The last thing Marco remembered was his ceiling, and then he was somewhere else.
He was standing in a white space with no visible walls or floor, just a clean expanse that extended in every direction without ending, and in front of him at roughly arm's length was a rendered version of himself, translucent, rotating slowly in place with text floating above its head that read CUSTOMIZE YOUR CHARACTER.
He stood there and looked at it for a long moment.
"Okay," he said out loud, because he needed to hear something.
He had seen this in anime. He had seen it in movies, the part where someone steps into a virtual environment and sees themselves rendered in three dimensions waiting to be shaped, and he had always watched those scenes thinking yes, obviously, that is what it would feel like, while also knowing that the technology for it did not exist anywhere outside of fiction. Except apparently it did, because he was standing in it right now,
He said, "This is insane," and his own voice came back to him clearly, and he said it again slightly louder just to confirm it, and it did, and that somehow made it worse and better at the same time.
He reached out and touched the interface panel that had appeared to the right of his rendered self, pressed his fingers against it and felt real resistance push back, and when he pressed harder the menu expanded fully.
CHARACTER CREATION
[USERNAME]
[ ]
[CLAN]
Dragon Clan - Available
Serpent Clan - Locked
Wolf Clan - Locked
Lotus Clan - Locked
[APPEARANCE]
Face & Hair
[BODY]
Height & Build
[ CHARACTER BACKSTORY ]
Who was your character before
arriving in this world?
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ CONFIRM ]
He went through it section by section.
Username was MarcoD without thinking about it, same as every platform since he was fourteen.
Clan was Dragon again because there was no other option.
Appearance he spent actual time on. The face sliders were more detailed than anything he had used before, granular enough that he could adjust the bridge of his nose independently from the tip, could change the weight of his brow without touching the eye shape, could cycle through hairstyles that looked genuinely hand-rendered.
He settled on something close to his own face but with better jaw definition because he was not going to waste the opportunity on accuracy.
Body he adjusted next, height and build on separate sliders, watching his rendered self shift between frames and pulling it toward something that looked like it could run without immediately stopping.
Then the character backstory field.
He read the prompt. Who was your character before arriving in this world?
He typed: Wandering scholar. Spent years studying things in books that turned out to work differently in practice. Travelled more than he settled. Knows a lot about history and very little about fighting. Left a city he had no good reason to stay in and has not found a better one yet.
He read it back, almost deleted it, and hit Confirm.
A new screen appeared.
APPLICATION SUBMITTED
Your character is pending
admin review and approval.
Estimated wait: up to 10 minutes.
Please remain in the lobby.
Marco looked at that screen.
"Admin review," he said out loud. "There is an actual person reviewing this."
He stood in the white space and waited. The rendered version of himself, now fully customized, kept rotating patiently. He walked a slow circle around it. He sat down on the floor, which was solid enough to sit on even though he could not see it. He lay back and looked up at the white expanse above him.
"This is the most impressive thing I have ever experienced," he said to nobody, "and I am currently lying on an invisible floor waiting for someone to click approve on my application."
The screen kept saying pending.
He got up and sat back down and got up again and eventually just stood there watching the timer because apparently even with neural-haptic sleep interfaces and real-time rendered virtual environments someone still had to manually approve your character, and that someone was apparently occupied with something else.
The system notification came in while Ryu was still eating breakfast.
ADMIN PANEL - PENDING APPROVALS: 10
Yang Reserve: 15%
REVIEW APPLICATIONS? [ YES ]
He set down his bowl.
Ten pending approvals had come in overnight while he was sleeping, which meant ten people had received their devices and completed character creation and were now sitting in the lobby waiting for him to let them in. He opened the review panel and went through them one by one.
The first nine went quickly. He read the backstories, checked the usernames, approved them in sequence, and watched the Yang counter tick down with each one.
Ser_Otomo_IV — APPROVED Yang: 14%
GraypackAlpha — APPROVED Yang: 13%
just_here_4_rice — APPROVED Yang: 12%
LotusPoison — APPROVED Yang: 11%
Dani_plays — APPROVED Yang: 10%
jett_plays — APPROVED Yang: 9%
kuya_bong — APPROVED Yang: 8%
night_archer — APPROVED Yang: 7%
KaijuSlayer88 — APPROVED Yang: 6%
He stopped at the tenth.
USERNAME: MarcoD
CLAN: Dragon
BACKSTORY:
"Wandering scholar. Spent years studying
things in books that turned out to work
differently in practice. Travelled more
than he settled. Knows a lot about history
and very little about fighting. Left a city
he had no good reason to stay in and has
not found a better one yet."
He read it once and approved it.
MarcoD — APPROVED Yang: 5%
He sat there looking at the five percent for a moment.
He had started the morning at fifteen. Accepting ten registrations at one percent each had brought him to five, which was below the ten percent threshold required to activate the gate for any session after the first, which meant he could open the gate exactly once right now on the first-activation waiver, and after that he needed three days of natural Yang recovery before he could bring anyone in again.
Ten players sitting in a white lobby waiting to enter a world, and he could open the door once and then had to close it for three days.
He opened the gate.
Summoning Gate: ACTIVE
Spawn Anchor: Sanhe
Players entering: 10
Yang Reserve: 5%
Next activation cost: 10%
Natural recovery to 10%: est. 3 days
Ten players. All heading to Sanhe right now. Two kilometers northeast, sixty to eighty real villagers going about their morning, and ten people who thought they were beta testing a VRMMORPG were about to appear in their fields.
He had not fully thought through what came after opening the gate.
He also had not thought through the time difference carefully enough until he tested it two days ago. Twenty-four hours here ran against twelve hours on Earth, which meant players spending what felt to them like a full day were actually spending two days in the world, and when they woke up and checked their phones the timestamps were going to be wrong and the sharper ones were going to notice immediately.
He added it to the list, which was getting long, and got up and found his boots.
He almost made it out of the compound.
Elder Shen was standing near the entrance looking at the path that led down toward the valley, and when Ryu came through with his boots on and a pack over one shoulder the Elder turned with the expression of someone who had been expecting this for some time.
"You are going to the village," Shen said.
"Yes Elder."
"Good." Shen looked back at the path. "We are short on hands for the harvest preparation and Sanhe has people who need the work." He paused. "And if there are any promising young ones, sharp eyes, quick hands, the kind that do not settle well into a farming life, bring them."
"To the compound?"
"We have not taken anyone new in six years," Shen said. "It is time." He glanced back. "Take Gao. He knows the families."
He walked back toward the shrine before Ryu could answer.
Gao stood, sheathed the blade, looked at Ryu for a moment with the expression of a man who had been told to babysit and was choosing not to say so, and started walking.
Ryu followed him out through the compound entrance and onto the path behind the drying racks. The morning was cold and the pine trees on either side of the path were still dark with it, and neither of them said anything for a while, which was fine.
Gao was not a man who filled silence for the sake of it, which Ryu appreciated because he was spending most of his concentration on the Admin Panel sitting in the corner of his vision where ten player markers had just appeared and were moving in slow confused circles around the eastern edge of Sanhe.
One of them was already walking in the wrong direction entirely.
He was trying to figure out how to address that without being physically present when Gao said, "You are doing the lip thing again."
"Sorry."
"Do not apologize, just stop."
Ryu stopped moving his lips and watched the marker walking the wrong direction veer left and then stop completely, which probably meant the player had sat down, which was somehow worse.
"The Elder thinks it is prayer," Gao said, stepping over a root without breaking stride. "I told him I had seen you pray before and it did not look like that."
"What did you tell him it looked like."
"I said I did not know. Which is true." Gao glanced back at him. "What is it."
"I am thinking through something complicated."
"You think with your lips."
"Sometimes."
Gao faced forward again and walked for a bit and then said, "The thing you are thinking about, is it going to cause me problems?"
Ryu checked the panel. The marker that had been walking the wrong direction was now moving back toward the main cluster, which was a relief. "Hopefully not," he said.
"Hopefully," Gao repeated, in the tone of a man filing that word away for later use as evidence.
They walked the rest of the way down without talking, and the chickens got progressively louder with every turn in the path, and by the time the first rooftops of Sanhe appeared through the trees Ryu could already see, in the eastern field just beyond the village fence, a cluster of people standing in the rice paddies looking at their hands.