2026-08-11 10:20:11The first thing that hit me was light.
Not the soft glow of morning, nor the dim LED flickers of my apartment. It was blinding, merciless sunlight pouring directly into my retinas, as if the sky itself had been torn open above me. Instinctively, I threw my right arm across my face. The heat struck a second later—a dry, suffocating wall pressing hard against my skin. Coarse sand scratched at my bare forearms and neck. My body felt leaden and sluggish, as though I had been dragged from a deep coma. For a few long seconds, I lay still, forcing air into my lungs. Then I pushed myself upright. Golden dunes stretched endlessly in every direction, rolling across the horizon like frozen waves beneath a bleached-blue sky. No structures. No trees. No access roads. Just an endless expanse of desert shimmering under a brutal sun. Where am I? I looked down at my clothes and frowned. The soft cotton shirt I’d worn into the pod was gone. In its place were rough, sun-bleached rags, frayed at the hem and smelling of dust. Unease coiled tightly in my chest. Then memory returned in a rush. The Interplanetary Network. IPN. I was inside the engine. Steadying my breath, I voiced the standard system command: “Virtual Status.” A translucent blue interface materialized before me, hovering weightlessly in the shimmering air. =================================================== [ Welcome, Photon-V. ] [ Current Location: Planetary System 687 (Planet Krada) — Arhod Desert ] =================================================== PLAYER PROFILE: Photon-V =================================================== Archetype: Charmer (Lv. 1 - Ordinary) Vitality Lv. 0: 100% (Stable) Mental Activity Lv. 0: 100% (Stable) Mana Pool: 50 / 50 Equipment: None Current Experience: 0 / 500 Personal Funds: 100 Ridan Universal Time: 08:04:16 =================================================== I scanned the data twice. The Universal Time timestamp matched the real-world clock down to the second. At least IPN wasn't desynchronizing real-world time yet. Ridan was clearly the local currency. My starting grade was baseline Ordinary, my skill registry was blank, and my gear was non-existent. A quiet, dry chuckle escaped my throat. I had spent my adult life grinding through double shifts and grading papers just to cover rent, treating games as a luxury for people with spare time. Now here I was, abandoned in a digital wasteland with zero stats and a pocketful of play money. What is the objective here? =================================================== [ Notification: Introductory Mission Available. ] [ Accept Mission? (Y/N) ] =================================================== “Accept,” I said immediately. =================================================== [ Mission Initialized: Tower of the Wise ] [ Objective: Travel to the southern region of the Arhod Desert and enter the Tower of the Wise. Acquire the Foundation Intelligence data block to unlock universe lore, historical logs, and base archetype skills. ] [ Difficulty Assessment: 70% ] [ Time Limit: 24 Hours ] [ Failure Penalty: 72-Hour Neural Lockout (Account Suspension) ] =================================================== “A seventy percent failure probability on an introductory quest?” The words slipped out before I could stop them. In any standard game design, an entry mission was a tutorial. Here, a misstep meant a three-day lockout. I checked my wallet: 100 Ridan. The desert heat was already sapping my Vitality gauge. Opening the survival interface, I located a single item listed under consumables: Purified Water (500ml)—Cost: 10 Ridan. Ten percent of my liquid assets for half a liter of water. Dynamic inflation at its finest. I confirmed the purchase. A cold glass flask materialized in my hand. The water felt shockingly crisp as it ran down my throat, the sensory feedback so precise that my brain completely accepted the illusion. After referencing the rudimentary map overlay, I turned south and started walking. The desert was unforgiving. Every step sank ankle-deep into shifting sand. Thermal haze distorted the horizon, and the dry wind threw stinging grit against my face. Fifteen minutes in, my breathing turned ragged. Thirty minutes in, sweat drenched my coarse tunic. Forty-five minutes in, I began to question whether the map was accurate or if I was walking into a rendered heat sink. But just as doubt began to take root, a distortion on the horizon solidified. A settlement. Low, thick-walled stone buildings rose out of the sand, clustered around a monolithic structure that pierced the sky: the Tower of the Wise. Its pale stone walls reflected the sunlight, giving it a soft, luminous glow against the yellow dunes. Relief washed over me as I picked up my pace. Crossing the perimeter of the settlement, the stillness of the open desert gave way to a wave of audio feed. NPC merchants shouted prices from canvas-topped stalls. Players haggled loudly over armor durability, while organized parties strode through the dusty avenues with the relaxed posture of veterans. Most wore high-tier ballistic gear or reinforced plate, with heavy energy weapons or spell-foci strapped to their backs. Standing among them in my torn rags, I looked less like an adventurer and more like an escaped prisoner. I kept my head down and headed straight for the base of the tower. A long, orderly line of players stretched from the entrance archway. I fell in at the back and began observing the crowd. “First time?” a voice asked from behind me. I turned. The speaker was a tall, heavily built player wearing matte-black scout armor reinforced with carbon-weave plating. A broadsword nearly as long as my torso rested in a magnetic scabbard across his shoulders. “Is it that obvious?” I asked, gesturing to my rags. He grinned, extending a gloved hand. “A little. I’m Ashfall.” “Photon-V.” We shook hands. His grip felt solid, heavy with feedback. As the queue crept forward, Ashfall proved to be an endless source of information. “Virtually everyone hits the Tower at least once,” Ashfall explained, leaning against his sword hilt. “It’s the primary lore hub for Planet Krada. The system tests your neural capacity, and depending on how much data your brain can index, you get awarded permanent stat boosts or skill books.” “How did you do?” I asked. Ashfall winced playfully. “Five percent indexing rate on my first try last year.” “Only five?” “Don’t say 'only', man!” He laughed. “Five percent was enough to unlock my class path to Planetary Hunter and give me the proficiency requirement for this blade. Most combat-focused players max out around three or four percent because the data stream causes severe sensory overload.” I nodded slowly. A neural indexing test. As someone who had spent a decade absorbing complex academic papers and processing information under stress, that sounded much more manageable than a physical battle. Nearly two hours passed in conversation before we finally reached the massive archway. Ashfall stepped out of line, waving me ahead. “You’re up, Photon-V. Don’t panic if your head starts spinning in there. Good luck.” “Thanks, Ashfall. See you around.” I stepped across the threshold into the Tower. The noise of the market vanished instantly, cut off by seamless acoustic dampening. Inside, a wide spiral staircase crafted from pale, polished stone wound upward around a hollow central chamber. Ancient, glowing glyphs were etched into the walls at regular intervals. No guards blocked the path. No system notifications popped up to guide me. Just the quiet staircase. I began the climb. Step after step, the temperature plummeted, leaving the desert heat far behind. By the time I reached the uppermost chamber, the silence was absolute. The top floor was a simple circular room open to the sky. In the center sat a stone pedestal, and resting upon it was a massive, leather-bound tome. Its cover was worn with age, inlaid with faint silver circuit lines that pulsed with a faint internal power. As I approached, the system display flared to life. =================================================== [ Destination Reached: Tower of the Wise — Apex Chamber. ] [ To initiate the Neural Indexing Trial, place your dominant hand upon the codex. ] =================================================== I swallowed, wiping my dusty right palm on my pants. I stepped up to the pedestal, raised my hand, and pressed it firmly against the cover.
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Chapter 110: Just Us
The next few hours were a blur. There was no victory parade, no music, no cheering crowd—just the steady, collective exhale of survivors stepping out from the shadows. Across the district, the bastions powered down, their protective shields flickering off one by one and leaving the skyscrapers looking like ordinary, dark monoliths once again.It felt surreal. We had spent so long viewing the world as a hostile theater of operations—a shifting grid of physics problems and tactical vectors—that seeing it simply exist as a city felt entirely wrong.I found myself back in the command center with Shane. We didn't need words to fill the quiet; we just sat there, tracking the dead monitors. The red threat icons were gone. No bio-constructs. No rifts tearing open the troposphere.My mom was safe in the nearest hospital, still unconscious from the strain, but stable and out of danger."You're staring at the screen," Shane said, breaking the stillness. She was perched on the edge of the desk, s
Chapter 109: Class Dismissed
The silence that followed the battle wasn't peaceful. It was the kind of heavy, suffocating quiet that hangs in the air right before a pressure cooker blows. The streets were littered with the raw debris of the past few days—shattered concrete, the melted remnants of Inviting a Star to the Fight, and the sharp, lingering stench of ozone and burnt hair.I stood near the center of what used to be a public plaza. My clothes were shredded, a dull, throbbing ache flared along my side with every breath, and my hands… my hands wouldn't stop shaking. Not from the adrenaline this time, but from the raw, buzzing current of the five gems still tethered to my staff.Then, the air shifted.It didn't just grow cold; it felt as though the oxygen was being physically sucked out of the world, replaced by something ancient and glacial. The shadows across the plaza stopped clinging to the walls. They began to pool, thickening and flowing together until they rose into a towering, jagged silhouette.Malak
Chapter 108: Inviting a Star to the Fight
The sky wasn’t just dark; it was bruised. The Null-Legion had pushed us back to the last line of our defensive perimeter, and honestly, we were running on fumes, pure stubbornness, and whatever mana Wyvon could scrape out of a depleted atmosphere. The smell of ozone and burnt soil was so thick it made my eyes water."Wyvon!" I screamed, ducking behind a slab of concrete as a beam of necrotic energy shaved the top off our cover. "We need to move! The line is collapsing!"Wyvon didn't answer. His mother lay unconscious against the jagged concrete nearby, but he was frozen, staring blankly down at the Celestial Ring in his palm. He looked like hell. His clothes were shredded, his face coated in a grim mix of soot and dried blood, and his hands were shaking so hard he was practically vibrating."Wyvon, listen to me," I snapped, grabbing his shoulder and forcing him to look at me. "If you’ve got a trick, play it now. If not, we’re done."He looked at me, and for a terrifying second, I thou
Chapter 107: A Son's Override
The Artron Industries server core was a place usually reserved for silence and climate-controlled perfection. Now, it sounded like a dying engine. The walls shuddering, the lights strobing in a sickly yellow warning pattern, and the air tasting faintly of ozone and a lightning strike.Agatha Klovis—Tooflan to her people, Mom to the only person who actually mattered—wasn’t checking monitors anymore. She was wrestling with the mainframe."The cooling baffles are melted!" one of the guild mages shouted over the roar of the ventilation fans. He clutched his forearm, his skin blistered from the heat venting out of the terminal. "If we push any more mana through the conduits, the whole floor is going to liquefy!"Agatha didn't look back. Her hands moved across the haptic interface in a furious blur. "We aren't cooling it, Kael! We’re dumping the heat! Redirect the thermal output into the secondary arrays. If the floor melts, let it melt. Just don't let the core lose sync.""If we blow the c
Chapter 106: Mirrors, Monsters, and Minor Cosmetic Damage
Malakor’s chain sweeps were ridiculous. They weren't just attacks; they were rhythmic, brutal pulses that tore through the city like a giant’s whip, leveling anything that stood in their path. Every time those chains slammed into the asphalt, the shockwave felt intent on liquefying your internal organs.I was crouching behind the concrete support pillar of a crumbling overpass, my mirror arrays spinning around me in a frantic, iridescent halo. I was sweat-drenched, my hair was clinging to my neck in the most unflattering way imaginable, and my mana reserves were screaming at me to quit."Keep the rhythm, you idiots!" I yelled back at the survivors huddled behind my position. They were mostly frontline combat-medics and stragglers from the local militia. "If you see a chain coming, you tuck and roll! Do not, under any circumstances, try to block it with your armor. You’ll be turned into red mist!"I didn't wait to see if they listened. I had much bigger problems.I flicked my wrist, an
Chapter 105: Simple Math
The mountain pass was barely wide enough for a tank, let alone an army. That was the point. It was a jagged, miserable gash in the earth—freezing cold, biting to the bone, and thick with the chemical tang of ozone and wet shale.I thumbed the seal on my gauntlet. My left arm was still responsive, though the servos were whining with that high-pitched grind telling me they were about two minutes away from cementing themselves shut forever.I looked back. The column of refugees was a slow, snaking constellation of lights in the dark, dragging themselves forward like a city on the move. If they didn’t clear the defile in the next hour, they were dead. If I let a single thing past my position, they were dead.Simple math. I always liked simple math."Alright, you bastards," I muttered, pivoting to face the absolute blackness pouring up the slope. "Come and get it."I slammed my boots into the mud, widening my stance. The Valkyrie armor groaned—a deep, iron-gutted sound of high-grade steel
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