Sebastian woke up gasping hard. His hands grabbed at his own chest!
His fingers pressed into the cheap fabric of his t-shirt. He was looking for the big hole where the Void God's black spear had stabbed him.
There was no blood. There was no hole!
There was only his heart beating fast and wild against his ribs.
He sat up fast. He breathed in quick, short gasps. Sweat covered his forehead and stuck his dark hair to his skin.
Sebastian swung his legs off the bed. The old rusty springs creaked.
He put his face in his rough hands to try to calm down.
The pain of his death still burned through his body. It felt like a deep cold that had frozen his soul right before the server broke apart. He had died!
He was totally sure of it. You do not survive a direct hit from a being that eats whole worlds for breakfast.
Slowly he began to notice the dim blue light of his small apartment. He lowered his hands and stared at the flickering neon sign buzzing loudly outside his dirty window.
The rain of 2077 never stopped. It was a light acid rain that covered the big city like a blanket.
His eyes moved quickly to the cracked hologram screen on his messy desk.
May 1st, 2077. 06:00 AM.
Sebastian stared at the glowing green numbers until they blurred. May 1st. Exactly one year back.
A dark, empty laugh scraped out of his throat. It echoed in the heavy silence of the tiny apartment.
He had returned!
The universe had sent him back in time. May 1st was the day everything started. Today was launch day for The Ethereal Plane. It was the amazing new virtual reality game that promised a new life for the poor and forgotten.
The big companies didn't know that the game was more than just code. Exactly one year from today, the Great Merge would happen. The digital servers would break into the real world and bring magic and monsters straight to Earth's doorstep!
The buzz of his phone broke his dark thoughts.
Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.
He glanced at the phone blinking angrily on his nightstand. INCOMING CALL: OMEGA CREDIT RECOVERY.
It was the debt collectors. They had been chasing him for months about the loans he took out to buy the VR gear sitting in the corner of his room.
Sebastian reached over and picked up the phone. He didn't answer it.
He just crushed the cheap plastic case in his hand. The screen cracked like a spider web, then the battery died with a weak fizzle. He threw the broken pieces into the trash can.
"If only you leeches knew," Sebastian muttered to the empty room.
"In twelve months, Level 1 Demon Rats will tear you apart in the sewers. Your money won't even buy you a bandage."
He stood up. His body felt strangely heavy and very human. He was no longer the Tier 9 hybrid who could break mountains with one flick of his wrist.
He was just a normal human. Weak. Fragile. Hurt.
But he was alive! And he had a one year head start.
Sebastian didn't bother showering or eating. He walked straight to the corner of his room where a shiny metal helmet sat on its charging stand. It was his way to survive.
In the apocalypse, power was the only thing that mattered. The game was the only place to get it.
He picked up the helmet. It felt cold. He didn't feel the excitement of a gamer starting a fantasy adventure.
He felt like a soldier picking up his gun for a war he had already lost once.
Sebastian lay back down on his lumpy bed and put the helmet on his head. The small needles pricked the back of his neck with a sharp, familiar sting.
"Link start." He whispered into the dark.
The world vanished.
His mind was pulled hard through a tunnel of blinding white light. He stopped feeling his real body. Instead he felt light and weightless, floating in the digital world.
Normally, a calm AI voice would welcome the player to The Ethereal Plane here.
Instead, the white light suddenly turned into a sick, blood-red color!
A loud burst of static tore through Sebastian's mind.
He clenched his teeth as his digital body flickered wildly in the empty space.
[Ding!]
[SYSTEM ALERT: PROBLEM FOUND.]
[TRYING TO LOAD PLAYER PROFILE: SEBASTIAN.]
[ERROR: TIME LOOP FOUND. SOUL MATCHES TIER 9 BEING PLAYER 'ZERO'.]
Sebastian's eyes widened. The system was trying to load his data from the future! The data of the man who had fought the Void Gods.
[TRYING TO SYNC DATA… FAILED.]
[BIG ERROR: BODY CANNOT HOLD TIER 9 POWER. OVERLOAD COMING SOON.]
The red space around him began to crack like broken glass. He felt pressure building in his digital head. The game's system was trying to force a god's power into a level 1 space!
'Stop.' Sebastian thought coldly. He tried to force a disconnect. 'You are going to fry my real world brain.'
[SYSTEM RULE 001 STARTED: PLAYER DATA ERROR RULE.]
[TO STOP A BIG SERVER CRASH, OLD DATA WILL BE DELETED. GIVING PLAYER A GIFT FOR THE BROKEN SAVE FILE…]
The painful pressure suddenly disappeared. The red space melted back into a clean, calm white.
The heavy, grinding static changed into the soft chime of a normal system message.
Sebastian floated in the white space and caught his breath. Deleted. All his old skills and god-level stats were gone.
It made sense, but it still hurt. He was back at the start.
Then a gift window appeared in front of him.
[SYSTEM BUG FIXED: GIFT PACKAGE GIVEN.]
Sebastian narrowed his eyes. He expected a normal max-level boost or some starting gold. Often, when the system had bugs during test runs, it gave players raw stats to keep them quiet.
The text on the clear blue screen scrambled into a mess of symbols he couldn't read. Then it settled into one line of text that made Sebastian's cold heart skip a beat!
[NEXUS BUG OCCURRED. ERROR IN GIFT SYSTEM.]
↳ Given: 10,000x Skill Proficiency Multiplier
Sebastian stared at the floating text. He read it once. He read it twice.
The game had not given him max level. It had given him something far worse!
In The Ethereal Plane, leveling up was hard and slow. To raise one skill from Tier 0 to Tier 1, a player had to use it hundreds of times.
To reach the deepest laws of magic, a player had to do millions of perfect actions. They had to grind for years without rest. The system was built to keep humans weak, even inside the game.
With a 10,000x multiplier, every single action would give him the experience of ten thousand tries!
Sebastian reached out and swiped the message away. A slow, cold smile spread across his face. This was very different from his usual dead, empty eyes.
The Void Gods had won because humans did not have enough time to grow strong.
'You gave me the bug,' Sebastian thought. His mind was already planning the total chaos he was about to bring to the game's economy. 'Now let's see if your physics engine can handle what comes next.'
The white space faded away, and he began his fall into the Hall of Heroes.