Clack, clack.
The sound of metal clashing echoed across the vast expanse of a ghastly, ruined battlefield.
The air was heavy, carrying the foul stench of blood.
The once-flat plane was decimated with deep holes that burrowed into a vast darkness of nothingness.
The sky was pitch black—not the kind that comes with nightfall.
It was completely unnatural, like the void had manifested itself.
A Silver-haired male figure held a sword dyed in black, shaking.
His face was filled with fury.
His eyes swept over multiple bodies that lay lifeless on the crimson-red-painted ground.
Some bodies stood out—they were his friends, lovers, children, and comrades-in-arms.
The guilt he felt weighed heavily on his heart.
Across the battlefield, a strange figure clad in absolute black, as if it were the darkness itself, stood, dark fog burning atop its body.
The fog on its face shifted as if it were smiling behind all that darkness.
“It’s your fault they are all dead.”
Its grin grew wider.
“You fucking bastard, I’m going to kill you!”
The male figure gripped his sword tightly, lunging forward at the darkness.
Clash…
“Here we go again.”
A dark haired boy with heavy eye bags sighed.
He light on his computer scene dimmed .
He had just placed the order for the latest VRMMORPG that was about to release.
This one promised something entirely new .
Most games gave you sliders.
Height, weight, face shape, maybe a dozen preset hairstyles if the developer had been feeling generous.
POMAX gave him none of that.
The moment he put on the headset and the calibration finished, a single line of text unfurled across an endless black void.
[Welcome to POMAX.]
[There are no templates here. Only worlds.]
[What will you create?]
Helios had spent three days reading about this game before launch, and he still wasn’t prepared for what “total character immersion” actually meant.
The dev team, a tiny studio nobody could find much information on, had built an engine that let players design not just a face and a name, but an entire life.
Race.
History.
Homeland.
Culture.
Magic system, if they wanted one.
Political structure, if they were ambitious enough to want that too.
Forum threads had exploded within hours of the beta reveal.
They’re not making a game, one popular post read.
They’re outsourcing the game design to us.
This is either genius or the laziest thing I’ve ever seen.
Helios privately thought it was both.
He loved it anyway.
He’d played enough MMOs to know the usual disappointment, rolling a character only to discover he was the four hundred thousandth “Chosen One” wearing the exact same starter armor as everyone else in the tutorial zone.
POMAX promised something different.
A world where the players themselves were the raw material.
He wasn’t alone in that excitement.
His friend Darryn had texted him at two in the morning, three days before launch, with nothing but a link to the official trailer and the words “we are so back.” Helios had replied with a single question mark, already knowing exactly what Darryn meant.
Every MMO for the last decade had promised a “living world” and delivered the same recycled fetch quests with a new coat of paint.
POMAX was the first one that actually seemed to be building on something structurally different, not just visually.
There was, of course, a catch.
There was always a catch.
[NOTICE: Players who create large-scale domains, kingdoms, armies, guilds, cities, or other collective structures, will have a portion of all future experience gains automatically redirected to sustain those structures.]
[This redirection scales with domain size and complexity.]
[This measure exists to preserve game balance for the first 5,000 players, who will additionally receive: 5 Free Levels upon server launch.]
Helios had read that notice roughly thirty times before launch day, turning it over like a puzzle box.
Most of the pre-launch community had reacted to it with immediate, unanimous rejection.
Don’t build anything big, the guides all said.
Take the free levels, build a normal character, coast on the head start.
Kingdoms are a trap.
You’ll spend the next six months underleveled while everyone else races ahead.
It was, by every reasonable metric, good advice.
Helios ignored it completely.
He wasn’t interested in being efficient.
He was interested in seeing how far the system would let him go if he stopped playing it safe.
If POMAX was really willing to hand five thousand strangers the tools to build entire nations out of nothing, the real question wasn’t whether it was a good idea.
It was: what happens if someone actually tried?
He opened a blank document on his second monitor, an old habit from years of tabletop worldbuilding, and started typing before the character creator had even asked him a single question.
Working title: Rexnest.
A kingdom of elves.
Not one kind.
All of them.
He typed out a rough sketch of the idea, deleted it, then typed it again with more conviction the second time.
If POMAX was going to punish him for building something big, he wanted the size of the punishment to at least mean something.
A single elven tribe wasn’t worth the risk.
An entire civilization, built from every major elven lineage he could imagine, might be.
Darryn would probably call him an idiot for this.
Darryn was probably right.
Helios saved the document anyway.
He didn’t know yet that within seventy-two hours, that single stubborn decision would leave him weaker than almost every other player who logged in that day.
He didn’t know that in less than a week, it would be the only reason any of them survived at all.
The character creator, once he engaged with it, was more patient than he expected.
It didn’t rush him toward a build.
It asked questions, quiet, almost curious ones, and waited.
[Foundational Race: Elf. Confirmed.]
[Sub-lineages detected in design: High Elf, Dark Elf, Elemental Elf, Forest Spirit, Elemental.]
[Multiple lineages require a unifying structure. Proceed?]
“Proceed,” Helios said aloud, feeling faintly ridiculous talking to an empty room.
The system didn’t care about his tone.
It moved forward, unfolding option after option.
Territory shape, foundational laws, starting population size, a dozen sliders he adjusted with the same care he’d have given an actual constitution.
Somewhere in the middle of it, almost as an afterthought, the system asked him something no other game ever had.
[You are designing a character with unusually high structural complexity.]
[Would you like to design a personal progression system as well?]
Helios paused.
“Yes,” he said slowly.
“Yes, I would.”
[Request logged.]
[Proceeding to personal foundation design.]
He had no idea, at the time, just how much weight that single word was about to carry, or how little of what he was about to build would still make sense to him once the game stopped being a game at all.
Somewhere on the other side of that black void, a system that had never once needed a player’s permission to exist was quietly taking notes on him too.
‘This one’s different,’ something noted, in a place no interface would ever show him.
‘Let’s see how far he goes before he notices we’re watching.’
Helios, meanwhile, was still grinning at his monitor like a man who had just been handed the keys to something far too big for him.
He had no idea he was right about that.
He just didn’t know yet in which direction.
First time writing a game themed book.
Kind of nervous .