Chapter 1: Genesis of Corruption
In the year 2126 AD—a time when humanity had forgotten how to fear the dark—a game called YGGDRASIL erupted into existence like a virus finding its first host.
Players swarmed. Players are hungry for promises. The most popular DMMO-RPG ever conceived, they said. The future of immersion, they whispered. The death of reality, they didn't yet know.
I was among them—Lionel Thompson, another fool eager to be infected.
The game was a digital garden of delights, a paradise of infinite possibilities. Extensive freedom flowered in every corner: character creation that bent reality, gear that gleamed with potential, choices that cascaded into consequence. But what truly consumed me, what burrowed deep beneath my skin and nested in the marrow of my obsession, was the NPC creation system.
You could birth almost anything.
Custom faces that smiled without souls. Races that defied nature's covenant. Powers that pulsed with programmed purpose. Items that existed solely because you willed them into being. Even personalities—carved, constructed, fabricated from pure imagination. Oh, they couldn't move like living flesh. They couldn't react with authentic terror when death approached. But descriptions, detailed and deliberate, could breathe a terrible semblance of life into these hollow husks.
Around me, players revealed their desires in digital flesh.
Some spawned succubi and sirens, flesh-forged fantasies, eye-candy creatures that existed only to be consumed by desperate gazes. Others conjured nightmares—fear-forged, fury-faced, bone-breaking behemoths built to intimidate and dominate.
But me?
I wanted resurrection. Revival. Rebirth.
I wanted Resident Evil.
That name—those two words—once echoed through the hallowed halls of gaming history like a death knell tolling for the twenty-first century. Born in 1996, baptized in blood and survival horror, the franchise had carved its legacy into gamer consciousness with rusty knives and rotting hands. Iconic didn't begin to describe it. The characters were legends. The bosses were monuments to monstrosity. The enemies were poetry—shambling, groaning, grotesque poetry written in decaying flesh.
The series had staggered on until 2023, then collapsed. No continuation. No resurrection. Just downloadable corpses and emulator-preserved remains for the few who remembered.
The graphics were outdated—ancient, obsolete, beautiful in their primitive decay. Playing them was like exhuming beloved graves, and God, how I wished I'd witnessed their original release, felt that first flush of fear fresh and unfiltered.
So there I stood, scheming and starving for something that the world had forgotten.
I would recreate them. Every enemy. Every horror. Every mutation that had ever lurched across a screen or lunged from shadow. But this resurrection required apostles, disciples, and believers.
I formed a guild.
I recruited the faithful—fellow followers of that forgotten franchise, worshippers at the altar of survival horror. What kind of prophet would I be, what kind of fanatic, if I didn't name our unholy congregation the Umbrella Corporation?
The requirements were ritualistic in their rigidity:
First, your character must be human. Wholly, completely human. We were scientists playing god, playing with plagues, birthing bio-weapons from behavioral modification and viral violation. We needed that human hubris, that mortal arrogance.
Second—dedication. Determination. Devotion. This wasn't a casual commitment; this was cathedral-construction, monument-making, madness masquerading as methodology.
Third—knowledge. Deep knowledge. Extensive, exhaustive, encyclopedic understanding of Resident Evil: the lore, the locations, the legacy of every last shambling corpse.
Applications arrived in droves—dozens, scores, swarms of would-be members.
Only thirty passed our trials. Thirty true believers became official members of the Umbrella Corporation. We divided ourselves into five groups, five focused factions, each assigned a single game to resurrect, enemy by enemy, boss by boss.
Our guild became famous.
Others watched and wondered. Copycat congregations sprouted like spores—guilds attempting to resurrect Devil May Cry, to revive Dead by Daylight, to reanimate their own beloved classics from gaming's graveyard. But they withered. They all withered. Disbanded before progress. Bored before completion. Dead before delivery.
We nearly joined them in that mass grave.
The mechanics were maddening. Recreating character behavior was difficult; recreating the Virus itself was damn near impossible in a world woven entirely from magic, not mutation. Spells, not science. Mana, not molecules. We were trying to transplant biology into a body that only understood the mystical.
Then—providence.
The developers noticed us. One developer in particular, himself a Resident Evil devotee, a fellow fanatic who understood our obsession. He championed our cause, pushed through bureaucracy and bottom lines to gift us something unprecedented: private customization.
Viruses.
He spent months—months—constructing code that captured contagion, programming pathogen protocols, designing digital diseases that functioned exactly as the T-Virus, the G-Virus, the Uroboros had in those beloved games. Mutation mechanics. Transformation triggers. Evolution through infection.
With our help, our intimate knowledge, our reverence for the source material, he succeeded.
We had done it. We had actually done it.
Then the backlash began—bitter, brutal, boiling with resentment.
The Virus race was ours exclusively, given only to the Umbrella Corporation. And it was powerful. Devastatingly so. Our creations could mutate into monstrosities that magic couldn't match, couldn't counter, couldn't kill. Raw biological horror overwhelming arcane artillery.
The player base erupted in outrage—screaming, seething, spitting accusations of favoritism and unfairness.
So the developer imposed a limitation, a leash, a lobotomy: Virus-type NPCs couldn't use magic. Not a single spell. They had to rely solely on mutation, on metamorphosis, on sheer physical savagery and strength.
We weren't power-hungry. We were art-hungry. This was recreation, not domination. Resurrection, not revolution.
We accepted immediately.
But the masses weren't satisfied. Still, they screamed. Still, they demanded. Make it public, they cried. Give everyone access. Never mind our disability, our deliberate disadvantage—they wanted the Virus for themselves.
It was publicized. Released. Made available to all.
And the majority proved utterly, pathetically incompetent.
They spawned shambling jokes—weak zombies, worthless walking corpses that couldn't threaten a training dummy. Measly mutations that fell to the first fireball. They abandoned the mechanic almost immediately, dismissing it as useless, unworkable, and underwhelming.
They didn't understand. They couldn't. They lacked the knowledge, the nuance, the obsession required to wield biological horror as we did.
Years passed like pages turning.
We completed our project—every enemy, every boss, every strain and mutation faithfully, fanatically recreated. But our guild had grown beyond mere monster-making. Our reputation had metastasized, spreading through the game like contagion itself.
We participated in guild wars—brutal, bloody battles fought over World Items we needed for our creations. We were selective, strategic, and only engaged when rewards proved essential to our progress. But when we did engage...
Carnage.
Despite our disability, our deliberate disadvantage, the monsters we'd created—those perfect, pristine recreations—overpowered guild after guild after guild. The players couldn't complain now. Couldn't report to us. Everyone had access to the same tools; we simply wielded them with surgical precision, with scientific savagery.
Through skirmishes and sieges, through events and expeditions, through dungeons dark and wars waged across digital wastelands, countless guilds fell before the Umbrella Corporation. Fell screaming. Fell mutilated by our viral vanguard.
Only a handful could match us.
Chief among them: Ainz Ooal Gown.
A guild of heteromorphs—players who'd chosen monstrous forms, embraced the grotesque, and become the inhuman. They were powerful, tactically brilliant, strategically savage. Every encounter was a chess match played with corpses.
Our battles were legendary, mythic, magnificent in their mutual destruction. Sometimes they prevailed. Sometimes we did. Victory swung between us like a pendulum, measuring time until the apocalypse.
Two guilds. Two powers. Two names that made other players pale and pray they'd never face us.
The Umbrella Corporation's headquarters was a labyrinth—a dungeon designed for disorientation, for dread.
Inside, sterile corridors stretched endlessly, pristine and cold. White walls, white everywhere, clinical cleanliness concealing catastrophic horror. Polished tile floors reflected fluorescent lighting—that harsh, hospital brightness that made everything look dead even when alive. Observation rooms with one-way glass. Experiment chambers with stainless steel tables. Living quarters that felt like cells.
It wasn't beautiful. Not like the crystalline castles, the obsidian fortresses, the gold-gilded palaces that other guilds erected.
But it was authentic. It was real.
We defied convention deliberately, perversely. Most guilds placed treasure vaults on ground floors, then stacked NPC guardians above like layers of deadly decoration.
We reversed it. Inverted it. Perverted it.
Our base of operations occupied the first floor—easily accessible, almost inviting. The treasury? Hidden far below, buried deep in the dungeon's bowels.
Raiders would breach our entrance effortlessly and confidently. Then reality would sink in—skin-deep, soul-deep, screaming-deep.
To reach the treasury, they'd have to descend. Down through level after level. Down through dozens of our most powerful Virus NPCs—Lickers and Tyrants, Hunters and Regenerators, Las Plagas parasites and Molded monstrosities. Every floor a fresh hell. Every corridor a new nightmare.
Meanwhile, Umbrella Corporation members would retreat to our bunker on the bottom floor, watching through monitor feeds as invaders were eviscerated. Watching flesh tear. Watching bodies break. Watching confident raiders become screaming prey, hunted through hallways by horrors that wouldn't stop, couldn't die, never tired.
Those days were glorious. Building NPCs. Designing the base. Creating our cathedral of corruption, our monument to mutation.
But completion brings consequences.
Once finished, there was... nothing. No more creation. No more construction. Just maintenance and monotony.
Members began leaving—one by one, then in groups, seeking more active guilds, guilds still engaged in constant conflict. The exodus was slow, then sudden, then total.
Thirty became five.
Five became one.
Now, as YGGDRASIL approached its final shutdown, its ultimate termination, only the founder remained.
Only Lionel Thompson.
Only me.
Alone in my laboratory. Alone with my creations. Alone in the dark, waiting for the end—waiting as a virus waits for its final host, knowing that when the game dies, my resurrection dies with it.
The monsters don't care. They stand in their designated positions, frozen in programmed purpose, waiting for invaders who will never come.
And I sit in the bunker, staring at empty monitors, remembering the screams that once echoed through these halls.
This is how the world ends, I think. Not with a bang, but with a logout.
But something feels different tonight.
Something in the air—digital air, impossible air—feels thick. Pregnant with possibility. Trembling with transformation.
The countdown continues.
The end approaches.
And in the darkness of my laboratory, something seems to be... breathing.