West Texas was quiet in a way cities never understood.
Not empty. Not dead.
Quiet like a held breath.
Jack Calder had learned to listen to that quiet long before he learned what it meant to own land. The ranch had been his father's once, and before that his grandfather's—a stretch of scrubland, pasture, and stubborn dirt that refused to give anything easily. You earned every fence post you set, every calf that lived through the winter, every gallon of water pulled up from the aquifer below.
The land remembered that kind of effort.
That night, the windmill was groaning.
Jack lay half-awake in his bed, eyes open, staring at the faint outline of the ceiling. The sound wasn't wrong, exactly, but it was persistent—the metal-on-metal complaint of old machinery working harder than it should. He made a mental note to grease the bearings in the morning.
Thunder shifted in the corral outside. One of the dogs—Ranger, by the sound of it—paced near the porch, nails clicking softly against wood.
Everything was normal.
Then the windmill stopped.
The sound cut off mid-groan, like someone had reached up and pinched the night itself shut.
Jack's eyes snapped fully open.
Silence flooded the ranch.
Not the usual quiet. This was deeper. He couldn't hear insects. Couldn't hear wind brushing through grass. Even the cattle—dozens of animals that never fully stopped making noise—were still.
Jack rolled out of bed in one smooth motion, hand already closing around the revolver on the nightstand. Years of ranching had trained his body better than his mind. You didn't hesitate when something felt wrong.
He stood there for a moment, breathing slow, listening.
Nothing.
Then the lights went out.
The lamp died. The digital clock on the dresser blinked once and went black. Somewhere in the house, the refrigerator sighed and fell silent.
Jack frowned.
Power outages happened. Storms, busted lines, the occasional transformer blowing in town. But this felt different. The air itself felt…thin. Pressurized. Like the moment before a tornado touched down.
He crossed the room, boots crunching softly on dust tracked in earlier that day, and pulled the curtain aside.
The ranch spread out beneath the moon as it always had. Fence lines cutting clean lines through pasture. The barn crouched low and solid against the horizon. Cattle slept in loose clusters, dark shapes rising and falling with slow breaths.
For a heartbeat, Jack felt foolish.
Then the sky fractured.
Blue light tore itself across the heavens, lines forming perfect squares that stretched from horizon to horizon. The stars vanished behind the grid as if the sky itself had been overlaid with something artificial.
Fence posts flickered.
The barn shimmered, its outline turning translucent for a split second before snapping back into place. The ground beneath Jack's boots rippled like disturbed water.
He sucked in a sharp breath.
"What the hell…"
The air vibrated.
Text appeared in the sky.
Not projected. Not reflected.
Written.
WORLD RESET COMPLETE
Jack felt it in his chest more than he understood it with his eyes.
He had lived through droughts that killed half his herd. Through storms that flattened miles of fencing overnight. He knew disaster.
This wasn't weather.
SERVER: EARTH-01
VERSION: 1.0
The words lingered, bright and impossible, then vanished.
The wind slammed back into existence.
Cattle bawled in panic, hooves churning dirt. Ranger barked once—sharp, alarmed—before cutting himself off. Something screamed from the hills to the west, high-pitched and wrong, a sound that didn't belong to anything Jack had ever hunted or run off his land.
Jack grabbed his rifle from the rack by the door and stepped onto the porch.
The night felt different.
Cleaner. Sharper. Like the world had been stripped down to bare essentials. His breath fogged faintly despite the warm Texas air.
Movement caught his eye near the far fence line.
A glow pulsed low to the ground.
Jack raised the rifle and squinted.
Something bounced through the grass.
It was round. Semi-transparent. Glowing faintly blue, like moonlight trapped in jelly. It cleared the fence with insulting ease and landed among the cattle.
Red letters flared above it.
LV. 3 SLIME
Jack stared.
"…No."
The thing lurched toward a heifer. When it touched her leg, the animal screamed—a raw, panicked sound that froze Jack's blood. Where the creature made contact, flesh hissed and smoked as if drenched in acid.
Jack fired.
The rifle cracked. The bullet punched straight through the creature's center.
It didn't slow.
Jack fired again. And again.
Nothing.
The heifer collapsed, thrashing weakly before going still. The creature pulsed brighter as it fed.
Above the corpse, translucent text appeared.
NON-PLAYER ENTITY TERMINATED
Jack lowered the rifle slowly.
He had buried cattle before. Disease. Accidents. Predators.
This felt like an execution.
A chime rang inside his skull.
Jack stiffened, one hand flying to his temple.
The sound wasn't loud—it was precise, like a bell struck directly against his thoughts.
INITIALIZING PLAYER INTERFACE…
A transparent window unfolded before his eyes.
NAME: Jack Calder
CLASS: None
LEVEL: 1
HP: 120/120
MP: 40/40
Jack exhaled slowly.
"So that's how it is," he muttered.
Another window appeared.
UNIQUE AUTHORITY DETECTED
The ranch answered.
Fence lines glowed faint gold. The ground beneath Jack's boots pulsed once, like a living thing recognizing its owner.
Then the final window appeared.
CHEAT SKILL ACQUIRED
[FRONTIER DOMAIN]
Understanding slammed into him.
Golden outlines traced his land exactly as the deed described—every pasture, every fence line, every dry creek bed. He felt pressure in his chest, deep and steady, like roots sinking into soil.
Within his land, Jack sensed movement. Every animal. Every imbalance. Every hostile presence.
The slime pulsed again.
A prompt appeared.
DESIGNATION AVAILABLE
Livestock
Pest
Predator
Jack didn't hesitate.
"Predator."
The word carried weight.
The land responded.
The ground beneath the slime hardened, jagged stone erupting upward to trap it. A health bar snapped into existence.
HP: 60/120
Jack raised the rifle and fired.
This time, the bullet hit.
The creature burst apart in a spray of glowing fragments that evaporated before touching dirt.
PREDATOR ELIMINATED
DOMAIN EXPERIENCE ACQUIRED
Silence fell again.
Movement stirred near the barn.
Four shapes emerged from the darkness—low, disciplined.
His dogs.
Ranger led, old and sharp-eyed. Dusty and Belle flanked him, lean and ready. Moose followed last, massive and calm, already positioning himself between cattle and open land.
They didn't bark.
They waited.
Golden outlines flared around them.
DOMAIN GUARD PACK ESTABLISHED
Soft thuds followed as barn cats dropped from rafters, vanishing into shadow.
Then Jack felt it—a steady presence at his side.
Thunder stood in the corral, powerful and unafraid.
Jack rested a hand on the horse's neck.
Somewhere in the distance, something howled again.
Jack looked across his land.
The ranch wasn't just land anymore.
It was territory.
The server had opened.
And Jack Calder was standing on his frontier.