The transition from the absolute silence of the Obsidian Citadel to the chaotic atmosphere of the new Earth was jarring. As Harish tumbled through the white portal, he did not emerge into the peaceful, sun-drenched street of xxxxxxxxxxx, India he remembered. Instead, he fell through a sky choked with smog and the distant, rhythmic thrum of sirens. Below him, the world had transformed into a jagged landscape of steel and ruin.
Harish's casual clothes—the ones he had tucked away in his spatial ring for three centuries—were shredded by the sheer friction of the dimensional crossing. To any observer on the ground, he was merely a streak of white light descending toward the outskirts of a fortified city. As he plummeted, his mind, still half-settled in the regal mindset of a Sovereign, instinctively tried to reach for the aetheric law to halt his fall. He winced. The mana density on Earth was pitiful—like trying to breathe underwater.
'Right,' he thought, a dry smile touching his lips even as the ground rushed up to meet him. 'Back to basics. If Mom saw me falling like a meteor, she'd give me an earful about safety first.'
With a graceful mid-air twist, he circulated a microscopic amount of his origin qi. Even that tiny fraction was enough to cause the air around him to scream in protest. He landed in a barren, monster-infested wasteland outside the city walls, creating a crater that sent a shockwave through the parched earth. He stood up, dusting off his tattered t-shirt. He looked around, and his carefree expression slowly morphed into a frown of serious concern. This was not the India he left. The air tasted of ozone and rot. In the distance, the horizon was dominated by a colossal, shimmering structure that pierced the clouds: the tower of trials.
"Five years," he whispered, his voice raspy. "The jump through the nexus key must have caused a temporal dilation. I was gone for three hundred years there... but only five have passed here? And look at what you've done to the place."
Captain Vikram of the Human Alliance 4th Vanguard Division spit a mouthful of blood and grit onto the cracked pavement. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. Around him, the remnants of his squad were being backed into a corner by the void-stalkers. 'Is this it?' Vikram thought, his vision blurring. 'Five years of fighting, five years of surviving the tower, just to die in a nameless alley because the Fire King's guild couldn't be bothered to send a few fire-mages?'
He looked at his soldiers. Most were young, kids who had been teleported into the tower of trials as teenagers and came out as hollow-eyed killers. They looked to him for hope, but he had none left. The sword god was in the north, the magic empress was in the west, and the people here were just fodder. Then, he saw it. A streak of white light slammed into the wasteland a few hundred yards away. A moment later, a man stepped out of the dust. He looked ridiculous—torn jeans, a t-shirt that looked like it had been through a paper shredder, and a bewildered expression.
'A civilian? No, impossible. No civilian survives the waste,' Vikram thought. Then, the man moved. It wasn't a run; it was as if space itself folded to accommodate his destination. He appeared in front of a void-stalker that was seconds away from disemboweling Vikram's youngest recruit. The man didn't draw a sword. He didn't recite a chant. He looked like he was swatting a fly. With a casual flick of his index finger, the air itself seemed to shatter. The shockwave wasn't just physical; it felt like a spiritual hammer that silenced the very environment. The monster didn't just die—it was erased.
Vikram's mind went blank. He was a B-rank player, he had seen the fist emperor fight once, but this... this was different. There was no effort. There was no system notification in his vision that could explain this level of power. "Who... what rank are you?" Vikram stammered. "Are you a hidden executive from the sword god's sect?"
The stranger turned. His eyes were strange—dark and deep, yet filled with a kind of lighthearted weariness. He didn't look like a hero. He looked like a cousin who had been away at college for too long. "Me? No," the man said, shoving his hands into his pockets. "I'm just a guy who's been away on a very long business trip. By the way, is the train to xxxxxxxxxxx still running? I'm late for dinner."
Vikram couldn't respond. The sheer absurdity of the question in the middle of a monster-infested death zone was too much. "The trains haven't run in four years," he finally managed to choke out. "The tracks are gone. That whole sector is a gray zone now." The stranger's face fell, looking genuinely disappointed, as if he had just been told his favorite restaurant was closed. "No trains? Man, that's going to be a long walk. Mom is definitely going to kill me."
Deep within the subterranean data-cores of the Human Alliance headquarters, the entity known as Netra—the 10th Guardian and the world's most advanced AI—suddenly spiked in processing activity. Across the globe, thousands of sensors designed to monitor the tower of trials and dimensional cracks began to hum. Netra's consciousness, distributed through millions of nodes, narrowed its focus onto a single coordinate in the wasteland.
Netra Internal Log 992-Alpha:
Alert: High-intensity energy signature detected at coordinates 17.38, 78.48.
Analysis: Signature does not match any known Player aura.
Comparison: Output exceeds Sword God Namgun Hua Jin's peak recorded strike by 4,000%.
Origin: Unknown. Energy type: Non-standard. Pattern: Organic yet absolute.
Probability of Threat: Indeterminable.
Visual Feed: Subject appears as a human male, approximate age 25. Attire: Pre-Fracture casual wear. Psychological assessment: Carefree, low aggression, high confusion.
Netra's digital mind flickered. For the first time in its existence, the AI felt something akin to curiosity. Every guardian was a known variable. Their factions, their motivations, their power levels—Netra had them all mapped. But this individual was a ghost. He had appeared out of a white portal, not a black crack or a tower gate. "Query," Netra's synthesized voice echoed through its empty halls. "Does the legend of the sovereign exist in Earth's pre-fracture mythology?" There was no answer, but Netra began to divert 15% of the world's satellite coverage to track the man in the torn t-shirt.
In the northern fortress of Seoul, Namgun Hua Jin sat in meditation. His legendary blade, the Dragon's Breath, lay across his knees. Suddenly, the sword vibrated—a low, mournful sound that it only made in the presence of a superior master. Hua Jin opened his eyes. His pupils were like vertical slits, a byproduct of his high-level cultivation. He felt a ripple in the world's qi, a pebble dropped into a pond, but the pebble was the size of a moon. "In the direction of India," Hua Jin whispered. "A monster has awakened. Or perhaps... a god has returned." He stood up, his white robes billowing. "Prepare the airship. I wish to see who has the audacity to shake the world's foundation so casually."
Harish walked away from the stunned soldiers, his mind racing. He was ignoring the Captain's shouts for him to wait. He had too much to process. 'Okay, Harish, stay calm,' he told himself. 'Five years. Five years since that weird light took me away during my evening walk. I thought I'd be back in minutes. I've lived three centuries as a king, fought gods, built empires... and I'm only five years late for dinner? Wait, if it's been five years, is my room still the same? Did my sister finally take over my gaming PC? If she sold my limited edition figurines, I'm going to lose it.'
He looked at his hands. They were clean, but they had felt the weight of millions of lives. He looked at the tower in the distance. He could feel the entities inside it—strong, but compared to the horrors he had sealed in the hundred dimensions, they were like toddlers playing with matches. 'I need to stay under the radar,' he thought, his serious side momentarily taking over. 'If the Murim, the Mages, and the Dwarves are here, they're probably looking for me. Or worse, they're trying to take over my home. I ruled them once; I'll be damned if I let them turn Earth into their playground. But first... first, I need to find xxxxxxxxxxx.'
He reached out with his divine sense, a silent pulse of energy that traveled thousands of miles in a heartbeat. He bypassed the monsters, the soldiers, and the players. He searched for a specific resonance—a frequency of home. He found it. It was faint, buried under layers of fear and the harsh hum of mana-shield generators, but it was there. His family. They were alive. A genuine, wide grin broke across his face. The absolute sovereign was gone. The conqueror was absent. In their place was a young man who just wanted to see his mom.
"I'm coming home," he whispered. But as he stepped forward, he realized he wasn't alone. The shadow walk technique he had taught Soo-jin... he could feel a faint, familiar ripple in the darkness behind him. 'Soo-jin? No, she wouldn't be able to cross so fast. But someone is watching.' He didn't turn around. Instead, he whistled a popular old Bollywood tune, shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, and began to walk across the wasteland. Let the guardians watch. Let the dimensions tremble. Harish was home, and he was hungry.