The hum of the PC fans filled the small room while Noah stared at the final screen.
"Finally…I finished it," I said, my voice slow and ragged, like someone who hadn't slept in days.
Hi. My name is Noah. I'm an orphan. Tonight I'd just completed Conquest, a sprawling kingdom-building strategy game where you command armies, manage provinces, and crush rivals. Ever since I was a child I'd been obsessed with rulers and empires—those moments in novels and games when a single decision changes the fate of thousands. I wanted to be that kind of ruler: decisive, feared, unstoppable.
"How long has it been since I slept?" I muttered, rubbing my eyes. "I'm wrecked. A quick nap, then I'll cook dinner."
I closed my eyes and let the darkness take me. It felt like relief. When light stabbed into my face and I opened my eyes again, everything ached—except, oddly, my body. I couldn't feel it.
"Betty! BETTY!! Wake up—Betty! Oh no!" A voice broke like glass with panic.
My vision cleared and I made out an old nun kneeling beside me, her face pulled tight with fear. Her lips trembled as if she couldn't believe what she was seeing.
…
Fifteen years later.
Fifteen years since I reincarnated into this world—and I still have the same name as my past life. Those first years were a grind. My mother died giving birth to me, my father—rumor said he'd been a hunter—died before I was born. I landed in an orphanage where the nuns smiled with empty mouths and kept every scrap meant for the children. The food was barely food. Donations vanished into locked drawers. I was small, bewildered, and for a long time I let the world grind me down.
Then I learned something that felt impossible: this world, Gaia, wasn't ordinary. Magic existed. Elves walked the wilds, spirits whispered in the trees, and talent—if you had it—could flare like daylight. At five, the orphanage took me to a temple to test me. The nuns placed a crystal sphere on a low altar and told me to rest my hand on it. I pressed my palm to its cool surface and waited.
Nothing.
"Tsk. A dud. He has no talent," the orphanage nun sneered, her voice like a guttering candle. I remember the way my heart slid into my stomach. I'd imagined casting fire and bending wind—one of those grand, cinematic spells—and instead the crystal betrayed me. That moment was the start of my unraveling.
Because I seemed talentless, the other children turned on me. Bullying was constant: jeers, beatings, a regular parade of cruelty while the nuns watched and laughed as if it were a play. There were times I wanted to disappear entirely. But the darkness shifted into something else over the years. Grief hardened into resolve. Helplessness curdled into a cold, patient hunger for control.
It took six years to stop being a victim.
When I was fourteen, I acted.
Those three boys who'd tormented me—the oldest, sixteen by then, legal adults in the orphanage's eyes—were predictable. Under the cover of night, while the dorms breathed and snored, I slipped into the kitchen, found a knife, and moved through the shadows. I went into the children's room and the nun's quarters and did what I had to do.
When the last breath left them I felt something ancient and terrible click into place—an awful, electric clarity. It made the world make sense.
Ding. Ding.
A new voice entered my head, crisp and clinical.
[CONGRATULATIONS. YOU HAVE AWAKENED YOUR PERSONAL SYSTEM.]
[YOU HAVE MET THE CONDITIONS TO AWAKEN.]
I'd read enough novels to know what a system meant: menus, points, rewards—the kind of thing that rewrites life into a game. I should have been ecstatic. Instead, after fourteen years of learning the world's cruelty, my excitement was laced with caution.
[Ding]
[YOU HAVE KILLED FOUR ADULTS. GAIN: 40 SYSTEM POINTS.]
"Huh," I said aloud, to no one. "System—what do you do? What are points for?"
[HOST: SYSTEM FEATURES: SYSTEM STORE. BUY: TALENTS, BLOODLINES, AFFINITIES, SKILLS, SOLDIERS, ARTIFACTS, SOLDIER POOLS.]
[SYSTEM POINTS ARE EARNED THROUGH KILLING. THE MORE POWERFUL THE TARGET, THE MORE POINTS AWARDED.]
[A FIRST QUEST HAS BEEN UNLOCKED.]
[QUEST: GAIN CONTROL OVER A CITY WITHIN ONE YEAR; PROCLAIM AN EMPIRE.]
[REWARD: BASIC SOLDIER POOL.]
A soldier pool—something that lets you summon troops after you found a kingdom. It sounded almost ludicrous: summon soldiers like clicking a button. But the condition to awaken this thing—murder—was a mirror to the world I'd been forced into. If power was the only language that mattered, the system was a tool. And tools were best used by those who understood them.
"Things just got interesting," I whispered.
That night, I left the orphanage. I didn't look back.
…
A year passed.
Now I stood in Mirch, a shabby city in the kingdom of Stygian. Stygian had been crumbling for eighty years; its monarchy clung to the core territory by threads. Mirch—north of Lythe, in Rover province of the dukedom of Bulwark—was the kind of place that flinched when asked for taxes. Poor fields, a thin market, hunters heading into the Endor forest with more hope than harvest. Perfect for a quiet takeover.
I had spent four months watching: how people lined up at the well, how the guards changed shifts, which merchants owed which debts. Eight months of scouting had led me here. I wanted a city easy to seize—one that wouldn't immediately summon the duke or the governor down on me.
Under the low light of my rented attic, I breathed and spoke the words that had become ritual.
"System, open system store."
Silence, then the familiar chime. The future felt like a chessboard—cold, sharp, and waiting.