The last of the game world dissolved.
Evan's final sight was not of the angel, but of home. The high vaulted ceiling of the Great Hall, the last standing pillar, the tattered banner of Monster's Haven—all of it turned to shimmering gold dust. It didn't vanish into darkness. It poured upwards, a silent reverse-rain, into a point of infinite light above.
Then, the light consumed everything.
The impact was not of matter against matter.
It was Reality against Concept.
The Guild Core—a bubble of preserved, living data wrapped in Evan's soul-template—slammed into the skin of a new universe. The sound was a silent, psychic thunderclap that rang through 4,328 consciousnesses at once.
Evan's senses severed. Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell—all the inputs his avatar had simulated for sixteen years were stripped away. He was adrift. A point of thought. A knot of memory and will, tied inextricably to the pulsing, protesting data-sphere of his guild.
In the void, Aura's voice was a thread, thin and strained.
"Reality integration… in progress. Foreign physical laws detected. Local energy matrix is… hostile. Active rejection of our foundational code. Systems are conflicting. It… hurts."
Hurts. She used the word. A feeling. Not a system error.
And then, Evan felt the others.
Not as names on a list. Not as NPC markers on a map.
As presences. A constellation of confused, frightened, awakening minds swirling around the Core, held together only by the net of his own sacrificed pattern. Four thousand, three hundred and twenty-seven sparks of consciousness. He felt Glimmer's sharp panic, a needle of light. He felt the deep, rumbling distress of Thorne, like shifting continents. He felt the hollow, clattering fear where Bone's steadfastness should be. A choir of disorientation and terror.
They were alive. And they were screaming into the void.
A final voice cut through the chaos. It was the angel, but distant, fading, as if speaking from the other side of a cosmic door that was slamming shut.
"YOU ARE NOW WITHIN A CULTIVATION REALM. ITS LAWS ARE DIFFERENT. ITS ENERGY REJECTS YOURS. YOU ARE AN ANOMALY IN THEIR SYSTEM. A DISEASE IN THE BODY OF THEIR DAO."
A pause, heavy with finality.
"YOU WILL BE HUNTED."
Another psychic tremor, the universe grinding against their foreignness.
"SURVIVE, EVAN BLACK. PROVE THAT CONSCIOUSNESS CAN EXIST WHERE IT SHOULD NOT."
Silence.
True, absolute silence. The angel was gone. The game was gone. There was only the dark, the pressure, and the silent screams of his guild.
Time had no meaning.
Evan was awareness without a body, a captain lashed to the helm of a ship in a starless sea. He held on. He had promised to keep the lights on. The lights were terrified, but they were on.
Sensation returned not with a bang, but with a slow, cruel drip.
First: Pressure. A terrible, immense weight on all sides. Not gravity. Something else. A dense, vibrant, living energy that pressed against their very essence, seeking to break them apart. It was aggressive. Hungry. It wanted to digest them.
Second: Sensation. A sharp, cold solidity beneath him. Not the smooth digital marble of the Core Chamber. Rough. Uneven. Gritty. Real.
Third: Sound. A low, mournful wind through… through trees. The rush of distant, cascading water. The creak of wood. Real sounds, complex and layered, not game audio loops.
Fourth: Smell. Damp pine. Cold stone. Rich, black earth. The iron tang of a distant ore deposit. A world of scent, overwhelming and profound.
Fifth: Sight. Not a rendered graphic. Light. True, blinding, golden-white light, filtered through a barrier he realized were his own eyelids.
He had eyelids.
A body.
The awareness crashed into him. He was not a point in the void. He was in something. Flesh. Bone. Muscle. A heart hammering against ribs. Lungs dragging in a burning, too-thick breath.
He lay still, afraid to move.
"Evan."
Aura's voice. Not in his ears. Not in his mind's ear. It was just there, woven into the fabric of his thoughts, calm and clear and utterly changed. It was her, but whole. Alive.
"Sensory reintegration is complete. We have… arrived."
He opened his eyes.
The light was blinding. He blinked, tears washing away the blur.
Above him was a sky of deep, velvet indigo, streaked with wisps of violet cloud. And in that sky, hanging with impossible clarity, were two moons. One large and silver-white, casting a cool, clean light. The other smaller, tinged with a faint, ominous copper hue.
His breath caught.
Slowly, grit digging into his palms, he pushed himself up onto his elbows.
He was on a stretch of wild grass at the edge of a forest of towering, dark-barked trees. Before him, the land rose into sharp, mist-wreathed peaks that clawed at the strange twin-moon sky.
And there, nestled in a colossal, hidden valley between those peaks, stood Ebonreach Keep.
It was not a rendering. It was stone. Real, weathered, immense stone. Towers soared, banners hung limp in the still air, walls that had been digital polygons now showed cracks, moss, the scars of time and a journey across realities. It looked ancient. It looked solid. It looked… terrifyingly real.
The Guild Core was no longer a crystal in a chamber. It was that castle. It was the land. It was them.
A wave of feeling—4,327 knots of confusion, wonder, and dawning fear—echoed through the new, fragile bond in his soul.
They were here.
They were alive.
And as Evan took his first true breath of the cultivation world's dense, aggressive air, he felt it. A subtle, constant vibration of rejection. The very energy in the wind, in the light, in the soil, hummed a note of discord against his mana-starved bones.
The angel's final words were not a warning. They were a prophecy.
You will be hunted.
Evan Black, the Last Guild Master, stood on shaking legs in an alien world, under two unknown moons, and faced his home.
The lights were on.
Now, they had to survive the night.