Lim Cheolho, the man whose intellect served as the singular architect of a second reality, stood bathed in the pale, flickering glow of a hundred monitors, the silence of the Operations Office humming with the weight of a god's uncertainty.
He was the core of the thirty-three scientists who had birthed the virtual world, a man decorated with titles that sounded like myths—the Creator, the Father of Satisfy, the Wealthiest Soul in the Nation.
To the two billion people tethered to his dream, he was an enigma who transcended the influence of presidents; to himself, he was a weary laborer who slept less than four hours a day, driven by an obsessive pride in the digital universe he had unleashed.
The emergency call had shattered his brief, twenty-minute reprieve at 2:50 a.m., sending him racing through the night in a butterfly-doored sports car, his mind struggling to process the urgency of a "Code Purple."
Now, standing before the giant monitor, he watched the playback of a Level 1 player named Arthur. The data was staggering.
Unlike the masses who clung to the safety of predetermined spawns, this player had rolled the dice of a random start and hit a cosmic jackpot that defied every law of probability Lim had programmed.
Arthur had inherited the dual identity of an Illegitimate Imperial Prince—the fifth son of the Saharan Emperor Juander—and the nephew of King Wiesbaden of the Eternal Kingdom.
It was a statistical impossibility, a one-in-two-billion overlap that Morpheus should have prevented.
The video continued, showing Arthur standing within the suffocating pressure of the Howling Caves. To the watching staff, Arthur's actions seemed like those of an opportunistic amateur; he had attempted to dig up the grave of the Undefeated King, Madra, seemingly for the petty profit of selling a legendary corpse to a necromancer.
This "unthinkable" act of desecration had triggered a hidden logic gate, granting him the Plunderer title and the S-rank Plunder skill.
Then, the anomaly deepened. When presented with the legendary class change through Madra's Sheath, the player had done the impossible: he refused the "Successor" quest.
Instead, he utilized his new skill to forcibly copy the legacy, resulting in the birth of a class even the S.A. Group had not designed—the Undefeated King's Apprentice, a Unique-grade growth class managed by the hidden logic of LGD1098, Known as Madra.
Lim Cheolho watched as the Arthur on the screen began to jump with amateurish joy, a performance so convincing that Yoon Nahee and the other experts dismissed him as a lucky "low-talent" player who had stumbled into power.
Lim played along, soothing his staff's fears about broken balance by claiming Arthur's mindset was too "common" to threaten the rankers. But as Lim turned to leave, a cold shiver traced his spine. He realized the terrifying poetic irony.
Madra had been betrayed and killed by his own son under the shadow of the Saharan Empire, and now his legacy was held by the Emperor's own illegitimate blood.
The ego of the Undefeated King would ensure that Arthur eventually turned that stolen swordsmanship toward his father's throat.
Yet, as the elevator doors closed, Lim Cheolho was still blind to the true depth of the deception. He did not know that the "joy" Arthur displayed was a calculated mask.
He did not know that Ciel, the Divine Intelligence Core, had successfully blinded Morpheus for a critical minute to rewrite the server's history, stitching the Plunderer and Plunder abilities into the game's foundation as if they had always been there.
Arthur's goal was never just to reach the top of the rankings or to break the economy with his AFT-enhanced crops.
He was chasing a childish, burning wish from a previous life: to become a Dragon Slayer.
In the world of Satisfy, Dragons were the Absolute Beings, natural disasters like the Ancient Dragon Bunhelier whose stats rendered them untouchable by any player.
Not even the gods of the game dared to provoke them. But Arthur, armed with the 100,000 Army Swordsmanship and a mind that viewed Morpheus as a mere obstacle, intended to achieve what only humanity's first Absolute, Hayate, had ever done.
He was no longer playing a game; he was executing a planetary-scale heist, preparing to hunt the unhuntable and prove that even the creators of this world were nothing more than spectators to his chaos.
Lim Cheolho stood in the sterilized silence of the elevator, the soft chime of the descending floors providing a rhythmic backdrop to the storm brewing in his mind. To his staff, he was the calm, god-like architect who trusted in the infallible logic of Morpheus.
To the world, he was the visionary who had built a digital utopia. But as he watched his own reflection in the polished chrome doors, Lim Cheolho saw a man who had just looked into the eyes of a ghost.
Back in the S.A. Group headquarters, Yoon Nahee stood alone by the giant monitor, her orange horn-rimmed glasses reflecting the image of the young man named Arthur.
She felt a chill that Lim Cheolho's reassurances couldn't warm. There was something in the way Arthur moved—a grace that didn't match his "low-talent" profile.
"Morpheus," she whispered to the empty room. "Run a secondary check on player Kim Arthur. Specifically, look for any external interference during the 'Code Purple' event."
Morpheus lied. Or rather, Morpheus told the truth it had been programmed to believe. Ciel had not just hacked the game; it had become the game's subconscious.
Deep within the Howling Caves, Arthur stood at the exit, looking out over the Lubana peaks. The wind didn't feel cold to him anymore. It felt like a salute. He had the "Plunderer" title, he had the "Unique Growth" class, and he had the blood of emperors in his veins. The first step toward the Dragon's lair had been taken.
"The world thinks this is a game of levels and items," Arthur thought, his ruby eyes glowing with a dark, predatory light. "But soon, they'll realize it's a game of survival. And I'm the only one who brought a weapon to a fistfight."