Chapter 1 – Waking Up Entirely Wrong

Nellie woke up to bright lights dancing in her eyes like a million fireflies. She stared at the moving shapes aimlessly, her eyelids only parted to slits. She couldn’t feel the rest of her body.

That made sense. She was supposed to be in a coma.

“Is she breathing?! I think I saw—quick, where is the—” A panicked voice came from her left. The sentence fizzled out in a word that she didn’t recognize.

“Add eight drops, and not one more! It’s not going to work any faster!” A second voice yelled, it was softer despite the underlying panic.

Looking at the blurred world beyond the curtain of fireflies, she saw two dark shadows move in the background.

They should’ve knocked me out by now. I wonder what’s taking so long, yelling about drops. Did they screw up the dosage of something important?!

There was no way to voice her concern. Her mouth wasn’t working at all. Panicking while she was trapped in her body wasn’t going to help.

She had agreed to this already. This was part of the process.

Nellie Strum had led a predictable life from a young age. She did everything she was supposed to do, and she was naturally good enough at them, though never spectacular. Fair to say she didn’t have a great time growing up, but she always had a direction.

She knew the answer to the question of ‘who do you want to be when you grow up?’ the day she played her first video game. It’s how she later became a lead developer at Amberlith, the company that made the MMORPG that she spent most of her childhood with.

At twenty-two years old, she was hired just in time to be part of the founding team of the latest Amberlith project called Vainfall, a cutting-edge VRMMO.

She was more than satisfied with her life for the next eight years, hammering on a keyboard and getting paid an incredible amount of money for it.

Her predictable life crashed to the ground shortly after her thirtieth birthday when she went to the hospital for a nosebleed. Two days later, she received a detailed report on how it was going to end.

Nellie never slowed down enough to figure out what she felt about it. She was rich, but money could only free time one already had, not buy time one didn’t. She was scared. Much like a child who got badly wounded, she wanted to pretend it wasn’t there.

An opportunity presented itself a few months after her diagnosis. Verse Research, a subsidiary of Amberlith, was seeking volunteers for their latest brain interface device called the Verse Gear.

She leapt at it, but the application process itself turned into a different nightmare. Her decision surprised everyone around her. She ended up having hundreds of conversations while signing hundreds of papers. It was a rude shock to someone who spoke less than twenty words on an average day, most of them being ‘thank yous’ to the food delivery guys.

She was almost wishing for a lethal injection instead of the wondrous brain interface at the end of it.

Eventually, everything was said and done. She was going to be the first human to taste humanity’s future.

Verse Research estimated an eighty-nine percent chance of surviving the surgery. If the remaining eleven percent didn’t get in the way, this was supposed to make the last few months of her life far better than the first thirty years.

She heard voices again.

“Eight drops like you said! It’s all mixed in there. Open her mouth, my hands are full!” the rough voice spoke again. She heard it much clearer now; it was an older man with a wheezy timbre to his voice.

“There, can you see?” the soft female voice asked. Nellie still had no sense of touch, but her head tilted back, and the blurred shapes beyond the fireflies changed. The dark background suddenly turned white.

Putting something in my mouth? Did something go wrong after all?

Whatever they did, she couldn’t feel it at all. They may as well have shoved a boot down her throat, and she wouldn’t have seen it. The only thing that she did feel was something slithering down her neck, the vague pressure of it expanding her from within, pressing her flesh against the bones.

Her throat itched, and she wanted to cough it out. Frustratingly, her body still refused to do what her brain desperately wanted to do.

Two seconds later, she felt the strongest surge of sensations since this coma fiasco began. The slithering thing paused right underneath her sternum and exploded.

The spreading heat felt like a boiling hot shot of whiskey. It rippled across her in pulses up and down her body until the fireflies in her eyes combined to white, and all sounds faded to silence.

She had no idea how long it lasted, but it ended just as abruptly as it began. The heat disappeared from her as if it had never been there.

All her senses returned at once.

The world around her resolved from blurred blobs. Nellie raised herself upright, blinking confusedly at everything around her. She could feel the wet ground beneath her.

If she was supposed to be in surgery, they were doing it to her in a theme park. There was no room; there were no surgeons or nurses.

She was in a cave with streams of water gushing all around her. It made no sense. She kept staring blankly at herself as water droplets peppered her from a nearby splash.

“What the?” she mumbled, still dazed. “What is this—euh—pfffooo!”

She stopped speaking when she realized her voice sounded softer and higher-pitched. She blew air out of her mouth as if it could get rid of the strange new voice blabbering her thoughts out loud.

There was something else that was different. She was a whole other color. Her skin was a perfect honey tan, which she knew she was too pale and pink to ever get.

She was disoriented, but she wasn’t stupid. All possible scenarios had already flashed through her mind, and she quickly had the most likely explanation for this outcome.

Am I already inside the Verse? What the hell is happening?!

This wasn’t how she was supposed to enter Vainfall.

Verse Research scanned her from head to toe, gathering terabytes worth of photogrammetric data to make a character exactly like her.

The days that she spent building the character with a design team were the most fun that she had during this whole process. It was addictive even when she knew how everything worked.

She got to add the height that she was never born with, the lean body she never went to the gym for, breasts of adequate size that she could proudly display, healthy, long, straight hair that she never would’ve had the time to comb.

Waking up like this now meant all that effort had been wasted.

This was a whole other girl from head to toe.

[Character]

She used a Verse command that she practiced during the training week. The seamless thought-trigger interaction flow of this brain interface was far different from what she was used to.

The character screen was different from the VRMMO build, which would normally show an animated character preview to the left of the screen.

It had been removed for some reason.

Character: Darya Altazark
Role: Archmage Ascendant I
Level: 75
EXP: 1,295,565 (1%)

HP: 92
MAX HP: 2,526
MP: 368
MAX MP: 7,265
SP: 12
MAX SP: 452

STR: 467
DEX: 588
CON: 398
RES: 1,342

“That’s not what I wanted at all!” she muttered dismally, wanting to throw a tantrum despite being thirty years old.

The stat screen had given her a good overview of this character. Nellie wasn’t impressed. It was hard to be impressed with the stats that she worked on for eight years.

Freshly leveled archmage. Anyone could get this far if they played ten hours a day for three months.

It wasn’t about the magnitude of numbers. Her character was supposed to be something else entirely. Vainfall was supposed to be her last vacation, a place for her to spend her days exploring the world that she built for eight years. She had a non-combat build with unlimited Runes to pay for things, as well as elevated instant travel privileges.

An arch-anything character was the opposite of the tourist that she was supposed to be.

This was the sort of character that she playtested with other developers. She used to look forward to those sessions before they became another part of the job. Ironically, despite working on an ‘MMO,’ Nellie had never really liked playing any game with other people.

The Vainfall player account that she was most attached to was the one she used with a developer console at home. It had an endgame build with a level 4,500-something Archdemon. She had gotten that far on her own to test the solo run player experience. For that character, this Darya Altazark would be a slightly spicy mob enemy.

She was curious to know something else. She issued the thought command to bring up that screen.

[Axis Mastery]

Lomiez (Cohesion): 95,634 EXP
Aenthune (Matter): 152,352 EXP
Unezilo (Energy): 818,049 EXP
Runthur (Density): 161,091 EXP
Rilomar (Movement): 68,439 EXP

This told her everything that she needed to know about Darya Altazark’s mastery over the magic system.

There were five physical axes to manipulate reality from. Spells were crafted by allocating Mana along these five axes for various effects and dynamics. Using such spells to deal damage successfully leveled up the axes used. This made the character good at the axes they used most in turn, increasing their mana efficiency for those spells.

From this type of axis mastery, Darya was an Unezilo mage because she had used energy spells more than others. It was one of the most spectacular progression paths that many players would’ve chosen by default.

Closing out of the Character screen, she tried other commands. Clearly, something had gone wrong with her character. She had been put in someone’s play testing account.

She had full control over her Verse interface. It was time to get out of this session. This first run had been disappointing, but she could start with her account without wasting even more time.

[Quit]

Nothing happened.

A shiver rippled through her spine. She hadn’t even thought about what to do if such a fundamental Verse command didn’t work.

[Vainfall: Terminate]

This command did something, but it wasn’t doing what she expected. It was the force quit option that usually froze the whole game, turning it gray for a moment before returning to the Verse home screen.

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This time, it froze the world except her. Nothing really changed. She could still move, touch surfaces, and feel things.

That’s weird. Why can I still move?

The gray world dissipated a second or two later, everything unfreezing at once.

“Oh no…” she muttered, suddenly starting to pay attention to her surroundings now that both methods of getting the hell out of here were out of question.

The first thing that she noticed was how real everything looked.

It was too real.

Verse was supposed to be the cutting edge of simulation research, but the level of fidelity she was experiencing went far beyond what she expected.

She tested it by touching the water droplets on her chest.

Everything was there. The wetness of surfaces, the fluid dynamics of combining droplets, the surface tension, and the droplets getting heavier and sliding down.

She knew what she had made with her own hands for eight years. There was nothing like this in the VRMMO build.

She didn’t know any method that could do this properly in real time. Impressive demos and research papers existed, but none of them were good enough for a game meant to be played by millions. Verse was just a layer. The game still had to run on consumer hardware at perhaps an expensive, but still reasonable price.

And that was just water.

She was seeing a lot more here that was even more impossible than a physically accurate fluid simulation. The particles, the ground texture, and the amount of detail on any surface. Everything put together, this was flat-out impossible. Sure, she wasn’t shown how exactly the proprietary Verse Gear was working under the hood, but it couldn’t be occult magic.

Is it somehow tricking my brain into thinking things are more detailed than they really are?

That was possible, but she had to know what this build version was before thinking any more in that direction. She issued the command.

[Vainfall: Build Version]