Cold. Putrid. A suffocating, bone-deep dampness. That was the first thing Ethan Chu felt when he forced his eyes open.
Murky, ice-cold water had already risen past his ankles. Unlike the others, who were already spiraling into hysterics, Ethan didn't scream. He held his breath, his eyes darting across the room in a rapid-fire scan.
He was standing in a massive, shadowed rotunda. Pale flashes of lightning strobed across the sky, illuminating the skeletal remains of a skyscraper. Moss crawled over the marble walls like a slow-motion infection. The reinforced glass curtain walls groaned under the assault of a gale-force storm, and floodwater hissed through the door gaps in a steady, relentless flow.
The water was a graveyard of office debris: shredded ID badges, soaked takeout boxes, and a few bloated, upturned rats. Every slap of the tide against the marble pillars echoed through the hollow hall—not like water, but like the wet, rhythmic gulping of some gargantuan beast.
Ethan realized the building's drainage had been sealed from the outside. This wasn't a natural disaster. It was a closed-loop death trap, a market being cornered.
He looked down at his leather shoes, now waterlogged and pale. He'd worn them to meet a debt collector, a pathetic attempt to maintain his last shred of dignity. In this hellhole, dignity was a devalued currency. He could feel the body heat draining from the people around him; fear was spreading through the water like a market contagion. He knew this scent well—the nauseating metallic tang in the air when a bubble bursts and the retail suckers realize their life savings have vanished.
He remembered that afternoon vividly: the moment the sea of green numbers—the color of profit in his world—suddenly plummeted into a bloody red. He had fallen from the penthouse to the gutter in a single session. His "brothers" vanished; the debt collectors' calls became a death knell ringing incessantly in his pocket.
In that moment, he had seen through the world's skin. The elites, the ones holding the levers of capital, didn't just earn money—they harvested it by manufacturing panic. And now, this "System" was simply taking that hidden harvest and making it literal, visceral, and raw.
Ethan stopped believing in promises. He only believed in the math of the game. To him, the wailing survivors weren't people; they were the same "retail sheep" he used to be—victims waiting for the Market Maker to trigger a Forced Liquidation.
"Where... where are we? Help!"
"My phone has no signal! What the hell is going on?!"
Thirty-odd people were scattered across the hall, waking up to a nightmare. Screams and the frantic splashing of feet filled the air.
Ethan ignored the noise. He retreated into the shadows, pressing his index and middle fingers against his carotid artery. Thump. Thump. Sixty-five beats per minute. Perfectly stable.
Before being dragged into The Sandbox, Ethan wasn't some ivy-league elite. He was a professional player who had clawed his way out of the meat grinder. He had been the "leek" at the bottom of the food chain, crushed by institutions until his family was gone and his debts were a mountain.
At his lowest point, he didn't quit. He holed up in a cramped rental, ignored the doctored financial reports, and began studying the only thing that mattered: human nature. He discovered that whether it's market volatility or tribal warfare, the underlying logic is universal—it's all about survival, resources, and fear.
He built a model designed to exploit "irrational fear." For years, he acted like a lone wolf, sniping the weaknesses of major conglomerates and dragging high-and-mighty Market Makers into the dirt. But because he broke the "gentleman's rules" of the circle, the big capital players colluded to blackball him, leaving him a retail trader buried under a mountain of debt.
To Ethan, nothing was sacred. There were only cold chips and the House that ran the game.
Suddenly, crimson electricity crackled in the air. Lines of text, looking like thick, dark-red gore, congealed in mid-air. A mechanical voice boomed through the hall:
> [Welcome to the "Infinite Threshold."]
> [Current Scenario: The Deluged Skyscraper.]
> [Rule 1: All interns must reach the 100th-floor CEO's office before dawn to clock in. Latecomers will be erased.]
> [Rule 2: Maintain professional silence. Loud disturbances are strictly prohibited. Violators will be erased.]
>
"What kind of 'clock-in' bullshit is this?! I'm the Chairman of East Sea Industries! Let me out!"
A middle-aged man in a bespoke suit—a man used to barking orders—snapped. He roared hysterically, charging through the knee-deep water to hammer on the locked glass doors.
"Shut up..." someone tried to hiss, but it was too late.
The moment the man struck the glass, Ethan's pupils contracted. He felt a sudden, frigid downdraft.
Without warning, a massive silhouette dropped from the ceiling's gloom. It stood over seven feet tall, its limbs elongated and spindly, draped in a soaking wet black suit. It had no face—where features should have been, there was only a smooth, pale expanse of skin.
Squelch.
The sound was sickening. The Faceless Suit descended, dragging the man into the shadows. Following a series of muffled, crushing impacts, the Chairman was gone—pulled into a swirling ripple of dark red water like a piece of paper sucked into a shredder. A pungent, metallic scent exploded in the hall, choking the air.
The monster stirred the water for a moment, let out a satisfied low chortle, and scuttled back into the darkness like a giant spider.
"AAAAH!!" After three seconds of paralyzed silence, the crowd erupted into even more frantic shrieks.
Ethan watched the scene with cold, even breaths. To him, the monster wasn't an invincible god; it was a machine driven by a rigid logic gate.
He quickly pulled up his survival matrix in his mind—the Sancai Nine-Palaces Matrix:
* Heaven (The Rules): We have to climb. We have to be quiet. This means the monsters are sound-triggered and likely follow a fixed "patrol route."
* Earth (The Environment): The water is rising; the ground floor is a sinking fund. Elevators are dead; we need the stairs.
* People (The Behaviors): These thirty people are liabilities to the "elites," but to Ethan, they were fellow "retail" survivors. They were the ones who could help him offset risk and scout the path ahead.
Ethan knew the most dangerous thing in this building wasn't the monster. It was what happens when resources get tight and the humans start harvesting each other.
"Everyone, don't panic! Listen to me!" A man in gold-rimmed glasses with slicked-back hair stepped forward, trying to establish authority in the chaos.
Ethan stood in the corner and let out a cold, silent smirk. The first round of "who harvests whom" had officially begun.
Would you like me to translate the next chapter, or should we refine Ethan's "Data Brute" terminology for the next scene?