The email loaded at 10:02 AM.
Kael read it once, the way he read everything — completely still, eyes moving left to right, no expression crossing his face. The subject line read "Re: Graduate Application — HK Pacific Asset Management, Analyst Programme." The body was six lines. The important part was in the second sentence.
After careful consideration, we regret to inform you that your application does not meet our current requirements.
He scrolled down. There was a second paragraph about their talent pipeline, how they'd retain his CV on file, and how they wished him every success in his future endeavours. He didn't read it. He'd read enough of those paragraphs to know they were all the same sentence dressed in slightly different clothes.
Kael closed the tab.
"Eight," he said quietly, to no one.
He'd applied to eleven positions this semester. Eight rejections. The remaining three hadn't responded, which was its own kind of answer.
Kael leaned back in his chair and looked outside the dorm window of Elliot Hall, Hong Kong Meridian University. The campus was doing what it always did on a Tuesday morning — the distant sound of a lecture hall door closing, someone's playlist leaking through the wall two rooms down.
Despite the rejection, Kael stays positive.
Disappointment only hurts when you still expect something.
Kael had learned that lesson at thirteen.
He still remembered standing in the hospital hallway while a tired nurse calmly explained that his father had died from severe brain injuries after the car accident. She spoke like she was discussing the weather.
His mother lasted another six months before disappearing from the city under a mountain of debt.
His grandparents raised him after that. They did their best until age finally caught up to them. One passed away, then the other followed two years later, unable to live alone for long. By the time Kael arrived at HKMU on a full scholarship — one of six awarded university-wide that year — he already understood something that most people learned much later.
Complaining changed nothing.
You looked at the situation in front of you. You accepted it for what it was. Then you figured out what to do next.
He opened a new browser tab to start on rejection number nine.
He never got the chance to type the URL.
The sound came first.
Not an explosion, not a crash — something stranger. A low harmonic pulse that he felt in his back teeth more than heard with his ears, like the city had briefly forgotten what frequency it was supposed to exist at. It passed in under a second. Kael's hands had gone still on the keyboard before he'd consciously registered it.
Then the voice arrived inside his skull.
It wasn't external. It wasn't sound in any conventional sense — more like language being pressed directly into his comprehension, bypassing the ears entirely, cold and mechanical and completely without warmth.
[ Project Nirvana — Global Version Update Complete. ]
[ Gaia Star has entered Evolution Sequence B2. ]
[ Body conversion and data synchronisation underway. ]
[ Global Survival Protocol initialised. ]
[ Week One Status: Beginner Protection Period ]
[ Eliminating other players will not yield rewards during the Beginner Protection Period. ]
[ Initial monster wave deployed. ]
[ Proceed to your System Panel. ]
The voice cut off.
Kael sat very still.
"What the—"
He wasn't the type to talk to himself in moments of shock — normally. But the words formed before he could stop them, dragged out by something his composure had no category for.
"What was that? Did that come from inside my head?" He pressed a hand flat against the desk. "Is everyone hearing this?"
His eyes moved to the computer screen, still open on the job board. The cursor blinked at him patiently. The room looked completely normal. His roommate's unwashed coffee mug sat on the desk. The pigeon was still on the ledge outside.
Project Nirvana.
He knew that name. Promoted globally three months ago — full-immersion VRMMO, they'd called it, coverage everywhere for weeks: the tech forums, the gaming channels, even the Morning Post had done a feature. The world-building was supposed to be unprecedented, physics simulated to the molecular level, something about a genuine neural interface. He'd skimmed the articles the way he skimmed anything that wasn't immediately useful.
But that was a game. A game that ran on a headset. He wasn't wearing a headset. He was sitting in his dorm chair in his regular clothes — grey t-shirt, dark joggers, the HKU-adjacent university lanyard he kept forgetting to move off his desk.
Then a translucent panel materialised directly in his field of vision.
Kael blinked. The panel didn't go away. He raised one hand and passed his fingers through the display — his hand moved through the light like it wasn't there, but the screen didn't waver even slightly.
"It's projecting directly onto my retina," he said slowly. "That's not—"
He stopped. Took one breath. Set that particular impossibility aside for later.
Then he read.
[ SYSTEM PANEL ]
[ Name: Kael Ruyi ]
[ Level: LV0 | EXP: 0/10 ]
[ Strength: 5 | Constitution: 5 | Agility: 5 | Spirit: 6 ]
[ Note: Age 22, healthy human baseline]
[ HP: 50 | MP: 60 ]
[ HP cap = CON × 10 | MP cap = Spirit × 10 ]
[ ATK: — | DEF: — | Attribute Resistance: — ]
[ Note: Determined by equipment, skills, class, and other factors. ]
[ Equipment: None | Skills: None ] [ Class: None | Title: None | Storage: Empty ]
He read through it once. Then again, slower.
Kael Ruyi. His name. His actual name, spelled correctly, was attached to a stat block as if someone had been quietly filing his paperwork for years without telling him.
"This thing knows who I am."
"Okay... I think I've finally gone crazy. All those sleepless nights studying and gaming — they finally got to me."
He was still processing that possibility — still half-entertaining the idea that this was some spectacular stress-induced breakdown — when he heard commotion start outside.
Then a scream.
Kael crossed to the window in four steps, moved the curtain one inch to the left with two fingers, and looked out.
For a full second, his brain refused what his eyes were sending.
They were coming out of a hole in the air.
A vertical tear opened in the space above the courtyard, its edges black and ragged, and through it they poured. Short — barely a meter tall, maybe a meter and a half at most. Their skin looked like something left in water too long. Not the bright green of cartoon goblins, not even a proper color really. More like color starting to rot. Wet moss stretched tightly over starving muscle. Veins twitched beneath the skin around their throats and wrists. Their ears swept into sharp points. Their jaws hung slightly open even when silent, showing teeth the color of old bone and gums so dark they looked bruised.
They moved wrong. Jerky, eager, every step slightly too fast.
His gaming experience quickly gave the creatures a name.
Goblin.
Diseased scavengers dragged out of humanity's oldest nightmares.
Some carried wooden clubs. Others held crude, curved blades.
That's real, he thought.
No dream created details like that.
Too real.
A student he didn't recognize was crossing the courtyard below, headphones in, looking at his phone. He looked up when the first creature came through the portal. He took two steps backward. And then one of the club-carriers swung, caught him across the shoulder, and he went down hard — blood spreading dark and fast across the concrete.
Kael's hand tightened on the curtain.
Someone just—
He watched. The crowds on the ground floor were running, screaming, spilling out of the walkways in every direction, and the creatures were spreading out from the portal with that horrible, eager shuffling gait, following the noise, following the movement—
Is this real?
The thought kept looping back, insistent, almost childish, refusing to stop.
This can't be real. Monsters don't exist.
A portal? That's insane. That's literally insane.
He stood frozen for one more second, watching the chaos spread below.
Then he stepped back from the window and let the curtain fall.
It's real.
The thought landed with a clean, almost physical finality. He didn't fully understand it yet — didn't understand any of it — but every instinct he had was saying the same thing: if he kept arguing with reality instead of responding to it, he was going to end up like that student, face-down on the concrete with his brain gushed out.
The question wasn't what was happening.
The question was what do I do right now.
He turned around.
The door first.
He turned the deadbolt, engaged the chain lock, and then — because the knob had been loose for two semesters and a chain lock on a cheap dorm door meant nothing — he dragged his desk from against the wall and wedged it under the handle at an angle. He tested it with his shoulder. Solid enough.
"Good for now."
It wasn't much, but it gave him at least some feeling of safety.
Then,
He opened the system panel again, knowing instinctively that whatever this was, the panel was the key.
Think, he told himself.
You've spent years playing games. Thousands of hours. If those hours were ever going to be worth something, it's now.
He looked at the panel again, more slowly this time.
A standard system UI — the kind of thing he had navigated thousands of times across countless games.
Unfortunately, the system offered no guide or AI explanation.
At the top of the interface was a shocking number.
[Project Nirvana — Total Active Users: 4,109,882,441 ]
Four billion.
Did that mean everyone on Earth had been forced into this game?
By 2026, the global population had already surpassed eight billion. Kael quickly guessed that the system excluded certain groups from the count — children, perhaps the elderly as well.
But what did that mean?
Had humanity been dragged into another dimension?
Or had the other half of the population been sent somewhere else?
Kael shifted his attention to the next panel displaying his status.
[ Strength: 5 | Constitution: 5 | Agility: 5 | Spirit: 6 ]
All stats at five.
That had to be the universal baseline.
Only Spirit stood slightly higher than the others.
Worth remembering.
Then his gaze landed on the part of the system that truly caught his attention.
The Sigil interface beneath the status panel.
Three glowing squares floated quietly in the air, each framed by faint bronze borders.
[Samson's Belt (Bronze)
[Run Faster (Bronze)]
[Inventory Expansion (Bronze)
Plain.
Unremarkable.
In the upper-right corner of his vision, another notification pulsed softly.
[ Please select your Sigil within 10 minutes. ]
Below it, the countdown had already begun.
08:19.
08:18.
08:17.