Let me tell you exactly how I died, because it is important that you understand it was completely avoidable and also entirely my fault.
It was a Tuesday afternoon. Clara and I were walking back from lunch near Pavilion when we saw it happen. An old woman was standing near the curb with her bag over her shoulder, and a guy on a beat-up kapchai rolled past, grabbed the strap, and was gone before she could even react. She stumbled forward two steps with her hand still reaching for something that wasn't there anymore, and every single person on that sidewalk suddenly found something else to look at.
Clara grabbed my wrist before I moved. "Don't. You'll get hurt."
I looked at the corner where the bike had gone, then at my Yamaha parked six meters away, then back at her. "His bike is a kapchai, mine is a Yamaha."
I kissed her on the forehead and left before she could finish whatever she was about to say.
I caught up to him two streets over without even pushing the throttle, which felt like complete vindication right up until he turned into a dead-end road near a drainage canal, realized he had nowhere left to go, and calmly reached besides the stolen bag and pulled out a gun. That was the variable I had not accounted for. I had done the bike math correctly and completely skipped the question of why a snatcher needed to be armed. He turned around, raised it, and I had just enough time to think 'huh' before the world went sideways and the road came up at me fast.
The landing did not hurt, which I know sounds wrong. But one moment I was falling and the next I was simply nowhere at all, and the last thought I managed before the dark took everything was that I had still been right about the bikes, for all the good it did me.
.....
The first thing I noticed when I woke up was that I could not open my eyes properly. They kept trying and failing, and meanwhile everything hurt across my back, my throat, both shoulders, and my left knee for reasons I had no explanation for. I was also cold, which made no sense because the last place I remembered being was a drainage canal in KL on a Tuesday afternoon.
I got my eyes open eventually.
The ceiling above me was stone. Old stone, dark with age, with a torch bracket on the wall to my right holding an actual burning torch. To my left was a narrow window and through it I could see sky, genuinely blue, with the edge of a pine tree at the bottom of the frame.
An old man was kneeling on the floor about two meters away. Completely bald, eyes closed, lips moving in something too quiet to hear, hands folded in his lap. He looked like he had been there for some time and had no intention of moving until he was ready.
Where were the doctors. Where was the hospital. Why was there a bald man on the floor.
The old man opened his eyes and looked at me. "You are awake," he said.
What came out of my mouth was not English. It was not any language I had ever spoken, but it came out of me without any effort at all, as if I had been speaking it my whole life. "Yes, Elder."
"The fever broke this morning," he said. "You were three days in it."
"I remember," I said. I did not remember. I remembered asphalt and a gun and nothing after that.
He studied me for a moment. "You seem different."
"huh?"
"Something in the eyes." He stood, walked to the door, and stopped without turning around. "Rest. Someone will bring food."
He left.
I lay there. Stone ceiling, burning torch, cold air with pine in it coming through the window, and a knee that hurt from what felt like years of training I had never done. My hands had calluses on the palms I did not recognize. Everything about the body I was lying in felt slightly off, present but unfamiliar.
I sat up slowly and looked at the room.
There was a low table next to the mat with a clay cup and a water bowl on it, a wooden chest against the far wall, and on the wall directly across from me, a banner. Dark fabric. A dragon embroidered in gold thread that had aged to a pale yellow. Coiled, not flying.
I looked at that banner and laughed. One short sound that came out before I could stop it. "There's no way," I said, to nobody in particular.
I reached over and picked up the water bowl because my throat hurt and I needed to drink. I lifted it.
I saw my face in the water.
It was not my face. It was a young man's face, roughly my age, with sharper cheekbones and a stronger jaw and a scar above the left eyebrow that had not been there on Tuesday morning. Dark eyes. Someone else's nose. Someone else's mouth.
I stared at it and it stared back and I said, "There's no f***ing way," and the face in the water said it with me.
I put the bowl down.
I got up and crossed the room to the banner and stood in front of it. The stitching was real, individual threads, slightly uneven the way handmade things always are. Dust along the top rod. The fabric cold from the wall behind it. I pressed my palm flat against it.
I knew this banner from a game. From years of reading lore documents and wiki pages and community posts at hours that Clara had always said were unreasonable. It was 2030 and Battle Realms was old enough that most people who loved it had grown up alongside it, and I was one of those people, and this banner on this wall in this stone room was the banner of the Dragon Clan, specifically the coiled variant described in Chapter Four of the Dragon Law scrolls.
The clan's symbol is not the dragon in flight, for flight implies escape. It is the dragon coiled, patient, contained, choosing.
I had cited that line in a community forum argument years ago and won and not been remotely humble about it.
The thing was, the Dragon remnant was barely mentioned in the lore. A few lines across the history chapters, a vague implication that not everyone had abandoned the old ways when the Serpent Clan formed, nothing specific about location or numbers or who was running things. I had written theories about it that in retrospect had been embarrassingly detailed, but theorizing was different from knowing. I did not know where this compound was. I did not know who these people were beyond what fragments existed in the source material. I did not know how many of them there were or what their daily lives looked like.
What I did know was where I was in the timeline. The Winter of the Wolf period. Grayback was somewhere in the Lotus shale mines right now, training people in secret, waiting. Yvaine was running those mines. Zymeth was on his plateau. The Horde was across the channel. And after all of this, once Grayback finally walked free and roughly a month had passed, Lord Oja would turn up dead and Kenji would be found standing over the body and would run before anyone could put a blade through him, and the whole thing would tip into the main campaign.
Years of story. I knew the shape of it.
I went back to the mat and sat down and picked up the water bowl again and looked at the stranger's face in it. He looked back at me from under someone else's scar.
"Okay," I said.
He did not look convinced. Neither was I.
I blinked and the system was there. just suddenly present in my vision the way a floater appears in your eye when you look at something bright, except it did not move when I moved and it did not fade when I waited.
DRAGON'S LEGACY — SYSTEM v0.1
Host recognized: Ryu [GM]
Status: Initialized
Yang Reserve: ██░░░░░░ 18%
Active Summoned: 0 / 10
► Internet Access: AVAILABLE
► Summoning Gate: LOCKED
Condition: Infrastructure required
► Admin Panel: AVAILABLE
► System Messages: 1 unread
Welcome back, GM.
The Dragon remembers.
I stared at it for a long time.
I focused on Internet Access and it opened, slow at first and then all at once, and the first thing I did was go to Clara's Instagram. Her last post was four days ago. Iced coffee at the place near Pavilion where we had eaten lunch before I made a bad decision. Forty-two likes. A leaf emoji caption. The comments were ordinary. Nothing about her page had changed.
I searched my own name.
My LinkedIn came up first, last updated in my third year of the Agriculture degree I had spent four years mostly ignoring in favor of teaching myself web development on the side. Below it was a Facebook post from my mother, shared publicly, two days ago.
She had used my full name and she had asked people to pray. She wrote that I was gone suddenly and that arrangements were being made and that she was asking for privacy. Forty-seven comments. My aunt had shared it. One of my university friends had written just the word no and nothing else.
I sat there after reading it. Long enough that the torch burned noticeably lower and the light coming through the window shifted.
I had no way to type from here, no way to reach any of them, no way to say anything at all.
I closed it and opened the Battle Realms community forum because I needed something else to look at. The top post was titled "unpopular opinion: wolf clan is mid and everyone is in denial" with two hundred and seventeen comments.
I had been dead for three days and the discourse had continued without me. I laughed, which felt wrong and also necessary, and then I sat there after it was done and let the room be quiet.
I opened the system message.
FROM: [UNKNOWN]
TO: GM
Forty-three days before the wolf walks free.
After that, a month before the heir runs.
What you build now is what survives later.
- The Dragon remembers.
Forty-three days before Grayback got out. Then roughly a month before Lord Oja ended up dead and Kenji fled and the whole island started eating itself. I had been unconscious for three days already. I had less time than I thought I had when I woke up this morning, if waking up was even the right word for what had happened.
My mother was on Facebook asking strangers to pray. Clara's last seen was two days ago.
I could not do anything about either of those things from here, and sitting in a stone room thinking about them was not going to make them different.
I opened a blank document. I had a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture that I had spent four years mostly attending out of obligation while teaching myself development on the side, and right now that second skill was the only thing I had that was actually useful in any practical sense. I had the internet. I had the lore. I had a system sitting in my field of vision waiting for me to build something before it unlocked anything further.
Battle Realm Online, I typed. Closed Beta. A living world.
I got three lines in before footsteps came down the passage and stopped outside the door, and a voice said, "You are awake."
I looked up. A Dragon warrior was standing in the doorway, broad across the shoulders, with a burn scar along the left side of his jaw and the flat expression of someone who had been told to bring food and was doing exactly that and nothing more. He set a clay bowl down near the door.
He looked at me for another second and then left.
I pulled the bowl over. Rice porridge, plain, slightly undersalted. I ate the whole thing and went back to the document.