Chapter 1 – Waking Up Entirely Wrong
Nellie woke up to bright lights dancing in her eyes like a million fireflies. She stared at the moving shapes aimlessly, her eyelids only parted to slits. She couldn’t feel the rest of her body.
That made sense. She was supposed to be in a coma.
“Is she breathing?! I think I saw—quick, where is the—” A panicked voice came from her left. The sentence fizzled out in a word that she didn’t recognize.
“Add eight drops, and not one more! It’s not going to work any faster!” A second voice yelled, it was softer despite the underlying panic.
Looking at the blurred world beyond the curtain of fireflies, she saw two dark shadows move in the background.
They should’ve knocked me out by now. I wonder what’s taking so long, yelling about drops. Did they screw up the dosage of something important?!
There was no way to voice her concern. Her mouth wasn't working at all. Panicking while she was trapped in her body wasn't going to help.
She had agreed to this already. This was part of the process.
Nellie Strum had led a predictable life from a young age. She did everything she was supposed to do, and she was naturally good enough at them, though never spectacular. Fair to say she didn't have a great time growing up, but she always had a direction.
She knew the answer to the question of 'who do you want to be when you grow up?' the day she played her first video game. It's how she later became a lead developer at Amberlith, the company that made the MMORPG that she spent most of her childhood with.
At twenty-two years old, she was hired just in time to be part of the founding team of the latest Amberlith project called Vainfall, a cutting-edge VRMMO.
She was more than satisfied with her life for the next eight years, hammering on a keyboard and getting paid an incredible amount of money for it.
Her predictable life crashed to the ground shortly after her thirtieth birthday when she went to the hospital for a nosebleed. Two days later, she received a detailed report on how it was going to end.
Nellie never slowed down enough to figure out what she felt about it. She was rich, but money could only free time one already had, not buy time one didn't. She was scared. Much like a child who got badly wounded, she wanted to pretend it wasn't there.
An opportunity presented itself a few months after her diagnosis. Verse Research, a subsidy of Amberlith, was seeking volunteers for their latest brain interface device called the Verse Gear.
She leapt at it, but the application process itself turned into a different nightmare. Her decision surprised everyone around her. She ended up having hundreds of conversations while signing hundreds of papers. It was a rude shock to someone who spoke less than twenty words on an average day, most of them being ‘thank yous’ to the food delivery guys.
She was almost wishing for a lethal injection instead of the wondrous brain interface at the end of it.
Eventually, everything was said and done. She was going to be the first human to taste humanity's future.
Verse Research estimated an eighty-nine percent chance of surviving the surgery. If the remaining eleven percent didn’t get in the way, this was supposed to make the last few months of her life far better than the first thirty years.
She heard voices again.
"Eight drops like you said! It's all mixed in there. Open her mouth, my hands are full!" the rough voice spoke again. She heard it much clearer now; it was an older man with a wheezy timbre to his voice.
"There, can you see?" the soft female voice asked. Nellie still had no sense of touch, but her head tilted back, and the blurred shapes beyond the fireflies changed. The dark background suddenly turned white.
Putting something in my mouth? Did something go wrong after all?
Whatever they did, she couldn't feel it at all. They may as well have shoved a boot down her throat, and she wouldn't have seen it. The only thing that she did feel was something slithering down her neck, the vague pressure of it expanding her from within, pressing her flesh against the bones.
Her throat itched, and she wanted to cough it out. Frustratingly, her body still refused to do what her brain desperately wanted to do.
Two seconds later, she felt the strongest surge of sensations since this coma fiasco began. The slithering thing paused right underneath her sternum and exploded.
The spreading heat felt like a boiling hot shot of whiskey. It rippled across her in pulses up and down her body until the fireflies in her eyes combined to white, and all sounds faded to silence.
She had no idea how long it lasted, but it ended just as abruptly as it began. The heat disappeared from her as if it had never been there.
All her senses returned at once.
The world around her resolved from blurred blobs. Nellie raised herself upright, blinking confusedly at everything around her. She could feel the wet ground beneath her.
If she was supposed to be in surgery, they were doing it to her in a theme park. There was no room; there were no surgeons or nurses.
She was in a cave with streams of water gushing all around her. It made no sense. She kept staring blankly at herself as water droplets peppered her from a nearby splash.
"What the?" she mumbled, still dazed. "What is this—euh—pfffooo!"
She stopped speaking when she realized her voice sounded softer and higher-pitched. She blew air out of her mouth as if it could get rid of the strange new voice blabbering her thoughts out loud.
There was something else that was different. She was a whole other color. Her skin was a perfect honey tan, which she knew she was too pale and pink to ever get.
She was disoriented, but she wasn't stupid. All possible scenarios had already flashed through her mind, and she quickly had the most likely explanation for this outcome.
Am I already inside the Verse? What the hell is happening?!
This wasn't how she was supposed to enter Vainfall.
Verse Research scanned her from head to toe, gathering terabytes worth of photogrammetric data to make a character exactly like her.
The days that she spent building the character with a design team were the most fun that she had during this whole process. It was addictive even when she knew how everything worked.
She got to add the height that she was never born with, the lean body she never went to the gym for, breasts of adequate size that she could proudly display, healthy, long, straight hair that she never would've had the time to comb.
Waking up like this now meant all that effort had been wasted.
This was a whole other girl from head to toe.
[Character]
She used a Verse command that she practiced during the training week. The seamless thought-trigger interaction flow of this brain interface was far different from what she was used to.
The character screen was different from the VRMMO build, which would normally show an animated character preview to the left of the screen.
It had been removed for some reason.
Character: Darya Altazark
Role: Archmage Ascendant I
Level: 75
EXP: 1,295,565 (1%)
HP: 92
MAX HP: 2,526
MP: 368
MAX MP: 7,265
SP: 12
MAX SP: 452
STR: 467
DEX: 588
CON: 398
RES: 1,342
"That's not what I wanted at all!" she muttered dismally, wanting to throw a tantrum despite being thirty years old.
The stat screen had given her a good overview of this character. Nellie wasn't impressed. It was hard to be impressed with the stats that she worked on for eight years.
Freshly leveled archmage. Anyone could get this far if they played ten hours a day for three months.
It wasn't about the magnitude of numbers. Her character was supposed to be something else entirely. Vainfall was supposed to be her last vacation, a place for her to spend her days exploring the world that she built for eight years. She had a non-combat build with unlimited Runes to pay for things, as well as elevated instant travel privileges.
An arch-anything character was the opposite of the tourist that she was supposed to be.
This was the sort of character that she playtested with other developers. She used to look forward to those sessions before they became another part of the job. Ironically, despite working on an 'MMO,' Nellie had never really liked playing any game with other people.
The Vainfall player account that she was most attached to was the one she used with a developer console at home. It had an endgame build with a level 4,500-something Archdemon. She had gotten that far on her own to test the solo run player experience. For that character, this Darya Altazark would be a slightly spicy mob enemy.
She was curious to know something else. She issued the thought command to bring up that screen.
[Axis Mastery]
Lomiez (Cohesion): 95,634 EXP
Aenthune (Matter): 152,352 EXP
Unezilo (Energy): 818,049 EXP
Runthur (Density): 161,091 EXP
Rilomar (Movement): 68,439 EXP
This told her everything that she needed to know about Darya Altazark's mastery over the magic system.
There were five physical axes to manipulate reality from. Spells were crafted by allocating Mana along these five axes for various effects and dynamics. Using such spells to deal damage successfully leveled up the axes used. This made the character good at the axes they used most in turn, increasing their mana efficiency for those spells.
From this type of axis mastery, Darya was an Unezilo mage because she had used energy spells more than others. It was one of the most spectacular progression paths that many players would've chosen by default.
Closing out of the Character screen, she tried other commands. Clearly, something had gone wrong with her character. She had been put in someone's play testing account.
She had full control over her Verse interface. It was time to get out of this session. This first run had been disappointing, but she could start with her account without wasting even more time.
[Quit]
Nothing happened.
A shiver rippled through her spine. She hadn't even thought about what to do if such a fundamental Verse command didn't work.
[Vainfall: Terminate]
This command did something, but it wasn't doing what she expected. It was the force quit option that usually froze the whole game, turning it gray for a moment before returning to the Verse home screen.
This time, it froze the world except her. Nothing really changed. She could still move, touch surfaces, and feel things.
That's weird. Why can I still move?
The gray world dissipated a second or two later, everything unfreezing at once.
"Oh no..." she muttered, suddenly starting to pay attention to her surroundings now that both methods of getting the hell out of here were out of question.
The first thing that she noticed was how real everything looked.
It was too real.
Verse was supposed to be the cutting edge of simulation research, but the level of fidelity she was experiencing went far beyond what she expected.
She tested it by touching the water droplets on her chest.
Everything was there. The wetness of surfaces, the fluid dynamics of combining droplets, the surface tension, and the droplets getting heavier and sliding down.
She knew what she had made with her own hands for eight years. There was nothing like this in the VRMMO build.
She didn't know any method that could do this properly in real time. Impressive demos and research papers existed, but none of them were good enough for a game meant to be played by millions. Verse was just a layer. The game still had to run on consumer hardware at perhaps an expensive, but still reasonable price.
And that was just water.
She was seeing a lot more here that was even more impossible than a physically accurate fluid simulation. The particles, the ground texture, and the amount of detail on any surface. Everything put together, this was flat-out impossible. Sure, she wasn't shown how exactly the proprietary Verse Gear was working under the hood, but it couldn't be occult magic.
Is it somehow tricking my brain into thinking things are more detailed than they really are?
That was possible, but she had to know what this build version was before thinking any more in that direction. She issued the command.
[Vainfall: Build Version]
Version: 17.01.134. RLP-F
She let out a gasp. The last major version that she had worked on was the sixth. The letter 'F' at the end of it was even more concerning. It was used internally to denote the 'Final' build of a major version after finishing all the tweaks, patches, and bug fixes.
The 'RLP' was another matter altogether. She had seen that abbreviation somewhere. It was 'Real Life' and the letter p—
Parity! I remember it!
This was the sales pitch and the stated long-term goal of Verse Gear.
Real Life Parity. Did they figure that out already?! Wait! How long has it been?
She could have time-traveled. Even if she didn't count the enormous progress on the RLP front, it would've taken another decade to get to major version seventeen.
She checked her surroundings, paying full attention to the strange cave environment she was in. She knew Vainfall's map by heart, but she couldn't remember anything like this.
The cave ceiling had partially collapsed. Giant slabs of rock jutted down and inwards. An odd, gigantic circular shape loomed at the center of it, at least fifty meters across. Bright rays of sunlight filtered in through the gaps in the collapsed ceiling around this circular shape.
It looked as if a giant ball had crashed into the cave.
The lower half of it had blown wide open somehow, leaving the inside of the sphere exposed. The inner material looked translucent, salami-like, pale pink, but still rigid. The outer layer was glossy black.
She was lying in the middle of the scattered debris.
Darya Altazark had dropped at least twenty meters and splattered on the rocky floor like a thrown tomato. She noticed the splashes of blood around her.
"What the hell happened here...?" She muttered, groaning as she got onto her knees. "Also, wasn't there someone here just a moment ago?"
Two people had shoved something strange down her throat before she woke up. They were nowhere to be seen.
I need to think. I'm getting more confused by the second.
There were only two options. She was either decades into the future with a Verse Gear, or she was actually in Vainfall.
She issued the command to talk with Verse. It was supposed to respond to natural language like a virtual assistant for players.
[Verse]
"What year is it?" she asked, looking up at the sky as if she were talking with God.
[Verse: The year is 9,247. This is the constellation year of the Boar.]
"I mean on Earth! What year is it on Earth!"
[Verse: There is no such place in Vainfall. Did you mean Uruth, the walled city of Sands? The year is universal across continents, though there are alternate methods of counting.]
"Motherf—" she muttered under her breath. She had very little patience with chatbots, even on a good day.
"What happens if I die?" she asked. "Will I get out of Vainfall?"
[Verse: If you die in Vainfall, you will no longer exist. Death has fascinated many across time. Most religions are modeled after the concept of an afterlife. This has never been proven—]
She closed out of the screen. The only way to answer her last question was to try it herself, but she was scared. What Verse said sounded like permadeath mode. She didn't know if dying would send her back to the Verse home screen or to the actual god-forbidden void.
None of it mattered. She was in Vainfall, perhaps not the exact way she wanted, but she was finally here. Everything she went through would be for nothing if she ended it here, and this cave was all that she got to experience before her inevitable death.
She looked at herself closely for the first time. This was going to take some getting used to. She could never tolerate other people in her space. In this body, she felt like a stranger in a room that she didn't want to be in, like the waiting lobby of the dentist.
Something at the back of her head issued a command that she had never seen before.
[Soul Merge Conflict: Resolve Identity]
The letters that she saw glitched out. She could only remember that she had read something, but not what it was about.
"What?" Darya muttered, "What was that?"
Something had happened, but she didn't know what it was. She looked at her hands and curled her fingers. She had the strangest feeling that for a moment there, she had felt something odd about her body and name. This sense of wrongness vanished in the next few seconds.
Maybe Verse fixed something under the hood. Whatever. I need to get out of this cave.
Darya looked around. She saw a staff stabbed diagonally into the wet rock about twenty meters away. It had to be her Mana caster, or Manacer for short. She walked over, feeling the wet rock under her bare feet as she marveled at every little thing that she saw or felt.
This RLP thing was truly insane.
She pulled out the weapon with both hands. The top of the staff was a peculiarly shaped blade. It had sliced into the rock like a hot knife through butter. This was further proof that she was an Unezilo archmage.
[Inspect]
Weapon: The Warblade Of Amatora
Rarity: Relic
Grade: 59
ATK: 1,780
Status Effects: Bleed, Burning
The weapon was higher level than the wielder. It had been leveled by someone else before she found, looted, or stole it. A good Manacer was an important piece of kit for any play style. This would've been invaluable for her recent archmage ascension.
Darya holstered it behind her like she did when she played the VRMMO version. The five-foot staff immediately toppled and whacked her squarely on the head.
"Ouch! The hell?!" she yelped, grabbing the back of her skull with both hands. She was lucky the bladed part didn't split her head open. "There's no holster slot?! how the hell am I supposed to carry this—"
The answer was clear. She was supposed to carry it. RLP was about total immersion, was it not? She picked it back up with a grunt. It weighed about three kilograms, not too heavy, but not ideal either.
[Inventory]
[Clothing] Brown Dress x1
[Currency] Gold Rune x1
[Manacer] The Warblade of Amatora x1
That's all there is?!
The inventory was completely different. This was like a directed insult after she had spent years tinkering with a slot-based system. It had been entirely removed.
Well, that's not the only thing that went to waste. I guess I'll be totally immersed now.
Closing out of the pathetic inventory, she looked around for a way to get out of this watery cave. The glimpses of a sunny sky through the cracks above were promising. Her gaming instincts failed to locate a convenient exit because this wasn't a handmade dungeon. This was an actual collapsed cave that she had fallen into.
The exit had to be created. It was time to use Magic, her favorite aspect in any game that she had ever played.
She loved magic, and her love for magic had gotten her quite far in life.
She used the Verse command to check her spell arsenal.
[Spells 25/25]
Spell: Seven Petal Spear
Grade: 35
Rarity: Uncommon
Axes: Un(163)
Mana: 163M
ATK/s: 326
Shaper: Line
Duration: 2s
Status Effects: Burning
Shoot a ray of fire that splits into seven and flares outwards on impact.
Spell: Blast Weaver
Grade: 58
Rarity: Rare
Axes: Lo(20) Ae(112) Un(161)
Mana: 293M
ATK: 1,758
Shaper: Touch
Duration: Instant
Status Effects: Bleed, Burning
Release a cluster of powerful explosions that subdivides and deals damage over three seconds. The explosive sparks can ricochet off surfaces.
Spell: Comet of Volaria
Grade: 67
Rarity: Rare
Axes: Un(257) Ri(257)
Mana: 514M
ATK: 2,313
Shaper: Bolt
Duration: Instant
Status Effects: Burning, Knockdown
Fire a high-speed Mana-infused projectile along a ballistic path that deals heavy damage to the designated target.
.
.
.
"Hm," Darya bit her lip after looking at her three best attack spells. She wasn't familiar with these exact ones.
That was to be expected.
Vainfall was a different beast when it came to magic. Players could create or modify spells through spellcrafting, which involved defining the amount of Mana allocated to a particular axis, among other parameters.
It was time to use one for the first time. Looking around, she found a bright crack with a plausible path to get there.
She gripped the leather-wrapped handle tightly and aimed her Warblade staff in that direction.
She was excited to finally feel the magic system that she spent years building.
[Seven Petal Spear]
The feeling started as a faint tingle at the back of her neck, which traveled to the end of her spine to bounce back again. Mana surged from her body in luminous golden vapor trails, twirling and twisting along the length of the Warblade staff.
For a split second, a brief splash of five lines sparked at the casting tip. A five-pointed star made of different-sized lines, representing the five-axis composition of the spell.
Mana molded into shape right after it, turning into a smearing ray of golden orange energy that fell on the distant sphere like a laser pointer. As the spell reached critical mass, more Mana turned to energy, momentarily growing the diameter of the ray's profile.
At the peak of this expansion, the beam shattered into seven, unfurling like a flower from the center.
The crack she fired at widened, sending shattered rock flying everywhere with a deafening crack that reverberated in the cave. The wall crumbled down in the aftermath. Letting more light in through the smoke.
Darya smiled for the first time since she woke up. She had felt that power course through her veins. She had really used magic. This was nothing like playing in VR.
She walked up the widened crack with the Warblade staff. The light and the fresh wind filtering in through it made her even more excited to see the outside world at last. She squeezed through the gap carefully, making sure not to rip her dress on any jagged rocks.
The world opened to a forest with wind-bent trees. Birds chirped over the sound of the unmistakable ocean winds. Sunlight filtered through the sparse canopy in bright golden beams. She stared at the wispy clouds with her eyes squinted to slits.
If the cave was proof of RLP, the forest was a hundred times more so. She had never seen this amount of complexity in any VRMMO environment.
She walked through the forest, admiring every detail from the leaves of ferns, tree barks, to dead insects caught in spiderwebs. She tripped and fell along the way and managed to wound herself twice. She watched with fascination as blood seeped out of the cuts. At some point, she had to stop marveling about the accuracy of the damned fluid simulation.
Alright, fine. This is real, and I can actually die.
The start of Bohemian Rhapsody echoed in her head. It turned into an earworm swirling in full stereo. She walked about fifty meters with this soundtrack and suffered two more accidental falls. It only dissipated as she cleared the edge of the forest and reached the beach.
Roaring ocean winds fluttered through her hair and dress. The heat from the midday sun was harsh, but the wind balanced it out perfectly.
She hadn't gone on a vacation like this in a year or more.
The only thing that interrupted this beautiful sight was a gigantic black sphere hovering above a distant island. It looked like the sphere under which she had died. Darya didn't know what it was. She hadn't worked on anything like it in version six.
She took her eyes off the unpleasant black sphere and gazed at the beautiful blue horizon. She thought about all the adventures she could have in Vainfall now that she was finally here.
There were many other beaches just like this in Vainfall, some with purple sands and yellow trees. She had worked all over the map, and she remembered everything as if she had done it yesterday. There were mountains in the north that pierced the sky with sky castles chained to them, cave systems in the south with cities inside their largest chambers, an Underworld of demons below everything, and an Overworld of angels in the sky. She only hoped those larger-than-life elements of Vainfall hadn't been cut in the name of RLP.
A sound came from her right, snapping her back to reality. She turned to see two people running towards her. The one at the front was a girl wearing a velvet green head covering and a cape. A gray-haired man wearing a pale red half cape was wheezing behind her, running with one arm reaching forward desperately.
"Princess!" the girl yelled, coming to a sliding stop on the soft sand. "By the light you're alive!" Her words trailed off into sobs and tears, her face flushed a deep red.
"Ah, yes. I noticed as well," Darya said, blinking at the girl curiously.