An online game called Yggdrasil would be shutting down its servers in seven days.
Countless players reacted with cheers, or grief, or nostalgia.
Roy alone wore an expression of relief.
It was finally happening.
Whether Roy could leap straight to the top all depended on how the server shutdown played out.
Obviously, Roy wasn’t from this world.
He was a textbook reincarnator.
Back on Earth, in his previous life, he’d been struck by an incredible stroke of luck: he hadn’t died outright, and he’d walked away with a mysterious treasure called the Dimensional Gate.
As the name suggested, the Dimensional Gate let him travel to anime and manga worlds and live out different lives.
Worlds like Hunter x Hunter, One Piece, Naruto, Overlord, One Punch Man, Toriko, and more, fantastical and dangerous places, every one of them.
For his very first crossing, the Dimensional Gate offered him a special deal.
He could cross over in his own body, or he could be reborn into the world instead.
If Roy chose rebirth, he’d also get a starter pack, with all kinds of choices available to him.
Things like family background, physical health, bloodline talent, and the point in time he’d be born into.
If he picked the Hunter x Hunter world, he could be reborn into the Zoldyck family.
If he picked One Piece, he could become part of the Will of D.
If he picked Naruto, he could get the Uzumaki bloodline.
And so on.
But if he picked too high a family background, his talent wouldn’t be very high in return, just average.
For most people, that would already be a perfect life.
Say what you want, but the Dimensional Gate played fair.
So out of all those worlds, Roy chose Overlord.
Not because he was a fan of Ainz, but because he saw a system to exploit.
Overlord told the story of Suzuki Satoru, an office drone stuck in a dystopian world, who never logged off when his game’s servers shut down.
Instead, he was pulled into another world along with his guild’s NPCs and artifacts, flipped the script to become the master of his own destiny, ended up a maxed-out powerhouse, and gradually steamrolled his way across the world under the name Ainz Ooal Gown.
A dark fantasy story through and through.
Just hearing the premise was satisfying.
The ultimate power fantasy.
Crossing over with your own game account attached was about as easy as getting stronger gets.
Naruto’s natural talent was cheat-tier and maxed out, and he still had to train hard to form the Rasengan.
Luffy got his hands on the Nika Fruit, and he still had to grind out sit-ups to train his body.
But in Ainz’s world, all you had to do was play the game.
In other words, if Roy picked the world of Overlord in its early, corporate-dystopia stage, he’d get a second shot at rewriting his fate against all odds.
That was a far better deal than becoming a Zoldyck, or carrying the Will of D, or anything like that.
He wouldn’t trade it for a Rinnegan.
After all, crossing over with a game account meant becoming a powerhouse instantly, with a mountain of wealth, artifacts, and followers thrown in besides.
Sure, the power levels in Ainz’s world weren’t especially high.
The strongest fighters could put out destructive power on roughly the level of a nuclear blast.
Ninth-tier magic like Nuclear Explosion, for instance, hit with the force of a small tactical nuke.
Drop an Overlord powerhouse into Hunter x Hunter, and they might not survive a swarm of Poor Man’s Rose.
Not to mention worlds like Naruto or One Punch Man, which could produce fighters capable of blowing up stars.
But where it won out was in how comprehensive its systems were: every kind of ability under the sun, incredible depth and variety, deep laws and mechanics of all kinds, and countless treasures besides.
That gave it an edge over every other world.
Fifth-tier magic alone could raise the dead.
That was genuinely absurd.
Roll the dice, and a bicycle becomes a motorcycle.
Worst case, Roy could just live out his life in a high-tech world and wait for the Dimensional Gate to open again for another crossing.
It wasn’t like he’d be living as a commoner anyway.
So Roy made his choice.
World selected: Overlord
Time period: the year 2108 CE, eighteen years before the game’s release.
Family background: the Sigma family, assets of 200 billion dollars, mid-tier among the elite.
Family standing: the eighth son, not in line to inherit, but favored by his father.
Talent level: ordinary.
Physical condition: ordinary health.
In a world where capitalism had been taken to its absolute extreme, Roy didn’t want talent, and he didn’t want to get dragged into a family civil war.
All he wanted was to be a freeloader, living off the family’s wealth and enjoying the perks.
By dialing down every other stat, Roy got the Dimensional Gate to hand him the highest family assets available.
That still only put him at the lower-middle end of the elite, nowhere near the top.
What did it look like when capitalism evolved to its absolute limit?
The wealth of the giants ballooned at a breakneck pace.
The assets controlled by the very top of the elite had long since blown past ten trillion dollars.
With 200 billion dollars under its control, the Sigma family barely counted as the middle of the pyramid.
There was still a long way to climb.
None of this surprised Roy.
Even back in the era he’d crossed over from, the world’s richest man had already been worth over a trillion dollars.
In this hyper-cyberpunk version of the Overlord world, wealth inequality in the year 2108 was bound to be even more extreme.
Push it further, and you’d probably end up with a single conglomerate that owned everything there was to own.
If Roy wanted a higher asset tier, he’d have had to badly sacrifice his physical health, intelligence, or looks in exchange.
Not worth it.
It was just a game, after all.
All he needed was a trickle of the Sigma family’s wealth, enough to let him spend big on the game, or to try crossing over again if this attempt failed.
Everything else didn’t matter.
So he was born into the Sigma family, known for being mediocre and pleasure-seeking.
“Roy, are you really going to spend your whole life like this?”
“The family is disappointed in you.”
Just as Roy was about to log back into the game, his eldest brother Arthur showed up unannounced.
Roy couldn’t help but smile.
“Big brother, there’s nothing shameful about it.”
“Not compared to Second Brother deliberately turning off autopilot and running people over while street racing.”
“Not compared to Third Brother starting a business and burning through five billion of the family’s money in two years.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong.”
Arthur’s expression stiffened.
After all, the Sigma family had never lacked for glittering, larger-than-life characters.
Roy sometimes worried some legendary hero was going to show up one day and lead the masses to string the whole family up on lampposts.
Fortunately, robot armies were already a mature technology, with over ten million units deployed worldwide to keep the lower classes in check.
That was part of why Roy had never felt much affection for the family, all these years.
Being around you people makes me feel like a decent person by comparison.
That’s a lot of pressure!
“How is that the same?”
Arthur Sigma said angrily:
“What they did were just the kind of small mistakes any noble might make.”
“But you, you like games for the lower classes.”
“That’s a genuine disgrace, a real mistake, staining the family’s honor.”
“The corporate consortium is still debating putting the worthless lower classes into Chemical Bliss, letting them live out happy lives inside a virtual world until they die, so resources get used more efficiently.”
“At least their fantasies would provide some data for AI training.”
“It hasn’t passed yet, but it’s already got twenty percent support.”
“So stop playing games meant for the lower classes.
Some people, when they heard, even suggested we cast you out of polite society!”
“It’s only because I’m your eldest brother that I even bother caring about you!”
Right.
Games for the lower classes.
The Sigma family Roy belonged to wasn’t top-tier elite, but they still had access to information ordinary people never saw.
There was a strange detail in the original story.
Suzuki Satoru had spent a third of his salary on the game every month, for twelve straight years, and that alone had put him near the top of the server rankings.
That level of spending was almost laughably small.
According to the web novel version, his monthly spending was 50,000 yen, and his total monthly income came to 150,000 yen.
Over twelve years, that added up to 7.2 million yen in total spending.
Even factoring in the odd gacha pull, it couldn’t have come to more than 10 million yen, somewhere around 60,000 dollars.
A genre-defining game, running for twelve years, and all it took was 60,000 dollars to land near the top of the server.
Honestly, that’s worse than Genshin Impact.
No wonder it shut down.
When Roy first read that, he figured the author, Maruyama, just didn’t understand spending in games, didn’t realize how brutal real MMORPG monetization could get.
But once he tried to actually play, and his brother stopped him, he learned exactly how people here viewed online games.
Entertainment for the lower classes.
Games like this only existed to help giant corporations reach one goal: Chemical Bliss.
People with no value would provide training data for AI, quietly living out their lives in nutrient pods until they died.
Yggdrasil’s real value wasn’t as a game.
It was preliminary tech for researching Chemical Bliss, with squeezing the last bit of wealth out of the poor as a nice bonus.
The game was never really about making money.
A lot of its absurd world-tier items, the things that didn’t make sense by normal game logic, were actually the products of experimentation.
Once Roy realized this, he genuinely started to wonder whether Ainz hadn’t crossed over at all, and had instead just been placed into another simulated game world by some mega-corporation for testing purposes.
He thought he might have picked the wrong world.
Later, using the family’s information network, Roy confirmed that the Chemical Bliss plan hadn’t actually been approved yet.
Ainz really could cross over and grow stronger.
That much wasn’t a lie.
Now that his eldest brother had brought the old subject back up, Roy just smiled faintly.
“Big brother, after all these years, you still don’t get me?”
“Aside from freeloading, I don’t want to deal with anything.”
“I was never part of your circle to begin with.
How can they cast me out of it?”
“So say it.
What do you want?”
Arthur sighed.
“Eighth brother, how could you misread me like that?
I really do worry about you.
You could easily have become the family’s heir-”
“Then goodbye.”
“Wait.
The World Seed Bank.
You hold shares in it, don’t you, eighth brother?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t.
Father gave them to you in secret at your eighteenth coming-of-age ceremony.”
Under normal circumstances, Roy had no claim to inherit anything from the Sigma family, let alone the 20 trillion dollars in assets.
Wait, wasn’t it supposed to be 200 billion?
When Roy was born, the family was worth 200 billion.
Thirty years of countless corporate drones working themselves to the bone had turned all that blood, sweat, and tears into a cozy 20 trillion dollars.
The true giants, meanwhile, had crossed into the hundred-trillion-dollar range.
The numbers were staggering, like they’d hooked up a nuclear-powered printing press.
To keep the family prosperous, the Sigma family never split its inheritance.
Instead, they chose the single most capable heir to take over everything.
At eighteen, every family member went through a coming-of-age ceremony based on ability and achievement, and was sorted into heir or non-heir.
Non-heirs got a share of assets to live comfortably on their own.
This generation of the Sigma family was full of capable people.
Six of them had kept heir status and were locked in a brutal power struggle.
Three were already dead.
Three remained.
Only Roy and his third brother, Raymond, had become non-heirs, walking away with startup capital instead.
It wasn’t much as startup capital went: one billion dollars total, plus a monthly living allowance of ten million dollars.
Roy’s third brother had chosen to start a business and was now buried in debt, using his entire ten-million-dollar monthly allowance just to pay it down.
He was so broke he couldn’t even afford a villa in the eco-cities anymore.
Life had gotten rough for him.
Roy, on the other hand, played it safe.
He kept his money in the most secure banks available, bought principal-protected investment products and trusts, and used a little family insider information to earn a modest profit on the side.
By now, his assets had grown to ten billion dollars, just barely enough to count as wealthy by this era’s standards.
Arthur normally had zero interest in his poor little brother.
But he’d recently come across an important piece of information.
Back at Roy’s eighteenth coming-of-age ceremony, their father had privately given him a 3 percent stake in the World Seed Bank.
Why their father favored Roy so much was hard to say.
But the World Seed Bank was worth an enormous amount, since the Sigma family’s core business was in the ecological trade, controlling global food production and distribution.
That 3 percent stake alone would be enough to tip the balance in Arthur’s favor in the succession war, letting him mobilize more resources against Second and Sixth brother.
Yeah, that was how power struggles among the elite worked in this world: plain, unadorned, and tedious.
Both sides would send in robot armies to slaughter each other, and the fighting got brutal.
Earth had gotten this bad in no small part thanks to their glorious contributions.
Otherwise, with the technology this world had, the ecosystem could have been fixed ages ago.
Nanobots were common enough that even a lower-class guy like Suzuki Satoru had access to them for gaming, and yet nobody could solve a little ecological problem?
Who did they think they were fooling?
Nanobot technology alone had enough raw power to reshape the entire planet.
But Roy didn’t care about any of that.
What he cared about was which bastard had leaked his information.
The Sigma family’s holdings ran to 20 trillion dollars, a fortune bigger than any ancient throne.
So Fourth Brother had died on the battlefield, Fifth Brother had taken a robot’s headshot, and Seventh Brother had fallen from a skyscraper.
The death rate rivaled an ancient royal court.
No doubt about it, one of the other brothers was behind it.
Arthur showing up now meant Roy had been dragged into the succession war.
Roy had flatly refused the Seed Bank shares his father tried to give him, but his father had been firm.
“If you don’t want the shares, then you’ll have to become an heir instead.”
Only a lunatic would want to be an heir.
So Roy had taken the shares and hidden them away, never spending a cent, pretending they didn’t exist.
He hadn’t expected Arthur to find out anyway.
Roy didn’t bother denying it.
He just asked directly:
“If you want it, big brother, what are you offering?”
“Straight to the point, eighth brother!
I like it!”
“One of the newest dome cities, plus a standard robot legion.”
“All the latest liquid-metal robot models.
What do you say?”
“That way you can freeload to your heart’s content.”
“Not a bad offer.
Big brother’s showing real sincerity.”
Arthur brightened.
“You’re willing to trade, eighth brother?”
Roy shook his head.
“I need a month to think it over and look into things.”
“After all, I don’t want to offend you, and I don’t want to offend Second or Sixth brother either.”
“I need to look into their situations and get my own safety squared away in advance.”
“Otherwise, even with a robot legion protecting me, I probably wouldn’t survive the year.”
Arthur’s expression shifted, but he knew Roy’s temperament.
Once Roy made up his mind about something, not even their father could change it.
Roy had actually been qualified to become the family heir.
He’d given it up voluntarily to focus entirely on gaming instead.
Arthur considered this for a moment.
“Fine.
Once you’ve looked into it, you’ll see my offer is the best one out there.”
“Second brother doesn’t have my patience.
As for Sixth brother, heh-”
Best offer or not, I don’t want any of it.
In seven days I’ll be crossing into another world as a maxed-out powerhouse.
Ainz himself won’t be fit to shine my shoes.
Fighting you people isn’t worth my time.
I’d rather just play the game.
Once I’ve got real power, I’ll come back and pull an Itachi Uchiha, string every last one of you up on lampposts.
If Itachi Uchiha ever ran into you lot, readers would just say good riddance, and ask why he left even one of you alive.
Roy had said a month on purpose.
Arthur was hot-tempered.
Say seven days and he’d probably cause trouble within two or three.
Better to buy some breathing room.
A month, he’d said.
But there were only seven days left.
By then, you can go to hell.
Roy had made plenty of connections in the game, including people tied to the resistance.
So he’d made secret arrangements: if he died, his estate would go to the resistance.
Officially, of course, they weren’t a resistance movement at all, just an ordinary-looking charity.
In short, Roy wasn’t giving a single cent to someone like Arthur.
After all, the scariest thing in life was dying with money left unspent.
When Suzuki Satoru crossed over and became Ainz, nobody even knew whether his original body had lived or died.
Unknown status meant dead, as far as Roy was concerned.
So Roy figured that once he crossed over successfully, his self in this world would count as dead.
His arrangements for what came after were the last bit of conscience he had left for this world.
Now that the troublesome relative was gone,
Roy could finally log in with peace of mind.
Launching Yggdrasil!