Silas's eyes opened.
He sat up straight in bed and ran his hands over his chest, his arms, and his legs. There was no blood or broken bones. The crushing weight that had ended his life was gone.
He looked around the small room with cracked walls and a sagging couch in the corner. Clothes piled on a chair that had never once seen a wardrobe. Street light leaked through the dirty window, throwing a pale yellow stripe across the floor.
"This is… my old apartment?"
The place looked exactly like it did before the world ended.
He could still smell the mildew from the corner where the wall had been leaking for two years. He had never fixed it. There had always been something more urgent. Now, somehow, the familiar stench felt almost comforting.
Silas rubbed his forehead. The last memory hit him like a wall of cold water.
The final battle. Ash in the air so thick it blotted out the sun. The God of Wrath standing at the center of a crater the size of a city, that massive black sword raised above its head like a judge handing down a sentence. The ground splitting open beneath billions of feet. The screams. The silence that came after.
Humanity was wiped out in the Nihil War. All of it. Every last person.
He had died on his knees, too worn to lift his arms, watching the sky fall.
He whispered, "Did I… go back in time?"
He reached for the phone on the nightstand out of habit. The screen lit up.
11:56 PM.
Four minutes left until midnight. Four minutes until the Godsfall announcement would tear the world apart and every human being on Earth would go to sleep one person and wake up someone else entirely.
Silas sat with the phone in his hand and let his thoughts wander. His face stayed calm with no sight of panic. He had lived through this night once before, had cried and screamed and begged the glowing panels to explain themselves. He was not that man anymore. He knew every horror that was coming, every name, every date, every mistake. He had paid for that knowledge with a decade of blood.
He was not going to waste it.
Then the air in front of him shimmered, like heat rising off summer asphalt.
Ding!
A bright panel snapped into existence, hovering at eye level, crisp and clear and radiating a faint white light.
[Ding! You have inherited the SSS+ Level Skill: 'System Parasite'!]
[Ding! You have inherited the Origin-Level Artifact: 'Soul-Severing Sword'!]
[Ding! You have inherited +999 Strength Attributes from the Corpse of the God of Envy, Nyxar!]
[Status: Locked until Void Heart awakens.]
A small, cold smile crossed his lips.
"Perfect," he said quietly. "A head start."
He already knew what the three gifts meant. System Parasite would let him bypass level requirements for gear and ignore the "Class Lock" on skill books. The Soul-Severing Sword was a blade that laughed at divine defenses. The kind of armor gods wrapped around themselves and called invincible. It can cut the "connection" between a soul and its talent, allowing the user to extract it.
And the strength from Nyxar's corpse would only be fully inherited if he could awaken the Void Heart which he knew nothing about. According to the system, it could turn the ordinary body he had been given into a divine body.
He had none of these advantages in his first life. He had scraped and bled and barely survived for ten years to build less than a fraction of what had just landed in his lap in thirty seconds.
The clock on the phone read 11:59 PM.
Silas moved fast but stayed calm. He pulled on a dark-grey hoodie from the pile on the chair. He grabbed the small backpack he kept by the door and checked the contents without thinking. Water bottle. A kitchen knife he had wrapped in cloth so it would not cut through the bag. A lighter. A small first aid kit he had bought on a whim six months ago and never used.
Small, ordinary things. But in the first hours of the descent, when the system was still loading and people were tripping over each other in the street, ordinary things kept you alive.
He zipped the bag and slung it over one shoulder.
Outside, the city was still normal. Cars rolled past on the main road. Music thumped from the apartment above his. A dog barked twice and went quiet.
Nobody knew that in a few seconds, none of that would matter anymore.
Midnight finally struck.
Ding!
The chime did not come from his phone. It came from everywhere at once. It rolled across the sky like a bell the size of the moon had been struck once, deep and resonant and completely out of place in the ordinary night air. Every person on Earth heard it at the same moment. Silas felt it vibrating in his teeth.
A glowing panel bloomed into existence in front of every human being on the planet simultaneously.
[Humans of Earth, the Godfall server has been connected with you, and the first batch of public beta access is now being issued randomly!]
Outside his window, the street changed in seconds.
The random laughters stopped mid-note. The music cut out. Somewhere close, a car swerved and clipped a parked vehicle with a sharp metallic bang. Then the shouting started from confusion at first, people calling out to each other, asking if they were seeing the same thing. Then the screams began, a few at first, then more, spreading block by block like fire catching on dry paper.
Silas watched from the window. He did not move.
In his first life he had been down there. He had run out into the street in his pajamas with no shoes, staring at the panel with his mouth open, bumping into strangers and asking the same useless questions everyone else was asking. "What is this? Is it real? What do we do?"
Now he stood at the glass and felt nothing but the quiet of calm settling into his limbs.
His left wrist burned. It was sudden and sharp, like a brand being pressed against the inside of the skin. He looked down. A ring of glowing runes spun around his wrist in a tight circle, bright gold against his skin, moving fast at first and then slowing, tightening, sinking inward until they vanished completely beneath the surface. The burning faded to a low warmth and then nothing.
The voice from the panel continued.
[The 50 million places for the first public beta have been distributed.]
[Beta testers can now enter the game at any time. Please check the specific rules yourself.]
[Humans of Earth, I hope you can break out of the hell coming for you, and contribute to the defense of the universe.]
Silas looked at his wrist. He flexed his fingers once, and the rune bracelet surfaced again at his silent command, glowing faintly in the dim room.
A new panel appeared directly in front of him.
[Do you wish to enter the game?]
[Yes / No]
[Note: Not entering the game right now is not advised!]
He tapped "Yes" without a moment of hesitation.