The air in Novus Landing tasted of sunshine and possibility. It was a carefully crafted illusion, of course—a symphony of scent emitters and haptic feedback—but it was so perfectly rendered that Elina could almost feel the warmth of the sun on her skin and smell the phantom scent of baked bread from the NPC baker down the street. It was the smell of a new beginning.
For Elina, it was the culmination of three years of meticulous planning. As a beta tester for Arcadia Ascendant, she had logged over eight thousand hours, a fact she kept jealously guarded. Those hours weren't spent in glorious combat against world-ending dragons or climbing the PvP leaderboards. They were spent hunched over virtual anvils until her digital hands were sore, tending to bubbling cauldrons that smelled of sulfur and starlight, and memorizing the delicate, crystalline structures of every single enchanting rune. While others chased glory, she chased perfection. Her in-game name, Aetheria, was a whisper of legend among the game's elite—the hidden artisan who armed the gods.
Today, on launch day, she was just Elina, Level 1. Anonymous. A blank slate. And it was perfect. The name Aetheria came with expectations, with demands, with rivals. As Elina, she was invisible. A ghost who could walk through the screaming, chaotic masses and execute the first, most critical phase of her plan without anyone sparing her a second glance. Her goal wasn't to be the strongest; it was to be the most essential. By the end of the month, every top player on this server would be her unwitting employee, farming materials for her empire.
The Grand Plaza of Novus Landing was a beautiful, chaotic symphony. A thousand players, all with the same dazed, euphoric smiles, marveled at the hyper-realistic world. Sunlight glinted off the polished cobblestones. A party of new adventurers were trying to climb the central statue of the forgotten king, laughing as their hands slipped on the smooth marble. An NPC bard strummed a lively tune, his AI so advanced that he winked at a player who tossed him a copper coin. Elina watched a line of two hundred people queued up for "Gregor the Stern," the city's main quest-giver, and a small, satisfied smile touched her lips. Her quests didn't come from NPCs. Her path was her own. The chime of a thousand simultaneous "Quest Accepted!" notifications created a constant, pleasant harmony, the sound of a world taking its first breath.
Then, the world went silent.
It wasn't a sudden stop. First, the bard's lute music faltered, the last note hanging in the air before vanishing. Then the ambient noise—the distant blacksmith's hammer, the chatter of the crowd—faded into nothing. The NPC baker, who had been jovially offering a sample of a sweet roll, froze mid-gesture, his cheerful smile locked on his face like a grotesque mask. An unnatural stillness fell over everything. Every player stopped, looking around in confusion. A server lag? A restart?
The sky, a perfect cerulean blue moments before, began to change. It started at the zenith, a drop of deep, royal purple that bled outwards like ink in water, swallowing the blue. A collective gasp swept the plaza. This wasn't in the patch notes.
A voice, neither male nor female, boomed from the heavens. It didn't come from any single direction; it was everywhere at once, vibrating not in their ears, but in the very marrow of their bones. The System UI—the comforting presence of health bars, mini-maps, and chat windows—flickered and dissolved into nothingness.
"Greetings, Pioneers. Welcome to your new reality."
For a long moment, the only response was a profound, echoing silence. Then, a nervous laugh broke the stillness, then another.
"Whoa, epic launch event!" someone shouted from the crowd. "The devs went all out!"
A murmur of agreement rippled through the plaza. Relief. It was just a show. A very, very impressive one. Elina's heart, which had seized in her chest, began to beat again, a frantic drum against her ribs. An unscheduled event. Annoying. It disrupted her timeline. She instinctively tried to call up her system menu, a simple flick of her wrist and a mental command, to check the server status.
Nothing happened.
She tried again. The gesture was as ingrained as breathing after her eight thousand hours. Still nothing. The familiar, translucent blue window did not appear. A cold knot of dread, sharp and icy, began to form in her stomach, eclipsing the manufactured warmth of the Novus Landing sun.
The disembodied voice spoke again, its tone utterly devoid of emotion, as if it were reading a legal disclaimer.
"The program you knew as 'Arcadia Ascendant' was a probationary trial. A tutorial. Your performance has been deemed satisfactory to proceed to the primary phase."
"Probationary trial?" a player near Elina muttered, his face pale. "What the hell does that mean?"
The voice seemed to answer his unspoken question.
"The function you refer to as 'Log Out' has been permanently deprecated. There is no longer a distinction between the player and the avatar. This existence is now your only one."
The laughter died completely. The air grew thick with a new, suffocating tension. Shouts of "This isn't funny!" and "Let us out!" began to pepper the silence. A young woman in simple leather armor began to sob, her cries sharp and piercing in the unnatural quiet.
One of the players who had been trying to climb the statue earlier—a burly warrior with a cocky grin and a default sword on his back—pushed his way to the front of the crowd. "Alright, very funny, Admin!" he boomed, trying to project a confidence he clearly didn't feel. "You made your point! This is the best game launch ever, we get it! But the joke's over."
The purple sky seemed to darken in response. The voice focused, its omnipresent nature coalescing into an invisible point directly above the warrior.
"Consequences in this world are no longer simulated. Pain is real. Exhaustion is real. Death is… permanent."
The warrior scoffed, a loud, derisive sound. "Permanent? Yeah, right. It's a 'permadeath' server, big deal. You think we're scared?" He drew his flimsy, Level 1 sword. He didn't point it at the sky. Instead, with a theatrical flair for the crowd, he turned the point toward his own stomach.
"You can't fool us!" he declared. "I've died a hundred times in betas. Watch this! I'll take one for the team, prove this is all just a script, and I'll see you all back at the spawn point in thirty seconds!"
Before anyone could stop him, he thrust the sword into his own gut.
There was no flash of light. No dramatic sound effect. Just a sickening, wet crunch of steel parting leather, flesh, and organ.
The warrior's cocky smile froze on his face. He grunted, a soft, wet sound of surprise. He looked down at the hilt of the sword protruding from his stomach as if seeing it for the first time. The bravado in his eyes didn't turn to pain—it turned to pure, unadulterated shock. His gaze flickered up to the crowd, his mouth opening as if to say something—perhaps to admit his catastrophic mistake—but only a gurgle of blood came out.
Then, his eyes glazed over. The strength left his body all at once, and he crumpled to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. He didn't dissolve into motes of light. He didn't fade away. He just lay there in a heap, the cheap sword still buried in his torso. A pool of dark, shockingly real blood began to spread from beneath him, staining the pristine plaza. The smell of copper and iron hit the air, overwriting the phantom scent of baked bread.
A single, piercing scream cut through the stunned silence, and then the dam broke. Pandemonium erupted. It wasn't the sound of gamers being startled; it was the sound of a thousand people witnessing a suicide that was never meant to be real. The game was over. The trap had been sprung by their own assumptions.
The voice returned one last time, its message a chilling epitaph and a terrifying new beginning.
"Your former lives are forfeit. Your previous world, a memory. Here, you will live by our rules. Survive. Grow strong. Ascend. Or die. The choice is yours."
The sky began to clear. The deep purple receded, revealing the cheerful, cerulean blue once more. The NPC baker unfroze, his smile returning as he offered his sweet roll to a now-empty space. The bard began to strum his lute again, the cheerful notes a grotesque counterpoint to the spreading pool of blood and the symphony of weeping.
The world had returned to normal, but everything had changed. Elina stood frozen, the chaos swirling around her. Her grand plan for economic domination, for a quiet life of supreme influence, was now a pile of ash.
But as the initial shock subsided, replaced by the cold, sharp clarity of a survivor, a new thought began to form. They were all trapped. They were all terrified. And they were all Level 1.
But they weren't all equal.
While they saw a death trap, Elina, through her terror, began to see a system. A brutal, unforgiving system with a new set of rules. And there was one thing she knew better than anyone else on this server.
How to exploit a system.