The alarm cut through the cramped bedroom like a blade, sharp enough to drag Sirius Smith out of a sleep he had barely managed to fall into.
He rolled once, tangled himself in the thin blanket, and nearly kicked the side of the bed before he surfaced enough to read the dim wall display.
Midnight, Standard Earth time.
His seventeenth birthday.
Path to Gods Realm’s Release day.
A grin spread across his ghost-pale face, too quick and too bright for the dull grey eyes beneath his messy brown curls.
“It’s finally time,” he murmured, voice rough with sleep and excitement.
The words sounded small inside the room, swallowed by the constant breath of the habitat vents.
His quarters were more storage compartment than bedroom: a narrow bed, a fold-out desk, a food dispenser built into one wall, and the gaming pod that took up nearly a quarter of the floor space.
Its dark frame and blood-red inner seat looked absurdly luxurious against scratched metal panels, recycled-air stains, and a life that had learned to make do with less.
Today marked the launch of Path to Gods Realm, the Full Dive title every gaming channel had been dissecting for months.
It was launching across the Universal Web, the digital frontier born in 3035 and expanded until it tied habitats, ships, domes, and distant colonies into one enormous nervous system.
The ancient World Wide Web had connected screens.
The Universal Web connected minds, worlds, and people scattered across distances that should have made daily contact impossible.
With stabilised wormhole gates allowing faster-than-light travel, humanity had escaped its cradle and spread through the stars, only to learn the universe was silent.
No aliens.
No ancient empires.
No neighbours waiting in the dark.
Just humanity, alone with its ambition.
Medicine had conquered almost every visible weakness of the body.
Limbs could be regrown, organs printed and replaced, genetic faults corrected before birth.
The brain, however, remained sacred territory, and the United Colonies of Humanity had drawn a hard line around it.
Identity was too fragile to gamble with.
Could a mind be transplanted without destroying the person it was meant to save?
The UCH had decided the answer was no, or at least not safely enough to be legal.
So Sirius remained himself, original brain included: short attention span, uneven focus, awkward social instincts, and the anxious habit of overthinking a sentence three times after the conversation had already moved on.
Full Dive gaming was the one place those limits loosened.
In a dive, he could be cleaner, stronger, better dressed, better spoken.
Path to Gods Realm promised more than another costume over old mechanics.
It promised a living world, permanent death, and a story shaped by whoever was brave enough, or stupid enough, to step inside.
He grabbed a quick meal from the dispenser, something warm, beige, and officially described as savoury protein breakfast despite tasting like damp cardboard with salt.
Outer-Hab meals were designed to remove decisions, not create pleasure; colour varied by nutrient blend, smell by heating fault, and texture by how long the dispenser had been avoiding maintenance.
Sirius ate in three hurried mouthfuls, wiped his hands on his sleep shirt, and slid into the pod before the food could dampen his mood.
The capsule closed around him with a soft hydraulic sigh.
Cushioned restraints adjusted across his shoulders and legs.
The full-face headset lowered where a headrest should have been, sealing him away from the tiny room, the stale air, and the life-support hum that followed him everywhere.
“Exactly midnight,” he said, trying and failing to sound calm.
His fingers tapped against the pod lining in rapid bursts.
“Hopefully the servers hold, and hopefully nothing decides to explode the moment I log in.
Please, just once, let launch day be normal.” He gave a breathless laugh, let his head settle back, and forced himself to breathe.
“Happy seventeenth birthday, Sirius.” No one else was counting down with him.
That should have made the moment smaller, but he refused to let it.
Childish excitement was still better than the careful numbness Outer-Hab life expected from him, and for once his excitement had somewhere to go.
The world vanished.
The vanishing frightened him less than the possibility that nothing special would follow.
Some cautious Outer-Hab part of him, trained by bills, warnings, and limited access, expected every promise to shrink the moment he touched it.
His consciousness unfolded into a vast white space, luminous enough that it should have hurt but somehow did not.
Icons drifted around him like suspended memories: old character saves, message fragments, recorded achievements, and snapshots of places he had escaped to when his real room felt too small to breathe in.
A carousel of games shimmered before him, each one dressed in its own promise, but there was only one title he cared about now.
Path to Gods Realm glowed at the centre of the display, its letters edged in silver and blue.
Behind it stood the outline of a blank avatar, featureless and waiting.
Welcome to Mordrea.
You have been randomly selected from our pre-order customers to receive a VIP account.
Do you accept?
Yes / No Sirius froze so completely that even his thoughts seemed to pause.
A VIP account?
There had been no public announcement, no leak, not even a rumour on the forums he had obsessively checked all week.
His excitement tangled with suspicion, then with the very real fear that if he hesitated too long the offer might vanish.
Options flickered through his head like static.
Hidden test account?
Promotional lottery?
Bug?
Trap?
Gift?
A normal prize would have been cosmetics, credits, or early access; this felt like the game had looked at him and quietly opened a door meant for someone specific.
Finally, before caution could talk him out of it, he selected Yes.
Congratulations.
New character customisation options unlocked.
May you find your path to Gods Realm.
Good luck.
The message faded, leaving him staring at the blank avatar with a mixture of triumph and dread.
Sirius let out a slow breath.
“Great.
As if I didn’t already struggle with choices,” he muttered, dragging a hand through hair that was not physically there.
“Now the game has given me even more choices to ruin my own life with.” The species menu expanded in front of him, longer than any launch preview had suggested.
The familiar options appeared first: Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Beastmen of dozens of lineages, and all the standard variations most games used as safe starting points.
Sirius scrolled past them quickly, chasing the new icons marked by a thin VIP border.
Interesting and uncomfortable choices flashed by on the way down.
“Wow, you can even be a Mind Flayer,” he said, pausing just long enough to read the summary.
“Psychic power sounds incredible, but I could not live with tentacles instead of a mouth.
Sorry.
Absolutely not.” Most of the unlocked choices seemed like elevated versions of existing species: High Humans, High Elves, High Dwarves, ancient bloodlines with better starting growth and worse social complications.
Then the stranger options appeared.
Lich.
Abyssal.
Chaos Born.
Nephillim.
Each came with flavour text, warning tags, and the kind of design language that made a player suspect the benefits were hiding knives behind them.
Sirius selected Chaos Born first, because curiosity had always been stronger than self-preservation in menus.
Chaos Born – Amorphous blob, born within the chaos of deep space.
Highly adaptable with indefinite evolution options.
Sirius stared at the description.
The advantages sounded absurd, but the mental image that followed was worse.
A body without bones.
No hands.
No face.
No familiar centre of balance.
In a normal game that might have been amusing for a few hours, but Full Dive made the body feel real.
Path to Gods Realm was already advertising deeper sensory fidelity than anything before it.
“Wow,” he said, grimacing.
“Just…
wow.
Who would be sane enough to choose that?
Imagine trying to fight as a puddle with ambition.
That would mess someone up.” He shook his head and backed out of the option before curiosity could make him read too much.
Nephillim waited a few places below it, the icon split between pale light and smoky darkness.
Nephillim – Born from an unholy union of Demon and Angel kind.
Able to use both divine and demonic attributed magic.
Robust humanoid body with energy-based wings enabling flight and containing reserve energy pool.
Warning: Nephillim are despised by both Angel and Demon kind.
The warning made him wince, but the rest of the description held him.
Divine and demonic magic.
A humanoid body, meaning his balance and instincts would not have to be rebuilt from nothing.
Wings, even if they were energy-based, and a reserve pool that sounded useful for emergencies.
Sirius leaned closer to the panel, reading the text again, and noticed the Chaos Born option grey out in the corner of his vision.
“No way,” he said, blinking hard.
“Did someone actually choose the cursed space blob?” He glanced back at the disabled entry, half horrified and half impressed.
“I’m guessing these are limited.
Right.
Best not to stare at the menu until someone takes the one I want.” He selected Nephillim before his doubts could gather into a committee.
His main plan had always been crafting, but permanent death changed every calculation.
A pure crafter could become rich, useful, and very dead.
A magic-capable crafter might live long enough to matter.
And, honestly, who did not want to fly?
The blank figure before him rippled and solidified.
Sirius found himself facing a version of his own body, close enough to be familiar and far enough removed to feel possible.
He preferred avatars that kept his proportions mostly intact; sync always felt cleaner when his brain did not have to negotiate a stranger’s skeleton.
Still, he allowed himself a few indulgences.
His hair shifted from messy brown to deep silver-grey, layered and untidy in a way that looked deliberate rather than neglected.
His eyes became a matching storm-grey, sharper than his real ones.
His frame filled out, not into the exaggerated bulk of a hero poster, but into lean muscle over a slim build, the kind of strength that suggested movement rather than display.
He had never understood the obsession with gravity gyms back in the habitat.
People trained in artificial weight fields as if survival depended on visible abs, then posted their progress beside filtered shots of recreation domes they could barely afford to visit.
Since the Exodus, it sometimes felt as if everyone had become fitness-mad, terrified that living in metal shells would make them less human.
Sirius understood the fear.
He just had no interest in sweating under ten times gravity beside people who already thought he looked breakable.
Even he knew his real body, pale, gangly, and undernourished, was not the form anyone would choose if given an honest character creator.
So he made himself look better, but still like himself.
Five feet nine.
Slim.
Defined rather than bulky.
A face still recognisably his own, only steadier, with the softness of poor sleep and bad nutrition stripped away.
He turned the avatar once, studying the result from front and side, then whistled under his breath.
“All right, that still looks like me, just a version of me that has slept properly and eaten something with colour in it.
I can work with that.” The avatar should have felt like vanity.
Instead it felt like a quiet accusation against the body waiting in the pod: the same bones imagined with enough sleep, enough food, enough room to grow without apology.
Sirius stared at the cleaner version of his own face and felt both hopeful and faintly embarrassed for wanting to keep it.
Class selection came next.
Path to Gods Realm handled classes differently from most older titles.
The game did not lock a player into a rigid tree of skills and predetermined rotations.
It used proficiency, allowing players to improve almost anything they practised enough.
Classes shaped that growth rather than replacing it.
A class did not say what you were allowed to do.
It said what the world, or at least the system, believed you were naturally inclined to learn faster.
For Sirius, the first choice was obvious.
Smith by name, smith by nature.
Blacksmith – Gains proficiency bonus for metallurgy, crafting, appraisal.
Stat growth bonus for Strength, Dexterity, Endurance in descending order.
He confirmed Blacksmith with no hesitation.
The secondary class demanded more thought.
Doubling down on another crafting option was tempting, but permanent death sat at the back of his mind like a cold hand on his neck.
A little combat utility might be the difference between an inconvenient mistake and losing the character entirely.
“Mage could work,” he said, scanning the list with narrowed eyes.
“My species already has magical affinity, so I wouldn’t be starting from nothing.” His finger hovered over the option.
Then he noticed the class beneath it.
Magi – Magic-oriented class, focusing on the collection of knowledge rather than practical use.
Gains small proficiency bonus across all skills.
Stat growth bonus for Wisdom, Intelligence, Charisma.
The flavour text described the Magi as seekers of knowledge, half scholar and half problem-solver, called upon by nations to discover, invent, or recover magical techniques.
That caught him harder than the combat classes had.
A pure Mage might help him throw fire.
A Magi might help him understand why fire obeyed the spell in the first place.
For a crafter, that mattered.
The stat system followed the same philosophy.
Stats improved through use and training, filling proficiency bars until a full bar awarded a point.
A VIP tooltip added an extra detail: at Tier 0, each level-up would pour enough proficiency into the corresponding class-linked stats to fill a bar once.
Early growth would be generous, but not endlessly abusable.
Even games had become training-mad, Sirius thought, though he could not quite stop himself from appreciating the design.
Magi would not make him explosively powerful in one direction, but it would reward curiosity, experimentation, and the exact kind of obsessive system study that had ruined more than one night of sleep for him in the past.
He selected it.
His character sheet flashed open.
Name: Sex: Male Race: Nephillim Class: Blacksmith Subclass: Magi Stats: Strength – 1 Dexterity – 1 Endurance – 1 Intelligence – 1 Wisdom – 1 Qi – 0 Free Points: 10 Sirius stared at the unfamiliar line.
His earlier excitement cooled into a focused frown.
“What kind of stat is Qi, and why does that feel like something I should already understand?” The moment the question crossed his mind, the panel distorted.
Not dramatically, not enough to look like a crash, but enough that the letters flickered and rearranged as though someone behind the interface had noticed a label showing through that should not have been there.
Name: Sex: Male Race: Nephillim Class: Blacksmith Subclass: Magi Stats: Strength – 1 Dexterity – 1 Endurance – 1 Intelligence – 1 Wisdom – 1 Potential – 0 Free Points: 10 “Well, that was strange.” Sirius rubbed his chin, eyes narrowed at the corrected stat.
“Potential is easier to understand, I suppose.
Did they release a tiny launch update already to reduce confusion?” The explanation sounded reasonable enough to say aloud and not reasonable enough to silence the itch in the back of his mind.
Qi.
The word felt too specific to be a random placeholder.
Still, the menu expected a decision, not a conspiracy theory.
Potential sat differently from the other numbers.
Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, and Wisdom all sounded like things a body or mind could use.
Potential sounded like the system measuring a door it had not yet admitted existed.
Worse, it sounded less like a score and more like a capacity waiting for a safer name.
The correction had been too smooth to feel like an ordinary bug.
Ordinary bugs broke things.
This had hidden a thing that already existed and then waited, politely, for him to stop looking at it.
He had already planned his point spread, but Potential complicated things.
Important-sounding stats always tempted players into reckless choices.
“I’m not sure why anyone wouldn’t dump everything into it,” he admitted, hovering over the value.
The urge to do exactly that flared for a second.
Then the glitch returned to his thoughts, sharp as a splinter.
If the stat had been renamed, its purpose might not be obvious yet.
If its purpose was not obvious, putting every point into it could be foolish.
Sirius exhaled through his nose and forced himself back to his original goal.
“I’m not trying to make myself the strongest on day one.
I want to craft mystical weapons and tools.
A couple of points into Potential, the rest where they help my build.” Name: Sex: Male Race: Nephillim Class: Blacksmith Subclass: Magi Stats: Strength – 2 Dexterity – 2 Endurance – 2 Intelligence – 5 Wisdom – 2 Potential – 2 Free Points: 0 Sirius had followed the same private rule in every game he had ever played: crafting needed creativity, and creativity needed a mind that could make connections other people missed.
Intelligence might not sound as heroic as Strength or as dramatic as a hidden power stat, but it was the attribute that made complicated things possible.
If he wanted to build more than iron nails and cheap horseshoes, if he wanted to create tools that made people stop and stare, then Intelligence deserved the largest share.
The last choice was his starting world.
A new list appeared, each entry paired with a rotating three-dimensional image of a planet.
The list was enormous.
Sirius filtered by species first, then realised there was no Nephillim home world at all.
Angel-owned and Demon-owned planets were greyed out, unavailable from the start.
He gave a low whistle.
“So Nephillim are hated enough that both sides refuse to spawn us near them.
Brilliant.
Neutral start, then.
Something Human-owned, maybe.
Humans tend to tolerate anything if there’s trade involved.” He moved through the Human worlds slowly, reading for resources rather than scenery.
Forest worlds looked beautiful but inconvenient.
Ocean worlds sounded like drowning with extra steps.
Desert worlds were an immediate no.
Then one entry caught his attention.
Calphon-5 – Mountainous world, high in metal resources.
Two continents at the northern and southern hemispheres.
A large band of water across the equator separates the two landmasses.
Metal resources.
Mountains.
For a blacksmith, that was close to an invitation.
Most players would probably skim past it, and most of the loud launch crowd would never linger on a mining-heavy backwater unless a reward route dragged them there.
No famous capital, no obvious dungeon promise, no launch-famous race homeland, no bright banner screaming glory.
Calphon-5 looked like a place someone chose because they cared more about ore than applause.
That made it feel less like a missed opportunity and more like an invitation meant for him: quiet, practical, overlooked, and exactly the sort of world a mainstream player might abandon before discovering what it could become.
Sirius opened the continent selection and chose Alcea in the northern hemisphere.
The southern option looked perfectly respectable, but years of history lessons and game tropes made his instincts rebel against it.
“Nope,” he said, confirming the north before he could overthink it.
“South always means complications in stories like this, and I am not starting my new life by volunteering for the ominous direction.” The final confirmation appeared.
Sirius hesitated only long enough to feel the size of the decision.
Species.
Class.
Subclass.
World.
He had no way of knowing how far those choices would reach or how firmly they would shape the person he was about to become.
To him, in that luminous white space, they were simply menu selections made by a lonely seventeen-year-old desperate for a world larger than his room.
Welcome, traveller.
I hope your path reaches far and true.
Good luck on your journey to Gods Realm.
The white space fractured into streams of light.
Sirius felt himself stretch and compress at the same time, as if reality had folded him into a shape it preferred and then unfolded him somewhere else.
For a heartbeat, or perhaps for a long impossible silence, he existed nowhere and everywhere.
Then sensation returned all at once.
Solid ground struck the soles of his boots.
Cool air rushed into lungs that felt startlingly real.
Weight settled through his bones.
Balance shifted strangely behind his shoulders, where the promise of wings existed as a phantom sense rather than something he could yet control.
His knees bent before he could stop them.
Sirius staggered, caught himself, and blinked hard as the world snapped into focus.
The first breath nearly broke his concentration.
Air hit his lungs with temperature, weight and taste, carrying stone dust, water, smoke, living bodies and something green he had no name for; it was too much after years of filtered sameness, and some hungry part of him wanted to breathe until his chest hurt.
He stood in the heart of a mountain city.
Not beside a mountain.
Not near one.
Inside and upon it, as if civilisation had been carved directly into the bones of the world.
Towers rose from cliff faces in tiers of pale stone, their balconies and archways fused so naturally with the rock that Sirius could not tell where geology ended and architecture began.
Bridges crossed open drops at dizzying heights.
Stairways curled up around spires and vanished into tunnels lit by blue fire.
Far above, ledges carried streets, markets, and tiny figures moving beneath banners that stirred in the alpine wind.
The whole city seemed layered vertically, a vast carved machine of stone, water, light, and people.
For several seconds he could not decide where to look, and that alone felt like a form of wealth.
His room back home had four usable surfaces and one view if the maintenance blind decided to work; this place had more depth in a single street than his entire block had ever been allowed to possess.
The light stole his breath first.
Runes covered everything: walls, archways, column bases, bridge supports, fountain rims, even the edges of public steps worn smooth by generations of feet.
Thousands of sigils glowed with soft blue radiance, not flat like signage on a habitat wall, but deep, as if the stone itself remembered starlight.
Some runes held steady.
Others pulsed slowly, heartbeat-gentle.
Together they gave the city an atmosphere of permanent twilight, bright enough to see by and dim enough to feel sacred.
“This is more than they promised,” Sirius whispered, and even that sentence felt too small for what stood around him.
He turned in place, silver-grey eyes wide, trying to catalogue too many wonders at once.
The runes were not decoration.
Even at a glance he could see patterns of function beneath the beauty: light sources arranged for even coverage, structural arrays placed at stress points, lines that might guide heat, water, or air through the mountain.
It was engineering, but not the sterile engineering of habitat corridors and maintenance manuals.
This was craftsmanship that had been allowed to become art.
For once, words failed because there was too much world rather than too little.
The Outer-Hab gave him surfaces: panels, seals, polymer seams, cheap light, numbered doors, and air scrubbed clean of history.
Mordrea gave him colour with weight behind it, sound with distance inside it, and stone that seemed to remember every hand that had shaped it.
He wanted to slow down and look properly, but his senses kept betraying him.
Light moved in too many directions.
Air carried more than filtered temperature.
Stone had weight, age, and mineral smell.
His brain tried to reduce it to data and failed, because this place was not presenting itself for inspection.
It simply existed too loudly, and the square did not care whether one overwhelmed new arrival could keep up.
Then he saw the fountain.
It dominated the central square, rising nearly fifteen feet from a broad circular basin of carved stone.
Locals gathered around it as naturally as people gathered around heat, leaning on the rim, filling flasks, talking, laughing, or simply passing through the spray that cooled the air.
A few other new arrivals stood nearby too, obvious not because the residents noticed them, but because they stared with the same open-mouthed bewilderment Sirius felt on his own face.
He barely registered any of them.
The fountain had taken hold of him.
Water spilled from tier to tier in sheets so clear that the blue light beneath them refracted into shifting ribbons.
Holographic figures moved above the surface, projected not by visible technology but by the runes carved into every curve and lip of the stone.
The images were delicate, almost translucent, yet detailed enough that Sirius could make out armour plates, weapon edges, expressions, and the suggestion of old scars on a hero’s face.
The entire scene was rendered in shades of blue, silver, and white, like moonlight trapped in water.
As he watched, an ancient warrior faced a creature too large and wrong to be natural.
It had too many limbs, too many eyes, and a body that dissolved at the edges like smoke.
The warrior’s sword flashed.
The monster collapsed into mist.
The scene shifted to the same figure standing on a mountain peak, arms lifted as stone flowed upward in answer.
Foundations formed.
Towers rose.
Builders, mages, and craftsmen appeared around the hero, working together until the city took shape beneath their hands.
Then the cycle returned to the beginning: battle, victory, founding.
Sirius stepped closer without realising he had moved.
“Incredible,” he breathed.
He crouched near the basin and studied the runes instead of the legend.
The story was impressive, but the mechanism behind it made his thoughts accelerate.
The rune lines formed circuits around the fountain base, spiralling into one another with a precision that made his fingers itch to trace them.
He stopped just short of touching the stone.
“The angles…
they’re all calculated.” Each rune had been cut to a specific depth.
Its edges were bevelled, not merely carved, faceted like the inner surfaces of a gemstone.
Light rose from within the grooves, hit those angled faces, and bent outward along invisible paths.
Where several paths intersected above the fountain, the hologram formed.
The water was not decoration either.
It acted as a moving lens, altering the refraction just enough to create motion: the flick of the warrior’s cloak, the writhing of the monster’s limbs, the shimmer of newly shaped stone.
The effect was not a projection sitting above the fountain.
It was the fountain, water and rune and stone working together as one device.
“It’s like a three-dimensional projection system,” Sirius whispered, awe thickening his voice, “but built out of craftsmanship and magical theory instead of emitters.” He shifted around the basin, checking the image from another angle.
It held.
No warping.
No collapse.
Whoever had designed it had accounted for every viewing position in the square.
One line cut a fraction too deep, one edge angled wrong, one water channel uneven, and the illusion would distort.
But it did not.
It was perfect.
The thought landed with enough force to make him smile.
The designer had not been merely a mage.
They had not been merely a stonecarver, engineer, historian, or artist.
They had been all of those things, or had worked with people who understood each craft deeply enough to make the boundaries vanish.
Form and function had become the same thing.
Beauty and purpose had stopped competing.
“This,” Sirius said softly, “is what I want to make.” The confession surprised him with its own certainty.
He had expected to want power, money, movement, wings, all the obvious rewards that games trained people to chase.
But standing beside the fountain, what he wanted most was the right to understand how beauty could be built without lying about function.
He opened the screenshot function with a thought and captured the fountain from several angles.
As a Blacksmith-Magi, it represented everything he had hoped the game might contain: material knowledge, magical theory, precision, artistry, and a public usefulness that did not lessen its beauty.
If a city put this much craft into a fountain anyone could walk past, what would its forges look like?
What kind of tools did its masters build?
What would a weapon look like if made by hands that understood light, metal, water, and spellwork as parts of the same language?
Reluctantly, Sirius tore himself away from the basin.
He needed to check his status.
Admiring public infrastructure was not a progression plan, no matter how inspiring it felt.
With a mental command, his interface materialised in front of him, a translucent panel of soft blue light hovering just inside his field of vision.
[CHARACTER STATUS] Name: Sirius Race: Nephillim Class: Blacksmith / Magi Level: 1 Tier: 0 Experience: 0/100 The panel made the numbers look clean, but nothing about his body felt like a clean number.
Every breath, every balance correction, every phantom hint of wings behind his shoulders carried the calm weight of a real body learning a new shape.
Sirius told himself that was immersion, because immersion was the safest word available.
He scrolled through the information.
The progression cycle was simple on the surface.
Every hundred levels, he could attempt an advancement quest, and success would return him to Level 1 of the next tier.
The climb would begin again, harder each time, with the rewards gradually changing shape.
It was a ladder disguised as a loop, and if he wanted to reach anything called Gods Realm, he would likely be climbing it for a very long time.
Then another line caught his eye and soured the moment.
[ABILITIES – LOCKED] Ethereal Wings (Nephillim Racial Trait) – Locked until Tier 2 Advancement Sirius stared at the message.
He had chosen Nephillim partly for flight, and now the system was telling him the wings were not a starting convenience but a future reward.
Level 100, advancement quest, Level 100 again, another advancement, and only then would the ability unlock.
“Of course,” he muttered, more annoyed with himself than the game.
“The one thing I wanted immediately is locked behind two entire cycles.” He filed the information away and continued scrolling, because frustration did not make useful data less useful.
The equipment section was even less flattering.
[EQUIPMENT] Body: Farmer’s Tunic (Common) Legs: Farmer’s Trousers (Common) Feet: Worn Leather Boots (Common) For the first time since arriving, Sirius looked down at himself properly.
The tunic was rough, undyed linen, loose at the shoulders and patched near the hem.
His trousers were plain and practical, tied with a cord rather than a proper belt.
The boots had seen better owners before him, their leather scuffed pale along the toes.
Around the fountain, even the humbler locals wore clothing with better cut and brighter dyes, while a few obvious players had already found or bought pieces that made them look like adventurers rather than misplaced farmhands.
Self-conscious heat crept up his neck.
He stood in a city of luminous runes and impossible craftsmanship dressed as if he had wandered in after harvesting root vegetables.
Sirius squared his shoulders, refusing to hunch.
Well, he thought, the logical first step is still the same.
Find a blacksmith.
Find a forge.
If I am going to be a BlacksmithMagi, I should at least learn where metal is worked before worrying about how ridiculous I look.
He turned from the fountain and began scanning the mountainside for signs of a workshop.
Heat shimmer.
Smoke.
Hammer icons.
Anything.
That was when the square’s noise struck him properly.
Until then, awe had softened it into background atmosphere.
Now the sound separated into layers: merchants calling from stalls, locals bargaining with sharp hand gestures, children laughing near the water, cart wheels grinding over stone, and conversations overlapping from every direction.
The voices were structured, melodic, and utterly incomprehensible.
The noise pressed into him as physically as heat.
Voices rose and crossed, boots scraped stone, animals snorted, water struck carved basins, metal rang somewhere down-slope, and Sirius realised with a shiver that silence in the Outer-Hab had not been peace; it had been poverty wearing a technical name.
Sirius approached the nearest vendor, a woman arranging polished trinkets on a cloth.
He kept his hands visible and his tone careful.
“Excuse me.
I’m looking for a blacksmith or metalworking workshop.” As soon as the question left his mouth, he noticed the vendor noticing him: the cheap cloth, the empty hands, the lack of escort, the bright ignorance he could not hide.
Every social exchange in Mordrea seemed to begin with assessment, and Sirius was still learning how much of himself strangers could read before he spoke twice.
The woman looked up, and the moment her attention settled fully on him, the overlay caught the exchange.
Her words reached his ears in the local tongue, but meaning unfolded across them in clear English, smooth enough to be eerie.
“A new arrival,” she said, or at least that was how the system rendered it.
Her expression warmed with professional patience.
“The forges are carved into the eastern face.
Follow the thermal shimmer in the air.
You will see it if you look carefully.
The master smith’s workshop is marked with a hammer sigil.” Relief loosened something in his chest.
“Thank you, I-” He stopped when a group of locals nearby burst into conversation.
They were close enough that he should have understood at least the topic if the translation was universal.
Instead, their words washed over him as meaningless sound.
A merchant called to passing customers in the same locked language.
Children giggled, one of them pointing at something behind a stall, and Sirius could not tell whether the joke had anything to do with him.
He opened his interface, moving through settings faster and faster.
Language options.
Translation controls.
Accessibility.
Anything.
There was nothing.
The realisation arrived cold and precise.
This was not a bug.
This was intentional.
Direct exchanges triggered translation, enough for trade, questions, and basic survival.
The ambient world did not.
The residents of this mountain city had their own language, and the system did not flatten their culture into player convenience just because Sirius wanted to listen.
He could buy goods.
He could ask directions.
But he could not overhear gossip, follow casual jokes, or absorb the social fabric that held the place together.
He was visible, present, and profoundly foreign.
That absence sharpened the crowd instead of dulling it.
Every untranslated laugh, warning and complaint reminded him that he was standing inside other people’s lives, not a private instance built around his comprehension.
The eastern forges no longer felt like a simple destination.
The incomprehensible chatter pressed at him from every side, and his old social anxiety rose with ugly familiarity.
Every glance felt like judgment.
Every laugh seemed to bend towards him.
The farmer’s clothes scratched at his awareness.
His hands tightened, and he forced himself to keep moving toward the mountain face before panic could root him in place.
Then memory hit him hard enough to steal his stride.
Year 9.
Universal Tongue history.
The lads in the back row, Marcus, Devon, and the others, leaning together over their desks with identical cruel ease.
They spoke in rapid English phrases he could not parse fast enough, their eyes flicking towards him, their laughter coming in sharp little bursts.
“What are they saying?” he had asked once, hating how small he sounded.
Marcus had grinned with that predatory warmth bullies used when teachers were nearby.
“Nothing, mate.
Just saying you’re absolutely shite at this.” But it had not been nothing.
He learned that later, long after the humiliation had already settled into him.
They had mocked his appearance, his awkwardness, the way he tried too hard to fit into conversations that moved without him.
They had taken him apart in a language he could not defend himself against while he stood there smiling uncertainly, hoping he looked less confused than he felt.
The memory left a tremor in his hands.
The mountain square blurred for a second, replaced by a classroom, cheap desks, and laughter he had never fully managed to forget.
Sirius breathed in, slow and rough.
What if it was happening again?
What if the merchants were laughing at his clothes?
What if the locals saw a helpless outsider and were already measuring what could be taken from him?
He knew, intellectually, that the fear was not proof.
He knew the residents around him had lives, errands, gossip, and concerns that probably had nothing to do with one strange new arrival in bad boots.
Knowing that did not stop his stomach from twisting.
He could not be that helpless version of himself again.
Not here.
Not in a world with permanent death and rules he did not yet understand.
The forge could wait.
The blacksmith could wait.
First, he needed information.
Language.
Culture.
Laws.
Social rank.
The shape of danger.
He needed knowledge the way a soldier needed armour.
There had to be a library somewhere in a city this old and sophisticated.
A place with books, records, maps, anything that could turn ignorance into footing.
He scanned the square until he spotted the lazy-looking merchant who had been watching the fountain traffic earlier, a man half-slouched on a stool beside a stall of woven cords, cheap charms, and polished stones.
The merchant had the relaxed, unimpressed air of someone who had seen too many new arrivals panic at too many ordinary things.
More importantly, he looked like he might answer a direct question.
Sirius approached carefully, aware of every patch on his tunic.
“Excuse me,” he said.
The overlay caught the interaction as the merchant’s eyes focused on him.
“I’m looking for a library.” He heard how careful he sounded and hated it a little.
Too polite could make a man seem weak, but too confident could make him seem ridiculous, and Sirius had spent most of his life trying to guess which mistake strangers would punish first.
The merchant’s posture changed so abruptly that Sirius almost stepped back.
The man’s chin lifted from his palm.
His brows rose.
For a heartbeat he simply stared, as if Sirius had asked where the city stored its spare moons.
“A…
library?” he repeated, each translated word carrying disbelief.
“Why would you ask for such a thing?” Sirius blinked.
“I wanted to find books so I could learn how this place works.” “Books?” The merchant laughed once, sharp and incredulous rather than amused.
Several charms on his stall clicked together as he shifted.
“Books are for nobles, boy.
Scholars.
Mages.
The wealthy.
Common folk do not stroll into libraries because curiosity nips at them.
That is not how the world works.” The laugh did not hurt because it was loud.
It hurt because it was familiar.
Not the same voice, not the same room, not the same world, but the same quick judgement that turned curiosity into evidence against him before he could defend it.
The words hit like cold water.
A rigid social hierarchy.
Knowledge fenced off by birth, money, and recognised status.
Sirius had expected different technology, different laws, maybe different dangers.
He had not expected the basic right to read to be treated like a luxury item.
Shock flared, but he forced it down before it could become another reason to freeze.
Information was still available somewhere.
It simply had gatekeepers.
“Then where would someone go to learn how things work?” he asked, choosing the phrasing more carefully.
“I do not mean noble knowledge or anything private.
I need practical information: work, local rules, and who I should talk to before I make a fool of myself.” The merchant studied him for a moment, the disbelief easing into something closer to reluctant approval.
At least this question made sense to him.
“The Guild Hall,” he said, pointing up the main thoroughfare toward a massive stone structure carved deeper into the mountain.
Its entrance was marked by runes brighter than most, arranged around a broad doorway like a declaration.
“All the city’s guilds keep business there.
Hunters, mercenaries, mages, craftsmen.
Work is posted there.
Alliances are made there.
Information flows there, if you have coin, use, or the sense to listen.” “The Guild Hall,” Sirius repeated, committing the words to memory.
“Follow the main road upward,” the merchant said, already settling back into his pose.
“You cannot miss it unless you are trying to.” Sirius thanked him because that seemed safer than leaving too quickly, then turned toward the rune-bright structure.
The city had different rules than he had anticipated, but rules could be learned.
Rules could be navigated.
Rules, once understood, could be exploited.
Books were restricted.
Knowledge had gatekeepers.
But the Guild Hall sounded like a place where information could be earned rather than inherited, and that was enough to pull him forward.
The thoroughfare climbed steeply through the mountain city, winding between terraces like the spine of some vast stone serpent.
As Sirius ascended, the sensory weight of the world began to gather around him in earnest.
The air was not merely cool.
It had texture.
He tasted mineral dust, clean water, and a faint metallic tang from distant forges.
Beneath his boots, the street held the day’s stored warmth in sunlit patches and the mountain’s cold in shadow.
Somewhere below, hidden channels carried water through the city, and he could feel their faint vibration through the soles of his worn boots.
He stopped beside a carved wall and pressed his palm against it.
The stone was extraordinary.
Not smooth in the cheap, factory-polished way of habitat panels, but shaped by intention.
Some sections were rough enough to grip.
Others had been worn satin-smooth by hands, weather, and time.
His fingertips found tool marks, tiny ridges, shallow cuts, and the warmer lines where runes pulsed beneath the surface.
The detail made him dizzy.
His new body registered everything with impossible clarity.
This was not like the habitat recreation zones.
Sirius had visited one once on a school trip, a premium sensory chamber meant to simulate a natural garden for children who would likely never set foot on a planet.
The air had smelled of manufactured flowers.
The grass had bent correctly under his shoes.
The artificial breeze had touched his skin on schedule.
Everything had been almost right, and that almost had ruined it.
The place had felt like a lie performed by expensive machines.
This did not feel performed.
Distant voices echoed from terraces above and below.
The fountain’s water murmured behind him, fading with each step.
Wind moved through carved channels in the buildings and returned as a low, fluted whisper.
Hammer strikes rang somewhere on the eastern face, softened by distance and stone.
His own boots scraped, paused, and scraped again, each sound occupying its own place in the city’s breathing.
He could focus on any one layer and hear it clearly, or let them blend into something alive.
Blue rune-light flowed across the stone in pulses that seemed almost organic.
The colours were not flat digital overlays.
They had depth, like light passing through ice or shallow water.
Shadows fell in soft gradients.
Reflections trembled in damp patches near drainage channels.
His brain accepted it as real with a conviction that tightened his chest.
Sirius had played Full Dive games before.
He knew what complete sensory immersion was supposed to mean.
This was different.
This was more.
And, unexpectedly, it made him angry.
Not at the game.
At the world he had left behind.
The ultra-wealthy had inner-hab residences spread across multiple connected levels, private climate gardens sealed behind glass, full-sky projection domes, soundproof leisure decks, real-water pools, chefs who cooked fresh-grown food instead of nutrient paste, and rooms large enough to waste space on beauty rather than storage.
Core habitat complexes had entertainment courts, holographic lounges, and restaurants where living plants were decoration instead of educational exhibits.
Even those places, polished and comfortable as they were, still felt enclosed.
Curated.
Owned.
The outer habitats were different: narrow corridors, exposed maintenance panels, cheap neon signs, recycled air, and rooms where every object had to justify the space it occupied.
The inner complexes had become stacked palaces with rented sunlight and engineered breeze, while ordinary people learned about soil, rain, and forests through screens.
Sensory richness had become something sold by the hour.
Here, the world insisted on being felt for free.
The mountain pressed against his palm with weight and age.
The air had flavour, temperature, and movement.
Light had thickness.
Sound had distance.
This was what wealth bought in reality: not just comfort, but depth.
Aliveness.
The right to stand somewhere that did not feel assembled from compromises.
Sirius pushed away from the wall, his hand shaking slightly.
In his real room, the pod could simulate contact, but simulation had always been feedback, a response to input.
Mordrea felt indifferent to whether he noticed it or not.
It existed with or without his attention, and that simple truth struck him harder than any launch trailer ever had.
His anger settled into focus.
The merchant had said information flowed through the Guild Hall.
Information could be earned.
This world might be unfair, dangerous, and full of barriers, but its barriers were at least visible enough to study.
Sirius resumed climbing, jaw set and eyes fixed on the rune-bright entrance above.
He had arrived in farmer’s clothes, unable to understand the language and ignorant of almost every local rule.
That would change.
He would learn.
He would adapt.
And for the first time since the alarm had dragged him out of bed, the path ahead felt larger than the room behind him.
[Location Discovered: Guild Hall of Khradrin] [Public Institution] [Available Services: Registration, Contracts, Commissions, Trade Introductions, Work Boards, Rank Assessment] [Institutional Interface Available] [You may request guidance at a public counter.] [Travel Note Acquired] [Destination: Briarvale] [Suggested Path: East Gate Caravan] [Departure: Morning Bell] [Path Updated] [Current Objective: Reach Briarvale] [Optional: Confirm Morning Caravan] [Optional: Learn Basic Local Terms] [Optional: Acquire Food, Coin, or Work Credit]