The first thing Aiden noticed was silence.
Not the calm, soothing kind—but an unnatural, crushing void where even his heartbeat had no right to exist.
He opened his eyes.
A sky of shattered glass stretched infinitely above him, shards of light suspended in frozen motion, each reflecting an endless number of Aiden's faces—smiling, screaming, dying.
> "Where… am I?"
The ground wasn't ground at all. It was a mirror, and every step he took, his reflection moved differently—lagging behind, smiling when he wasn't.
Then he saw them.
Figures standing in the distance, cloaked in black, faces obscured by white porcelain masks, each marked with a different emotion: joy, despair, rage, apathy.
One of them spoke—not aloud, but directly into his mind, a voice that sounded like every person he had ever loved and hated combined into one:
> "You are dead, Aiden."
"But death is only the first door."
Before he could respond, chains burst out of the mirror beneath his feet, wrapping around his arms, chest, throat. They burned like molten steel, yet when he looked down—his flesh wasn't burning. It was turning transparent, like glass.
The masked figure continued:
> "The Game of Eternity begins now."
"Survive, and you may claim the throne of existence itself."
Suddenly—
The glass sky shattered completely, and Aiden fell into an abyss of screaming stars, while thousands of notifications exploded before his eyes in glowing crimson text:
> [YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED AS A CANDIDATE.]
[RULE 1: KILL OR BE ERASED.]
[RULE 2: NO ALLIANCES LAST FOREVER.]
[RULE 3: THE STRONGEST WILL RENAME REALITY.]
And then—
A voice he had never heard, whispered from the void:
> "Aiden… will you become the god who rewrites destiny?"