who’d once arm-wrestled the concept of Entropy itself to a draw.

“Thank you,” I heard myself croak, “but I’ll manage.”

Foolish pride. But I’d committed to walking, and my word was my power. Even if it killed me. Again.

By sunset, I’d covered perhaps twenty miles. Twenty miles that felt like twenty thousand. Each step had become a philosophical exercise in suffering. Not the grand agony of divine judgment or the exquisite torment of hellfire, just the small, persistent misery of a body pushed beyond its comfortable limits.

I, who was born as the Apex of All Existence, whose destiny had been nothing less than surpassing divinity itself, found myself genuinely struggling to move one foot in front of the other.

When the roadside inn finally appeared through the gathering dusk, I nearly wept. The sign read “The Pickled Herring,” a name that promised absolutely nothing good about the quality of food or lodging, but I didn’t care. It had walls. A roof. A bed.

I pushed through the door with all the grace of a demon lord who’d been walking for twelve hours straight, which is to say, none at all. I may have stumbled. There might have been whimpering.

The common room did not go silent when I entered. At least, not the awed silence that usually greeted my entrances, complete with dramatic lightning and ominous chanting in dead languages. Just the brief pause of regulars evaluating whether the newcomer was going to be entertaining, problematic, or ignorable.

Dusty. Exhausted. Carrying a porter’s pack. They categorized me as ignorable and returned to their conversations.

Perfect.

I stumbled to the bar, where a woman with arms like tree trunks and a face that brooked no nonsense regarded me with professional disinterest.

“Room for the night?” I croaked. When had my throat become a desert? Oh right, when I’d forgotten that humans needed regular hydration. Such demanding maintenance, these mortal forms.

“Two silver. Three with a meal. Four with a bath.”

A bath. The word sang siren songs of promise. In my previous form, I’d bathed in the Lake of Eternal Fire while discussing philosophy with condemned souls. But hot water and soap suddenly seemed the pinnacle of luxury.

I fumbled through the bag of gold the kings had given me, fishing for currency I had never had to deal with in any existence before finally handing her what I assumed were four silvers. The other patrons had gone silent at the clink of my coins.

She swept the coins into her apron with practiced ease. “Up the stairs, third door on the right. Bath house is out back. Dinner’s mutton stew.”

“Is it good mutton stew?”

She gave me a look that could have curdled milk at fifty paces. I’d seen ogres with friendlier expressions. “It’s hot, and it’s food.”

Fair enough. I’d eaten the dying screams of stars and the shattered dreams of fallen empires. Hot and food sounded absolutely delightful by comparison.

The stairs might as well have been a mountain. Each step was a personal insult. My legs filed formal complaints with every movement. By the time I reached the third door on the right, I was seriously considering just sleeping in the hallway. The floor looked so invitingly horizontal.

The room was small, sparse, and absolutely perfect. A bed with actual sheets, not the finest silk, but they existed and were relatively clean. A washbasin that didn’t appear to be cursed. A window overlooking the stable yard, from which wafted the honest smell of horse and hay.

In my state, this was paradise. Minus the annoying harps.

I dropped my pack, sat on the bed to remove my boots, and made a tactical error of cosmic proportions.

I lay down. Just for a moment. Just to test the mattress.

Every muscle in Willem’s body staged an immediate coup. They’d carried me this far, they informed me through the medium of screaming agony, and now they were done. Finished. On strike until further notice and possibly the next incarnation.

This was ridiculous. I’d once fought the archangel Gabriel for seven days straight without rest, and he cheated by bringing his cousins. I’d held the Gates of Pandemonium against an entire crusade while simultaneously playing three-dimensional chess with a lich. I’d done things that would make gods weep with envy and devils take notes.

But apparently, walking twenty miles in human form was where I drew the line.

“Bath,” I told myself firmly. “Then food. Then sleep.”

My body laughed. Not a pleasant laugh. The kind of laugh that suggested I’d be lucky if I managed to remove my boots before unconsciousness claimed me.

“Food,” I negotiated. “Then sleep.”

Another laugh, even less pleasant.

“Sleep?” I offered hopefully.

My eyelids, traitors that they were, were already closing. For the first time in four hundred and forty-four incarnations spanning millennia beyond counting, I was about to experience something entirely new.

Unconsciousness. The dress rehearsal for death. The temporary cessation of being.

How fascinatingly mortal.

My last coherent thought, as darkness claimed me fully clothed and still wearing my boots, was that tomorrow I’d have to walk again. The commitment I’d made stretched out before me: three hundred and thirty more miles of bipedal absurdity.

I fell asleep smiling, though I couldn’t have said why.

Perhaps it was because, for the first time in my existence, I had no idea what would happen when I woke up.

Three weeks. Three weeks of what I had foolishly imagined would be peaceful retirement, and I was ready to resurrect myself as a Demon Overlord just for the simplicity.

Evil, you see, is straightforward. The hero attacks; you kill him or die. You conquer; they resist. Someone prophesies your doom; you kill them slowly so nobody else decides predicting your doom will be a good career path. Clean motivations, clear objectives, quantifiable results.

But this? This was madness.

I stood at the edge of my newly acquired turnip field, watching Lower Middleton conduct its morning ritual of organized contradiction. This was Willem’s dream village, my village now, the place where he imagined settling before I’d borrowed his body. He liked how safe it felt.

The armpit of nowhere, tucked into the Kingdom of Trumar, which was itself barely worth mentioning on most maps. To the east, the Empire of Pelan loomed with its legions and war machines, but they’d calculated long ago that conquering Trumar would cost multiple times more than the entire kingdom’s worth. The only route here from the Empire was through a mountain pass so narrow that two merchants’ carts could barely squeeze past each other, let alone an army. Two grannies with a broom c. . .