In the depths of an underground chamber, the glow of countless LCD screens bathed the room in a cold, artificial light. Each display showed a different angle of the same scene—men in black uniforms, heavily armed, forcing their way into a towering corporate building. Their movements were sharp and precise, a predator's hunt caught on film.
Sitting before this wall of screens was a young man, striking in appearance. His sharp jawline and calm, almost unearthly expression made him look more statue than flesh. Yet what made him unforgettable was his hair—it shimmered, changing colors in a slow, rhythmic pattern. Crimson bled into sapphire, sapphire into emerald, emerald into gold, a spectrum that shifted endlessly, as though his very thoughts painted his hair with emotion.
He stared at the scenes unfolding before him, his lips parting in a quiet murmur."How… did it come to this?"
The words were spoken aloud, but his mind was already far away. His thoughts spiraled, weaving through memories and regrets.
This world… this dying world… it was doomed long before today.
Once, Earth had been vibrant. But now, the skies were suffocated by smoke and metallic haze. The oceans had long since turned into acidic graves, and the forests—those lungs of the planet—had withered into dust. Humanity had become a species trapped within its own cage of concrete and steel, relying on artificial oxygen masks to simply draw breath. Animals had vanished, entire ecosystems erased. For most, beauty existed only in relics—books that described green fields, or old videos that played the songs of rivers no longer alive.
Despair weighed heavy on humanity, but in their desperation, they found escape. First, it was the rise of VRMMORPGs. Virtual worlds where the dead could dream again, where polluted air was replaced with fresh digital skies, and the silence of extinction was drowned out by laughter, battles, and adventures. Those games could not simulate every sense, not perfectly, but it was enough to make people forget reality.
Until the next breakthrough changed everything—Soul Dive MMORPGs.
This technology allowed players to link directly with their souls. No more limited immersion. No more dull imitations. For the first time, every sense could be experienced at a hundred percent. Taste, touch, pain, pleasure, warmth, cold—all of it became real inside a world that was not real. People no longer logged in to play; they lived inside those games.
And I… I was the one who went further.
I was hailed as a genius, a pioneer. While others built worlds bound by systems and rules, I forged something greater: the next generation of Soul Dive MMORPGs—Soul World Dive MMORPGs.
Not just a game.Not just a world.But an entire soul reality.
I called it Soul World Online, or simply SWO.
Inside it, players weren't just heroes bound by pre-written quests. They could create. Spells never before imagined. Weapons forged from raw thought. Entire cultures, born from imagination. The game was not a cage; it was an endless canvas.
And at the center of it all, stood me.
My in-game avatar was not a warrior, not a mage, not any race familiar to fantasy. I chose instead to become something eternal: a World Tree.
But not the ordinary green and brown mythic Yggdrasil. No—my Yggdrasil was a colossus in an infinite white void. Its trunk and branches were black as midnight, but across that darkness shimmered countless white specks, like galaxies scattered across the cosmos. And within its immense form, space itself bent. Its branches were not mere wood—they contained planes of existence, each one a world unto itself.
Some of those planes were barren, twisted lands swarming with monsters. Others flourished with civilizations of players, NPCs, and beings born from soul-energy algorithms. From the void, my leaves grew, glowing in every color of the spectrum—an endless aurora swaying gently in a place without wind.
Those leaves were more than decoration. They were engines of creation, weaving soul energy, matter, and mana from nothingness.
That was my true genius—not just the coding of fantasy, but the breakthrough of science itself. I found a way to convert ordinary electrical energy into soul energy. That energy, in turn, became matter and mana, the twin fuels of my worlds.
In the real world, every person carried a negligible spark of soul energy, so faint it was useless. But in my Soul World, that same energy was amplified, reshaped, reborn. I even introduced something our world had never known before—mana. A force that bent reality itself, born from rules I designed.
And like every game, there were levels. But in SWO, there was no ceiling. Characters could climb from level one to infinity itself. The cap was determined only by me—by Yggdrasil's growth. As I leveled up, my branches expanded, my leaves multiplied, and entire new worlds were born, fueled by the endless cycle of creation.
It was limitless. Eternal.
And in a dying world where people had no future, my creation became their salvation.It became their obsession.It became… their new reality.
The most popular game in the world. The only light left in the darkness.