The mental typing got easier on the second day. By the time the torch burned down to its last quarter I had a folder structure, a rough wireframe, and a hosting service picked out that would not require a credit card I no longer had access to because I was dead. The free tier existed. I used it.
The site was nothing yet, just a blank page with a title and a cursor blinking in the middle of it. I had spent most of the night not writing content but thinking about the anchor, which was the problem I kept coming back to.
The anchor was where players spawned. In the summoning gate panel, sitting locked in the system since the first night, there was a single input field labeled Spawn Anchor with nothing filled in. The description underneath said the anchor needed to be a location with consistent human presence, open enough for a person to appear without immediately being seen, and close enough to the compound that I could get to new arrivals before they wandered into something they could not handle.
The compound itself was not an option. Thirty people lived here, all of them trained and observant, and a stranger appearing from nowhere in the middle of their courtyard would raise questions I was not ready to answer.
What I needed was a village.
I knew there had to be one somewhere close. The lore mentioned civilian settlements in the mountain regions, small farming communities in the contested space between the Serpent lowlands and the higher ground, too insignificant for any of the three clans to bother occupying directly. But the lore was vague about specifics, which was the entire problem with the Dragon remnant section of the history. A few lines here, an implication there, nothing that gave me an actual location. I had written three forum posts theorizing about exactly this kind of settlement and none of them had helped me now.
I needed someone to tell me where the nearest village was.
The compound had a morning rhythm. Elder Shen at the shrine before anyone else was properly awake. The warriors training in rotating pairs in the yard. Meals together mid-morning, after which everyone dispersed into whatever their day required.
I spent the first two mornings sitting in the yard eating my porridge and letting people get used to me being there without asking anything of them. A few nodded when they passed. Most looked at me the way people look at someone who has been sick and is now clearly not the same as before.
On the morning of the third day I saw my opening.
One of the older warriors was sitting alone near the east wall working on a sword belt with a broken buckle, squinting at the stitching in the early light. He was maybe sixty, grey at his temples, with the permanent slight squint of someone who had spent decades outdoors. I had noticed him watching me a few times with an expression I could not read.
I walked over and sat nearby and waited a moment.
"Is there a village below the compound?" I said. "Northeast, maybe."
He looked up at me.
He just looked at me. Fully, directly, the way you look at someone when what they just said does not make sense coming from them. He held it long enough that I started to feel it.
"What?" he said.
"A village," I said. "Below us."
He set the sword belt down on his knee. "You have walked that path since you were eight years old," he said. "Your mother bought grain there every month until she died."
I had not thought about that. Of course the person whose body I was in had a history here. He had grown up in this compound. He knew every path and every face and every building. This man sitting across from me had probably walked to that village with him a dozen times.
"The fever took some things," I said.
He looked at me for a moment longer than was comfortable. Then he picked the sword belt back up and looked back down at the buckle. I thought the conversation was over.
"Sanhe," he said, without looking up. "The village is called Sanhe. Two kilometers northeast. You take the path behind the drying racks, follow it down past the split pine, and you will hear the chickens before you see anything."
He said it the way you tell someone something they already know and should not need to be told, which was fair.
"Thank you," I said.
He did not answer that. I got up and walked back across the yard and opened the system and typed Sanhe into the Spawn Anchor field.
The field turned green.
Spawn Anchor set: Village of Sanhe
Estimated population: 60-80
Distance from compound: 2.1km northeast
Open terrain available: YES
Current threat level: LOW
Anchor stability: GOOD
Good enough. I went back to the document.
The site needed to do three things. Look legitimate enough that people registered. Explain the entry mechanism without making people call the police. And reach the right people, which meant Battle Realms fans specifically, because anyone else who arrived would have no frame of reference for what they were walking into.
The targeting was straightforward. I knew those communities. The Steam forum, the subreddit, three Discord servers, a Facebook group that was mostly people posting screenshots with nostalgic captions. I knew where the fans gathered and I knew what they paid attention to.
The entry mechanism was harder to write around. The device was the problem, some physical object the system would manufacture and deliver to registrants that would serve as the interface between the real world and here. I needed to explain it in a way that sounded like game design. I spent two hours on it and eventually landed on proprietary neural-haptic sleep interface, which was vague enough to be unfalsifiable and technical enough to sound like something a well-funded indie studio might actually build.
The company was the other problem. A legitimate studio had a paper trail. A registered name, a business address, at minimum a LinkedIn for the lead developer. I spent an afternoon building all of it from scratch, constructing a fictional company from inside a stone room in a fantasy world using a mental interface that cost me Yang every hour I kept it running.
I named the company Remnant Studio.
The status window was something I almost missed until I was halfway through the ad copy.
I had been thinking about it as a pure immersion game, no interface, nothing between the player and the world, but that was not accurate to what the system actually provided. Players would have a status window. Health, stamina, Yin and Yang accumulation, active missions if I assigned them. It was not a full HUD, nothing floating over the environment, more like something they could pull up deliberately the way you check your phone, present when needed and gone when not. The system had built that in without me asking.
Which meant the ad copy I had been drafting was wrong.
I went back and rewrote it.
BATTLE REALM ONLINE
Closed Beta - Dragon Clan
A living world with real consequences.
Train to fight. Fight to survive.
Build something that lasts.
You arrive as a peasant.
What you become depends entirely
on what you are willing to do.
Your progress carries over.
Your choices carry over.
Everything carries over.
This is not a game that forgets you.
CLOSED BETA - LIMITED SLOTS
Register. The rest will find you.
I read it back. Then I pushed the ads live across every Battle Realms community I had access to and closed the interface.
The Yang reserve was at eleven percent. I needed to stop for at least a day and let it recover, which meant tomorrow I had nothing to do except exist in this compound as a person who had grown up here and apparently knew where every village and split pine and flock of chickens was and had somehow forgotten all of it.
The old warrior was still sitting near the east wall. He had finished with the buckle and was now just sitting, not doing anything in particular. Not watching me exactly, but oriented in my general direction the way people are when they are thinking about something and the something happens to be in front of them.
I looked at the system message one more time before I closed it for the night.
Spawn Anchor: Sanhe
Summoning Gate: LOCKED
Condition: 10 registered users required
Current registrations: 0
Yang Reserve: 11%
Recommendation: rest
Days remaining: 40
I closed it and lay down and listened to the wind come through the window and looked at the ceiling until I fell asleep.