The sky was bleeding.
Ethan Cross stood atop the shattered remains of New Seoul's final fortress, his sword arm numb, his lungs burning with every breath. Around him, the city that had taken eight years to build was collapsing in real-time. Skyscrapers fell like dominoes. Screams echoed through the smoke.
He was thirty-eight years old. He'd been fighting for ten years straight.
And he was the last one left.
"Status," he croaked.
His System interface flickered to life, barely functional.
[HP: 47/1,240]
[MP: 0/890]
[Stamina: 2%]
[Debuffs: Bleeding (Severe), Exhausted, Broken Ribs (x4), Curse of the Fallen]
Forty-seven hit points. He'd survived worse.
No, that was a lie. He'd never survived worse.
The 317th Monster Wave had broken through thirty minutes ago. S-Rank defenders—people who could level mountains—had been torn apart like wet paper. Commander Yun, who'd held the western gate for six years, had been swallowed whole by something with too many mouths. Dr. Reeves, the healer who'd saved Ethan's life seventeen times, had burned to ash trying to resurrect the fallen.
Ethan had watched them all die.
He tightened his grip on his sword—a Mythic-tier blade he'd looted in Year Seven, back when he still thought Mythic gear mattered. The weapon was cracked now, its enchantments failing. Just like everything else.
A roar split the air.
Ethan turned.
The Titan-class monstrosity crawled over the eastern wall, each of its six legs the size of a building. Its body was a nightmare of black chitin and exposed muscle, pulsing with corruption. Eyes—hundreds of them—covered its torso, all locked on him.
[Abyssal Devourer — Lvl 287 | Titan-Class | HP: 4,890,000/5,200,000]
He'd dealt three hundred thousand damage to it. Alone.
It wasn't enough.
It was never going to be enough.
The creature's maw opened. Ethan saw the glow building in its throat—the same attack that had vaporized the fortress's shield generators. If that hit him, there wouldn't even be ash left to bury.
He should run.
There was nowhere to run to.
He should fight.
There was no fight left in him.
The glow intensified. The Devourer's eyes narrowed, all of them, in what might have been satisfaction. It knew. It knew he was finished.
Ethan laughed.
It was a broken, bitter sound that surprised even him.
"Ten years," he said to no one. "Ten years of grinding, dying, coming back, grinding again. And for what? To stand here and watch it all end anyway?"
His vision blurred. Blood loss, probably. Or tears. Did it matter?
The light in the Devourer's throat reached critical mass.
Ethan closed his eyes.
And thought, for the thousandth time, the same thought he'd had every day since Year Three:
If only I'd known.
If only I'd found the Dev Node on Day Zero.
If only I'd had just one more chance—
The world went white.
Ethan's eyes snapped open.
He gasped, hands clutching at his chest, expecting agony. Expecting the hole the Devourer's attack would have punched clean through his sternum.
Nothing.
No pain.
He was lying in a bed. A cheap bed with scratchy sheets and a lumpy mattress. Sunlight streamed through a window covered in dusty blinds. The air smelled like instant ramen and stale coffee.
He knew this place.
This was his apartment.
His old apartment. The studio he'd rented in District 4 before the world ended. Before the System. Before everything.
"What—"
His voice cracked. He bolted upright, and his hands—
His hands were smooth. Unscarred.
In Year Ten, his hands had been a roadmap of violence. Burn scars from fire elementals. Calluses from a decade of sword work. Three missing fingernails that had never grown back after the torture dungeon in Year Six.
These hands were clean. Whole. Young.
He scrambled out of bed and nearly fell. His legs weren't responding right. They felt wrong. Weak. He caught himself on the wall and looked down.
He was wearing boxers and a faded t-shirt.
His body was lean. Not starved-lean like Year Ten. Not muscle-corded like Year Eight. Just... normal. The body of a man who went to the gym twice a week and ate too much takeout.
His phone buzzed on the nightstand.
Ethan stared at it like it was a bomb.
Phones didn't exist in Year Ten. The System had fried every network on the planet within the first month. The only communication was System messages or runners between settlements.
His hand trembling, he picked it up.
March 15th, 2025 — 11:50 AM
The date hit him like a warhammer to the chest.
March 15th.
Day Zero.
The day the System Integration began.
"No," he whispered. "No, this isn't—"
He unlocked the phone with shaking fingers. Checked the calendar. Checked the news. Checked his banking app.
Account Balance: $3,247.18
His life savings. The pathetic amount he'd scraped together working two jobs before the apocalypse. He'd spent it all in the first week buying supplies that hadn't mattered. Food that had rotted. A tent he'd never used because the monsters came faster than anyone expected.
This was real.
He was back.
Ten years. He'd lived ten years of hell, died fighting a Titan, and somehow—impossibly—he was back at the beginning.
His mind raced. How? Why? The System didn't do this. There were no respawns before Integration. No time travel. No—
The Dev Node.
His breath caught.
In Year Nine, he'd met a dying man. A System Engineer—one of the poor bastards who'd been part of the Integration program before it all went live. The man had been half-mad with radiation poisoning, bleeding out in a collapsed server bunker.
He'd whispered three things before he died:
A password.
A set of coordinates.
And a time: Day Zero, 12:00 PM.
"The Dev Node," Ethan said aloud. "It was real."
He'd thought the man was delirious. By Year Nine, hope was a luxury no one could afford. But the man had been so certain. So specific.
"Find it in the first seventy-two hours," he'd said. "Before the System locks down. That's when the Admin access is still vulnerable. That's when you can rewrite the rules."
Ethan had filed it away as fantasy. A dying man's last delusion.
But now—
Now he had the chance to test it.
11:51 AM.
Nine minutes until Integration.
The coordinates were burned into his memory. An abandoned construction site in District 7. GPS: 37.5326° N, 127.0246° E.
It was a fifteen-minute drive.
He had nine minutes.
Ethan grabbed his jeans off the floor, yanked them on, and nearly tripped again. His body wasn't responding right. He'd spent ten years with maxed Agility stats and Enhanced Reflexes. This body was human. Slow. Fragile.
He hated it already.
Keys. Where were his—there. On the kitchen counter next to a half-eaten bowl of cereal from yesterday.
He snatched them and ran for the door.
His car was a fifteen-year-old sedan that rattled when it hit forty miles per hour. In Year Ten, he'd driven armored APCs and stolen military Humvees. This felt like driving a tin can.
He floored it anyway.
The streets were normal. Peaceful. People walked dogs. A couple argued outside a coffee shop. A kid on a skateboard nearly collided with a businesswoman on her phone.
None of them knew.
In twelve minutes, the sky would fracture. Blue system windows would appear in front of every human on Earth. Monsters would spawn in parks, in malls, in living rooms. The Tutorial Quest would begin, and ninety-six percent of these people would be dead within a week.
Ethan's knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
He couldn't save them. Not yet. Not without power.
First, he needed the Dev Node.
11:54 AM.
Six minutes.
He ran a red light. A car honked. Ethan didn't slow down.
District 7 appeared ahead—a neighborhood of abandoned lots and half-built apartment complexes. The construction site was on the eastern edge, a skeletal concrete structure surrounded by chain-link fencing and yellow caution tape.
11:57 AM.
Three minutes.
He screeched into the gravel parking lot and killed the engine. The silence was deafening. No System alerts. No monster roars. Just the distant hum of the city.
Ethan ran.
The chain-link fence had a gap—probably cut by vandals or homeless people looking for shelter. He squeezed through, tearing his shirt on the jagged metal.
The construction site was a maze of rebar and concrete pillars. Dust hung in the air. Somewhere, a bird called out.
Where was it? The coordinates put it near the foundation, but—
There.
A shimmer in the air.
It was faint. Almost invisible. Like heat distortion on a summer road. But Ethan had seen System phenomena for ten years. He knew what code looked like when it was manifesting in physical space.
The Dev Node was materializing.
He sprinted toward it, boots crunching on gravel.
11:58 AM.
Two minutes.
The shimmer solidified into a floating distortion—a sphere of fractured light, maybe three feet in diameter, hovering two feet off the ground. Inside it, he could see... code. Raw System code, scrolling in languages that shouldn't exist. Alien glyphs mixed with binary, with mathematical symbols that hurt to look at.
This was it.
This was the back door.
Ethan reached out—
"Hey!"
He froze.
A teenager stood twenty feet away, staring at his phone. Designer jeans. Expensive sneakers. A leather jacket that probably cost more than Ethan's car. The kid looked up, and his face twisted with irritation.
"Are you blind?" the teenager snapped. "I'm standing here. This is my spot."
Ethan's mind went blank.
No.
No, no, no.
11:59 AM.
One minute.
"Move," Ethan said.
The kid sneered. "Do you know who my father is?"
Ethan didn't have time for this. He charged.
The teenager's eyes went wide. "What the—"
Ethan tackled him aside—not hard enough to hurt, just enough to get him out of the way. The kid hit the ground with a yelp, phone skittering across the gravel.
"You psycho!" the teenager screamed. "I'm calling the cops! My father will—"
The world shuddered.
Ethan felt it in his bones. A vibration that started deep in his chest and spread outward, like reality itself was adjusting its frequency.
The sky fractured.
Cracks appeared in the blue expanse above them—jagged black lines spreading like a shattered windshield. Blue light bled through the gaps. Symbols appeared, floating in the air, glowing with impossible clarity.
[SYSTEM INTEGRATION: INITIALIZING...]
The teenager stopped shouting. He stared up at the sky, mouth open.
"What the hell—"
[WELCOME, PLAYERS OF EARTH.]
[SCANNING... 8,247,391,842 ENTITIES DETECTED.]
[CLASSIFICATION: TUTORIAL WORLD — RANK F.]
[INTEGRATION PROTOCOL: ACTIVE.]
The blue window appeared in front of Ethan's face, solid and real. He'd seen this message before. Ten years ago. Right before everything went to hell.
But this time, he wasn't staring at the welcome screen.
He was reaching for the Dev Node.
His hand plunged into the shimmering distortion. It felt like touching liquid electricity. His vision exploded with light.
Code flooded his sight. Millions of lines of text, scrolling faster than thought. He saw the System's architecture laid bare—the skill trees, the monster spawn algorithms, the player stat distributions. It was overwhelming. Infinite. Impossible.
And then, a prompt appeared. Small. Hidden in the corner of the cascade.
[DEVELOPER ACCESS DETECTED.]
[AUTHENTICATE?]
Ethan's heart hammered. His fingers moved on instinct, typing into empty air. The password the dying engineer had given him:
RESET_PRIVILEGES_OMEGA_7
The code froze.
The world held its breath.
And then:
[AUTHENTICATION SUCCESSFUL.]
[ADMINISTRATOR MODE: ACTIVE.]
[TIME REMAINING: 71:58:32]
Seventy-two hours. That's all he had. Seventy-two hours before the System locked down, before the Admin access window closed forever.
But seventy-two hours was enough.
Ethan grinned.
Behind him, the teenager gasped.
"What... what did you just do?"
Ethan turned.
The kid was on his knees, staring at his own System window. But it was glitching. Fragments of Ethan's admin interface were bleeding through—golden code overlaying the standard blue.
The teenager's hand trembled as he reached toward his screen. His fingers brushed the distortion still clinging to Ethan's jacket from the Dev Node.
And his eyes went wide.
"I... I can see it," the kid whispered. "The admin menu. You just—"
He looked up at Ethan. Not with fear. With greed.
"You just made me rich, old man."
The teenager scrambled to his feet, grinning like a maniac. He pulled out his phone—still functional, barely—and sprinted toward a Porsche parked at the edge of the lot.
Ethan's blood turned to ice.
No.
If this kid told anyone about the Admin access—if he posted it online, if he called his rich friends, if the information spread—
The future would change in ways even Ethan couldn't predict. The Dev Node was supposed to be a secret. A single point of failure. One player with God Mode.
Not two.
"Wait!" Ethan shouted.
The teenager didn't stop. He reached his car, keys already in hand.
Ethan ran, but his body—this weak, human body—was too slow.
The Porsche's engine roared to life.
And the kid was gone.
[END OF CHAPTER 1]