My consciousness didn't fade so much as… compress.
One moment, I was Zarathos, the Abyssal Sovereign, standing atop my crystal-spired fortress in the Bloodstone Peaks, unleashing waves of necrotic energy upon the tenth—or was it eleventh?—party of "heroes" to invade my sanctum. A paladin's holy blade had finally found the flaw in my phylactery matrix. Annoying, but not unexpected. I'd calculated a 67.3% chance of that particular group succeeding within the next five centuries.
The next moment, I was drowning in sensation. Physical sensation. The scratch of rough wool against skin. The ache of muscles I hadn't possessed for millennia. The deafening, chaotic symphony of a heartbeat, lungs drawing air, blood rushing in ears.
I opened eyes—mortal eyes—to a wooden ceiling cracked with damp.
…Reboot sequence complete.
Admin privileges revoked.
New identity allocated: [Kael]
The familiar blue system text hovered in my vision, but it was… dimmed. Subdued. Like a god reduced to whispering.
I sat up. The motion was clumsy, requiring the conscious activation of a dozen minor muscle groups. Disgraceful. My new body was approximately 1.82 meters tall, mass ~70 kilograms, with underdeveloped musculoskeletal structure and mana channels so faint they were practically theoretical.
I was in a small, stone-walled room. A single bed, a washbasin, a chest. Sunlight—actual, unfiltered, non-cursed sunlight—streamed through a narrow window, illuminating motes of dust.
A memory that wasn't mine surfaced. Kael. Age 17. Orphan. Aspiring Adventurer. Currently in debt to the Rusty Tankard Inn for three nights' lodging. Primary skill: Basic Swordsmanship (Level 2). Secondary skill: Mediocre Persuasion.
I accessed what remained of my system interface.
<< STATUS >>
Name: Kael
Race: Human
Class: Beginner Adventurer (F)
Level: 1
Title: None
Health: 120/120
Mana: 15/15 (Channels Atrophied)
<< ATTRIBUTES >>
Strength: 9
Dexterity: 8
Constitution: 10
Intelligence: 15* (Anomaly Detected)
Wisdom: 14* (Anomaly Detected)
Charisma: 7
<< ABILITIES >>
> Sword Proficiency (Novice)
> Survive on 1 Copper a Day (Passive)
<< ADMIN LEGACY (INACTIVE) >>
> Final Boss Template (Sealed)
> Dungeon Core Mechanics (Sealed)
> Minion Summoning Protocol (Sealed)
> Cosmic-Level Threat Aura (Sealed)
A wave of something unfamiliar—hot, sharp, disruptive—washed through my neural pathways. I recognized it from observing billions of mortal interactions: humiliation. I, who had once designed continents and calibrated catastrophe events, was now a Level 1 human with a Charisma of 7 and an ability to survive on laughable currency.
A knock at the door. "Kael! You in there? Guild assessment starts in an hour! If you're late again, they'll mark you as 'unmotivated'!" The voice was young, female, laced with a grating enthusiasm.
Another memory-flash: Lira, fellow aspirant from the same backwater village. Optimism core: unstable.
"I am aware," I called out, my voice a stranger's baritone. It lacked the reverberating, soul-chilling timbre I was accustomed to. I stood, examining my new form in the polished metal serving as a mirror. Brown hair, gray eyes, features utterly unremarkable. A face designed for anonymity. How… pragmatic.
I dressed in the adventurer's garb laid out—stiff leather, poorly tanned; a cheap iron shortsword in a scuffed sheath. As my hand closed around the sword's hilt, a subsystem I hadn't noticed flared to life.
<< ANALYSIS MODE (LEGACY) >> ACTIVE
Target: Iron Shortsword (Crude)
Durability: 43/100
Damage Profile: 5-8 Slashing
Flaws: 12 detected (Primary: Improper quenching has created microfractures along the central axis. Will shatter on 73rd impact against hardness >4.)
Enchantment Potential: Null.
Interesting. Not all my administrative functions were gone. Merely… repurposed.
I left the room, descending into the common area of the Rusty Tankard. The noise was an assault. Dozens of humans and demi-humans talking, laughing, chewing. The smell of ale, sweat, and roasting meat formed a potent olfactory cocktail. My new senses, so pitifully broad, were overwhelmed.
"Kael! Over here!" Lira waved from a corner table. She had bright red hair, freckles, and an expression of permanent earnestness. Her status hovered above her head, visible only to me: Lira, Level 2 Apprentice Ranger. Threat Assessment: Negligible.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," she said as I sat, pushing a bowl of gruel toward me. "Nerves?"
"Re-calibrating," I stated, probing the gruel with a spoon. << ANALYSIS: Oatmeal, water, trace salt. Nutritional value: low. Contaminants: None detected. Palatability: 2/10.>>
"It's just the preliminary assessment," she whispered, leaning in. "They just test your basic stats, your class affinity, and run you through the tutorial dungeon. So long as you don't freeze up facing the practice golems, you'll get your F-Rank license!"
The Adventurer's Guild. The universal sorting algorithm for mortal combatants. In my past life, I'd received automated reports on guild rank distributions. It was a simple pyramid: vast F-Rank fodder at the bottom, filtering up to the occasional S-Rank who might provide a marginally entertaining skirmish.
And now I was at the absolute base of that pyramid.
"Let us proceed," I said, standing. The gruel was beneath consumption parameters.
The Guildhall was a large, sturdy building bearing a banner with a crossed sword and staff. A line of youths, all between 16 and 20, snaked from the door. Their chatter was a din of anxiety and bravado. I observed them with my detached analysis.
<< Target: Human Male. Class: Brute (Potential). Flaw: Overdeveloped trapezius muscles limit overhead swing range by 15%.>>
<< Target: Elf Female. Class: Arcane Sensitive (Latent). Flaw: Mana flow hampered by emotional volatility.>>
It was tedious. Like watching bacteria calculate their division.
We were processed in groups. A tired-looking clerk used a basic identification stone on each person, calling out results. "Marl, Fighter. Strength 12, pass. Next. Jax, Scout. Dexterity 11, pass."
When my turn came, I placed my hand on the cold stone.
"Kael, Adventurer…" The clerk frowned. The stone flickered erratically—white, then black, then gray—before settling on a dull, non-committal beige. "Class… inconclusive? Attributes…" He squinted. "Intelligence 15? Wisdom 14? For a beginner?" He gave me a suspicious look. "Have you been soul-scanned before, boy?"
"This is my first allocation," I said truthfully.
He muttered, marking his ledger. "Irregular. Proceed to the tutorial instance. You're in Group 7."
The "tutorial instance" was a magically maintained cellar beneath the Guildhall. A simple circular room of stone. In the center stood three clumsy humanoid constructs of wood and enchanted clay: Practice Golems, Level 1.
Our group had five members: myself, Lira, the over-muscled Brute (Bran), the volatile Elf (Elara), and a shifty-eyed boy who kept to the shadows (Denn).
"Alright, greenhorns!" barked a grizzled Guild Assessor by the door. "This ain't a real fight. It's a test of instinct. You face the golem, show you can defend, attack, and not wet yourself. Use the weapon you registered with. Begin! Bran, you're up!"
The test was as primitive as I'd predicted. Bran lumbered forward, roared, and smashed his club against a golem. It staggered back, a shallow dent in its clay. "Pass! Next, Lira!"
Lira danced around hers, landing two shallow cuts with her daggers before retreating breathlessly. "Pass!"
Elara closed her eyes, muttered, and produced a weak spark from her fingers that startled her golem into stumbling. "Pass… barely."
Denn slipped behind his, prodded it with a short spear, and retreated. "Adequate. Pass."
Then, it was my turn.
All eyes fell on me. I walked to the center of the room. The remaining golem activated, its simple magic circuits glowing amber as it shambled toward me.
My mind, however, was not on the golem. It was on the room itself. My Analysis Mode was mapping everything. The mana lines powering the constructs. The stress points in the stone floor. The Assessor's bored posture. The slight warp in the golem's left knee joint from repeated impacts.
The golem raised a fist to execute its standard overhead smash, a move I had seen it perform 23 times already. My body, with its Dexterity 8, was too slow to dodge gracefully. My Strength 9 was too weak to block effectively.
So I did not dodge or block.
I took one precise step forward, inside the arc of its swing. My cheap iron shortsword, held not for a slash but like a dagger, lanced out not at the golem's body, but at a nearly invisible hairline crack in the stone floor just behind its advancing heel.
The blade tip struck the crack, jamming there. The golem's foot, coming down, caught the protruding hilt.
It was a leverage point of minuscule magnitude. But applied at the exact moment of the golem's unbalanced forward motion, it was sufficient.
The construct's leg twisted. It emitted a grinding sound of protesting magic and toppled sideways like a felled tree, crashing to the floor, where it lay twitching, a root-like foot tangled with my sword.
The room was silent.
The Assessor stared, his jaw slightly slack. The other aspirants gaped.
I looked down at the immobilized golem, then at the Assessor. "Its weight distribution is flawed. The enchantment matrix prioritizes forward momentum over lateral stability. A design error. You should file a report with your artificer."
I bent down, retrieved my sword with a twist, and sheathed it.
The Assessor blinked slowly. "That's… not how you're supposed to…" He shook his head, then gruffly marked his board. "Pass. Unorthodox, but pass."
As I walked back to the group, Lira's eyes were wide. "How did you know to do that?"
I met her gaze, my expression neutral. "I have experience with structural weaknesses."
A new notification, tinged with a familiar dark purple hue from a lifetime ago, scrolled across my vision.
<< LEGACY SYSTEM NOTIFICATION >>
Triumph via Superior Data: Admin-level tactical analysis utilized in a tutorial scenario.
Reward: Sealed Legacy Fragment [1/10,000] recovered.
Ability Unlocked: [Fault Sight] (Passive).
You perceive critical structural, magical, and existential flaws in constructs, entities, and systems. Perception scales with Intelligence.
And below it, another message, this one in stark, urgent crimson:
<< WARNING: ANOMALOUS ACTIVITY DETECTED >>
Final Boss Signature (Residual) has been partially emitted.
Scanning… Scan complete.
Result: Signature detected by [2] high-tier entities within a 50-mile radius.
Recommendation: Assume low-profile protocols. Survival probability decreasing.
I looked up from the text, out past the cellar walls, as if I could see through stone and earth. Two high-tier entities. Had they sensed the echo of Zarathos? Were they old enemies? Or perhaps… curious powers, wondering who had just flickered onto their radar from the absolute bottom of the mortal heap?
A faint, almost forgotten sensation stirred within my new, human chest. Not fear. Not yet.
Anticipation.
The game, it seemed, was not over. It had simply changed servers. And this time, I was starting from the very beginning—with all the knowledge of how it all ends.