Overflow Novice: 10,000 Years in Tutorial Hell

The wood grain on the third plank from the left still looked like a weeping woman if he squinted. Ryu knew this because he had spent approximately three thousand years staring at it. If he tilted his head forty-five degrees to the right, the knot in the timber looked like a very disappointed potato. He felt a spiritual kinship with that potato.

Ryu blinked, his eyelashes feeling like heavy iron shutters. This was morning number 36,500,000. Give or take a few leap years the system might have forgotten to program into this digital hellscape. He didn't sit up. He didn't stretch. There was no need for a morning routine when your muscles had reached a state of perpetual, hyper-dense perfection that defied the laws of biology.

"Three... two... one..." Ryu whispered. His voice was a dry rasp, the sound of ancient parchment rubbing together.

BAM!

The flimsy wooden door of the starter hut didn't just open; it disintegrated into a flurry of toothpicks. A gust of wind, smelling of wet fur and programmed aggression, flooded the small room. Standing in the threshold was the Tutorial Boar, a three-hundred-pound slab of muscle, tusks, and bad coding. It let out a roar that was supposed to strike terror into the heart of a fledgling hero.

To Ryu, it sounded like a very loud, very annoying alarm clock.

The boar charged. This was the moment where a normal player would scramble for the rusted iron dagger under the bed. They would roll, perhaps take a hit to the shoulder, and spend twenty minutes sweating through a desperate struggle for survival.

Ryu remained horizontal. He watched the beast approach in a world that had slowed to a crawl. To his eyes, the boar wasn't charging; it was drifting through molasses. He could see the individual pixels of its bristling fur. He could see the way the light reflected off its slobbering maw.

I could let it hit me today, Ryu thought, the spark of a suicidal whim flickering in his hollow chest. Maybe if I just lie here, it'll actually gash my throat. Maybe the 'Immortal Newbie' buff will finally glitch out and let me see a Game Over screen.

The boar’s tusks were inches from his jugular. The beast’s hot, stinking breath fanned his face. Ryu closed his eyes, leaning into the promise of the end.

Crack.

His arm moved. It wasn't a conscious decision. It was the "Perfected Instinct" skill, a passive ability he’d accidentally maxed out during his second millennium in the hut. His right hand blurred, an action so fast it didn't register to the human eye, and he extended a single index finger.

He didn't poke the boar. He simply touched it.

Micro-Vibration Strike.

It was a technique Ryu had spent exactly one hundred and twelve years refining out of sheer, unadulterated boredom. By oscillating his internal mana at a frequency that matched the atomic structure of his target, he could bypass all physical armor.

The moment his fingertip brushed the boar’s snout, a low, hum-like sound vibrated through the room. For a heartbeat, the boar frozen. Then, its entire skeletal structure turned into fine powder. The kinetic energy rippled backward through its flesh, and the beast didn't just die, it liquidated. A spray of blue "mana-blood" misted the air, and the boar exploded into a shower of generic loot drops: three cracked hooves and a single strip of tough bacon.

[Level Up!]

[Current Level: 1]

[Experience: 1/100]

The blue floating text mocked him. It always stayed at Level 1. The Tutorial Island was a closed loop. No matter how much experience he gained, the "graduation" criteria required him to leave the island through a portal that had never opened.

Ryu sighed, finally sitting up. He looked at the bacon on the floor. "Too salty," he muttered. "The drop rate for the 'Lean Ribs' is only 0.002%. I haven't seen a rib in four centuries."

He stood up, his joints not making a single sound. He walked out of the ruined doorway and looked at the sky. The Tutorial Island was a floating rock in a void of endless blue. There were palm trees that never dropped their leaves and a stream that flowed with the same three gallons of water in a recursive loop.

He walked to the edge of the island, his bare feet treading on the grass he had counted, blade by blade, more times than he could remember. (There were 4,206,901 blades, give or take the one the boar stepped on).

"System," Ryu said, his voice gaining a bit of its edge back. "It’s been ten thousand years. I’ve mastered every weapon. I’ve invented seventeen new schools of magic using only the moisture in the air. I have literally run out of things to think about. If you don't let me out, I'm going to start punching the vacuum of space until the server crashes."

The system did not respond. It never did.

Ryu sat on the edge of the cliff and waited for the midnight reset. The sun—a glowing sprite that followed a rigid track, began to dip toward the horizon. This was the most dangerous part of the day for his sanity. The transition. The moment the world blinked and put the boar back in its cage and the door back on its hinges.

The clock in the corner of his vision ticked toward 00:00:00.

"Here we go again," Ryu whispered, closing his eyes to prepare for the flash of white light. "Morning number thirty-six million, five hundred thousand and..."

Bzzzt.

Ryu’s eyes snapped open. The sound was wrong. It wasn't the clean ding of a reset. It was the sound of a motherboard dying a violent death.

The blue system window in front of him didn't flash white. It flickered a violent, bruised purple. Then, a vein of crimson red bled across the screen. A smell of ozone and burning plastic filled the air, real smells, not the simulated scents of the island.

"Wait," Ryu stood up, his heart doing something it hadn't done in millennia: it thudded. "Is that... smoke?"

The system window began to vibrate violently. Cracks appeared in the air around the text, looking like shattered glass. The blue light turned into a screaming, strobe-light red that bathed the entire island in the color of an emergency.

[CRITICAL ERROR: DATA LEAK DETECTED]

[ANALYZING USER 'RYU'...]

[WARNING: STACK OVERFLOW]

[WARNING: TOTAL EXPERIENCE POINTS EXCEED 64-BIT INTEGER LIMIT]

The air around Ryu began to warp. The palm trees were being pulled into a central vortex, their pixels stretching like taffy. The ground beneath his feet groaned as the "Indestructible" terrain began to crumble into the void.

[ERROR: USER STRENGTH SCALE HAS BROKEN LOCAL PHYSICS]

[EMERGENCY PROTOCOL 000 ACTIVATED: MANUAL EJECTION]

The sky above Ryu didn't just darken; it shattered. Great shards of the blue "atmosphere" fell like glass, revealing a terrifying, infinite darkness behind the curtain. The red screen in front of him expanded until it was the only thing he could see. It began to smoke heavily, the digital interface literally melting away.

A final message appeared, blinking in a font that looked like it was screaming.

[ERROR: USER OVERFLOW DETECTED. GRADUATING...]

The ground vanished. Ryu didn't fall; he was launched. A force equivalent to a thousand suns slammed into his chest, and for the first time in ten thousand years, the scenery changed.