[Name: Lyra]
[Attributes: Click to view details]
[Current Survival Points: 23]
[Game Identity: Player]
[Current Location: Game Main World]
[Current Remaining Maximum Play Time: 23 days]
[Warning: Player play time is below 30 days. To avoid death, refrain from sleeping as much as possible and accumulate Survival Points immediately.]
[Watch ads to stay alive! One hour of viewing increases Survival Points by 1. Maximum three times per day. Click here.]
[Irongate Construction Group is recruiting dungeon testers. Spend 30 Survival Points for a chance to double your total. Click here.]
[Survival Point Loans: Low interest, instant access. Borrow today, live tomorrow. Click here.]
[System Announcement: Welcome, Dungeon Constructor!]
[...]
Lyra sat on a bench by the river, staring at the panel floating in front of her for a full three minutes.
The evening water shimmered with broken fragments of gold. Street lights on the bridge flickered on one by one. In the distance, the glass curtain walls of skyscrapers caught the last of the sunset, painting the sky in layers of pink-purple and burnt orange, gorgeous enough to belong on a travel poster.
If one were to ignore the expression on her face, it was genuinely a beautiful scene.
She was young, soft black hair falling to her shoulders with an effortless ease. Her skin was naturally pale, catching the warm light well, and her features were delicate without trying. A few loose strands drifted across her face in the river breeze, restless and unruly, adding something quietly striking to the whole picture.
Evening glow. Young girl. Riverside.
Beautiful words, all of them.
The expression, however, ruined everything. The closest comparison would be a person who had just realized, after a long and terrible journey to somewhere she never wanted to go, that the situation was somehow even worse than she had imagined.
"You're joking."
"No, seriously. Is this real?"
Lyra stared at the System panel, the stack of ads blinking patiently behind it, and muttered to herself.
For the people native to this world, this was probably an ordinary evening.
But Lyra was not from this world.
This was only her second day since transmigrating.
The reason she ended up here was straightforward enough. One evening after work, she had a fatal encounter with a freight truck moving at full speed, did everything she could, failed completely, and left the world one pedestrian shorter.
When she opened her eyes again, she was somewhere unfamiliar, in a body that was not hers.
That alone would have been enough to process. But while sorting through the girl's memories, she found something worse: there was something fundamentally wrong with this world.
The good news was that it resembled her original world in most ways. History, culture, geography, the overlap was significant. With a little care, she could blend in without issue.
The bad news was that this world appeared to have been pulled straight from a novel.
The memories made it clear.
Four years ago, on an ordinary workday, at 10:17 in the morning, every electronic screen on the planet went dark at the same moment.
Then every screen came back. Mobile phones, televisions, mall advertisement boards, hospital monitoring terminals, all of them displayed the same line of text:
[Initiate Survival Protocol]
And then He appeared.
He looked different to everyone who witnessed it. Some described light. Some described a single enormous eye. Some described an entire city hanging upside down in the sky.
But no one doubted what He was.
The world came to call Him God.
His voice arrived directly in the mind, bypassing language entirely. No translation needed. Everyone understood.
"Your world is about to become a battlefield."
"The Outer Realm is approaching."
"You cannot resist."
"Therefore, you must become Players."
"Grow. Grow quickly. The enemy is coming."
He vanished immediately after, but the world He left behind was not the same one.
Everything began to digitize. To gamify. Reality became the so-called Main World, the primary stage of the game. Hideous creatures began appearing everywhere. In the early period, modern weapons were enough to hold the line.
But as the gamification deepened, conventional weapons started failing. Not breaking down, but failing to meet conditions.
Certain firearms required minimum attribute thresholds to fire. Certain vehicles required specific buffs to operate. Certain equipment required items that existed nowhere in the real world.
The primary way to meet those conditions was through Dungeons.
Dungeons were worlds that materialized alongside the digitization of reality, separate from the Main World and wildly varied in nature. Anyone could enter by spending Survival Points, and clearing them yielded tangible rewards.
The dungeon currently holding the highest clear rate was called [Lone Operative]. Set in a modern military backdrop, entry cost 150 Survival Points. Inside, the player took the role of a solo soldier: avoid enemy reconnaissance, cross the front line undetected, infiltrate enemy territory, and reach the target safehouse.
The routes available were completely open. Players could go in guns blazing, bribe their way through checkpoints, crawl through no-man's-land on willpower alone, or even defect to the enemy side, betray the safehouse location, and guide a strike team to the target. All of it counted as mission completion.
Whatever approach a player could conceive, the System would allow. Scores and rewards scaled with the chosen route and the quality of execution.
The reason [Lone Operative] held the top clear rate was largely due to military involvement. Rumors had been circulating that it was on track to become an official evaluation ground for soldier selection.
The benefits flowing back from dungeon runs were substantial. Attribute points, item drops, and score-based rewards.
It was rumored that most players could obtain a passive skill called [Stealth] from [Lone Operative], significantly reducing the chance of being detected by enemies. Those with stronger performance could walk away with rarer skills like [Lone Wolf] or [Firearm Intuition].
The former granted passive attribute growth whenever a player operated alone. The latter was considerably more valuable, allowing players to modify firearms and dramatically lower their usage conditions.
At a time when the requirements for operating modern weapons were growing increasingly demanding, that kind of skill was worth a great deal.
As a side note, many players had attempted the defection route, but only one person had ever pulled it off. The reason was simple: convincing the enemy required exceptional persuasion, and anyone caught attempting it faced immediate execution.
With the military now heavily involved in the dungeon, ordinary civilians rarely got the chance to try it anyway.
Most dungeons in the world were generated by the System.
A smaller portion came from ordinary people.
Because yes, alongside becoming Players, people could also become Dungeon Constructors.
These player-built dungeons, distinct from System-generated ones, were called public dungeons. Once a Constructor submitted their dungeon, the System automatically evaluated and scored it. The Constructor could then decide whether to open it to the public and set their own Survival Point entry fee.
When players cleared public dungeons, the System distributed rewards based on multiple factors: overall dungeon completion rates, the quality of the dungeon design, and individual player performance.
Truly exceptional public dungeons even had a chance to be absorbed into the System's official catalogue.
In theory, it was a perfect cycle. Talented players would become Constructors, design dungeons tailored to front-line combat situations, supply powerful items and passive skills to soldiers holding the line, filter out stronger players through that process, and then refine future dungeons based on player feedback.
Clean. Efficient. Self-sustaining.
But theory and reality were two different things.
This world had a lot in common with the one Lyra had lived in for over twenty years. Historical trajectory, cultural development, technological progression, the parallels ran deep.
But "almost the same" still left room for differences.
Here, the Cold War had lasted considerably longer, and it had been a three-way standoff rather than a bilateral one. For decades, nearly every resource and industry had been oriented toward potential conflict. Even after the Cold War ended, that momentum carried forward long past its expiration date.
Entertainment culture was only just beginning to find its footing when the gamification began.
And the timing could not have been worse, because this world had experienced its own version of the Atari Crash. Right before reality began to digitize, the market had been flooded with low-effort, formulaic games that had gutted consumer trust in the industry entirely.
A weak foundation to begin with.
Then, on top of that, predatory public construction groups moved in and made everything worse.
Under those conditions, expecting public dungeons to be worth anything was wishful thinking.
Ninety percent of public dungeons were trash. Pure Survival Point traps with nothing of value inside.
The Irongate Construction Group ad sitting on Lyra's panel was a perfect example. A hundred percent scam. The kind of dungeon where even clearing it earned rewards so small they barely registered, with an F-grade System rating and clearance conditions that were likely rigged from the start.
And yet they had enough Survival Points to buy panel ad space.
Placing an ad on the player panel cost tens of thousands of Survival Points.
Tens of thousands.
Survival Points...
The thought snapped Lyra back to the present. She looked at the number sitting on her panel. Twenty-three. She pressed her lips together and felt the full weight of how bad her situation was.
Survival Points were a product of the gamification, simple as that. Everyone received them proportionally after becoming a Player. They could be traded, spent in the System mall on virtually anything imaginable, and used as entry fees for dungeons.
More importantly, they were what kept a player alive.
One Survival Point was automatically deducted every twenty-four hours. Hit zero, and the account was deleted on the spot.
Twenty-three Survival Points meant twenty-three days left to live.
The reason the number was so low came down to the original girl's history. She had never once entered a System dungeon, too frightened to try. And sometime before Lyra arrived, she had been conned out of a large sum of Survival Points by a public dungeon scam, which had only deepened her fear.
Her parents had divorced when she was seven. After both remarried, neither brought her along. She had grown up with her grandmother, quiet and withdrawn. When her grandmother passed, she had no one left. She never went to dungeons. She had no friends. She barely left home. And then, the one time she finally trusted someone.
She got robbed.
Then Lyra arrived.
Eyes open, twenty-three days on the clock, an unfamiliar world, and a body that was thoroughly not her own.
That last part, if she was being honest, was technically the smallest problem on the list.
Even if she had spent a mortifying amount of time in the bathroom on the first day confirming things she already knew.
Three separate times.
"You might as well have just let me die," Lyra muttered, pressing her lips together as she looked down.
Then she caught sight of her own silhouette and immediately wished she hadn't.
She looked away.
Fine. Ignore it. Just treat the next twenty-three days as an extended farewell tour and call it done.
The thought lasted about two seconds before the memory of dying surfaced. The exact feeling of it. The specific and horrible reality of what that moment had been like.
Lyra went quiet.
She looked down again.
Reconsidered.
This was actually fine. Completely manageable.
She did not want to go through that again. Not even slightly.
When the alternative was death, suddenly nothing else seemed like much of a problem.
Right. So. The only real question was: how to survive?
Lyra took a slow breath, pushed the memory back down, and made herself think clearly.
Watch ads? Three hours a day maximum, with a hard cap on daily views. Barely enough to tread water.
Enter a System dungeon? No spare Survival Points for the entry fee, no confidence in her ability to clear one, and far too much risk.
Take out a loan? The interest rates were brutal, forcibly deducted from dungeon earnings. Without the skill to back it up, borrowing would only accelerate the countdown.
That left one option.
Lyra looked at the last notification sitting on her panel.
[System Announcement: Welcome, Dungeon Constructor!]