One months ago, if someone told me I'd end up pissing off every god in the universe, I'd have laughed and gone back to my boring, stupidly successful life.
I would never though of running from a dragon with a timer counting down to my cosmic deletion.
Let me back up.
My name's Brand. I'm twenty-eight, disgustingly rich, and until recently, bored out of my mind.
You know those coding competitions where nerds fight over who can solve impossible problems fastest? Yeah, I won three of those. The financial algorithms moving billions around the global market? I wrote half of them. Tech companies throw money at me like I'm some kind of digital messiah.
And I was dying of boredom.
Picture this: you're sitting in a million-dollar apartment, staring at job offers that would make most people cry tears of joy, and all you can think is "This is it? This is what winning looks like?"
Everything felt like tutorial mode. Every problem had a solution I'd seen before. Every challenge was just a variation of something I'd already crushed.
I needed something real. Something that would actually test me instead of just paying me.
So naturally, I decided to go tomb raiding.
"You want to what?" Danny's voice crackled through my phone. I could hear the Google office humming in the background. Even at midnight, the guy never stops working.
"Explore some ruins. Find ancient treasures. You know, adventure stuff."
"Brand, people like you buy yachts when they have a crisis. Not... whatever this is."
"Yachts don't have puzzles."
Long pause. "Are you having a breakdown? Because there are healthier ways to—"
"Danny, I found something."
That shut him up. Back in college, those three words meant we'd stumbled across something that would keep us awake for days.
"Found what?"
"A place that shouldn't exist."
I'd been poking around government databases—completely legally, thank you very much. Then I noticed something weird in the satellite data: geometric patterns in the Egyptian desert. Perfect geometric patterns. The kind that doesn't happen naturally.
So I dug deeper.
Zero archaeological records. No university surveys. No government documentation. According to every official source, this place didn't exist.
But those satellite photos didn't lie.
"Define 'shouldn't exist,'" Danny said, but I could hear the curiosity creeping in.
"The kind of place that makes you wonder if reality has bugs in it."
Three weeks later, I was standing in the Egyptian desert, melting my ass off and wondering if rich people problems had finally driven me insane.
The heat was unreal. Like someone had cranked Earth's thermostat to "kill humans." My expensive expedition gear made me look like a tech bro cosplaying Indiana Jones, and my GPS kept spinning in circles like it couldn't figure out where the hell we were.
The ruins looked normal enough at first. Ancient stones, hieroglyphs, the occasional death trap that would've been terrifying a few thousand years ago but now just made ominous clicking sounds when you stepped on the wrong spot.
"Probably says 'Welcome, please wipe your feet before entering,'" I muttered, taking photos of the wall carvings.
My team was doing real archaeology stuff. Measurements, documentation, professional behavior. Me? I wandered off into Corridor C because the structural scans showed something interesting down there.
Worst decision of my life. Also the best. Depends on your perspective.
The corridor should've looped back to the main chamber. Instead, it kept going. And going. After twenty minutes of walking, I realized I might've taken a wrong turn somewhere.
That's when things got weird.
The walls started changing. Not weathering or crumbling—changing. Stone peeled away in clean sheets, like someone was stripping old paint. Underneath was metal. Polished, seamless metal with glowing blue veins running through it.
"Okay," I said to my phone camera, "either I'm hallucinating from heat stroke, or this tomb just went full sci-fi."
The corridor opened into a chamber that belonged in a space station, not an ancient tomb. Metallic walls pulsed with electricity, the air hummed with power, and right in the center sat something that made my brain hurt to process.
An eye.
Not carved. Not decorative. A living mechanical eye, basketball-sized, covered in silver circuits that seemed to shift when I wasn't looking directly at them. It sat on a pedestal that looked grown rather than built, and I swear the thing was watching me.
Around it was a barrier made of pure energy and… Data.
I stared at it for maybe ten minutes before I realized what I was looking at.
A puzzle. The most complex puzzle I'd ever seen.
I set up camp right there. Forgot about my team, my schedule, everything. This was it. The challenge I'd been looking for.
For three days, I threw everything at that barrier. Every algorithm I knew, every pattern recognition technique, every brute force attack in my arsenal. Nothing worked. But I could feel it responding, like it was testing me as much as I was testing it.
By day four, I was running on coffee and stubbornness. That's when I stopped trying to break the lock and started trying to understand it.
It wasn't technological. It was logical. Pure information theory wrapped in energy, waiting for someone who could think in algorithms instead of just applying them.
I treated it like debugging elegant code. Not forcing a solution—finding the one that was already there.
At 3:47 AM, the barrier dissolved.
The eye blinked at me.
Then my world ended.
—Reward to Player: [Omniscient System]
Heat exploded in my skull like molten metal being poured directly into my brain. My vision shattered into fragments—code, numbers, data streams I couldn't process. Sound became static filled with voices speaking in languages that shouldn't exist.
[Analyzing User]
...
[Analysis Complete]
Compatibility… 99.7%
[Beginning Integration]
Information flooded in. Not like learning something new—like becoming something new. I could see worlds spinning through space like a cosmic playlist. Thousands of Earths, each one slightly different. Magic here, technology there, dragons and robots and impossible things that made perfect sense.
Integration: 34%... 67%... 89%...
And behind it all, I saw the administrators. Cosmic beings treating reality like a database, making sure everything stayed balanced, predictable, boring.
[Integration Complete]
[Welcome to Earth x-19, Player Brand]
[Administrator Override Activated]
[Warning! Unauthorized access detected!]
{System monitoring initiated}
{Anomaly detection: Active}
The data stream cut off. I was on the floor, blood in my mouth, body shaking like I'd been electrocuted.
Administrator Override? What the fuck?
[New Quest: Survive Detection]
Objective: Establish yourself within Earth X-19 without triggering administrative intervention.
Reward: ???.
Failure: Total system erasure: body, mind, and record.
{System monitoring: Low priority - Maintain operational security}
I grabbed my gear and ran like hell.
The tomb was wrong now. Corridors bent in impossible directions, walls folded inside themselves, and hieroglyphs flickered between ancient symbols and lines of code. By the time I stumbled into dying sunlight, I wasn't sure I'd come out the same place I'd gone in.
That's when I saw my first dragon.
Small one, maybe bus-sized, perched on a sand dune like it owned the place. It was roasting what looked like a car-sized scorpion, scales shifting between blue and gold in the light. When it noticed me staring, it cocked its head with curious intelligence.
My phone buzzed. Danny: "How's the vacation going? Find any cool rocks?"
I stared at the dragon. The dragon stared back.
My phone sparked and died in my hand.
[Synchronization Complete]
The dragon's eyes lit up silver—the same color as the circuits in the eye. It spread wings that made the air shimmer, and I realized I was looking at something that could probably vaporize me without breaking a sweat.
I should've been terrified.
Instead, I started laughing.
For the first time in years, I had a real problem. Something I couldn't solve with money or connections or perfect code.
{
Name: Brand
Job: Administrator Lv. 1
Status: Unauthorized User
Level: 1
HP: 200/200
MP: 250/250
AP: 5/5
STR: 15
AGI: 15
INT: 25
}
Time to figure out this world before someone notices what I'm doing.
{Administrative attention: Minor anomaly detected}