Prologue — "This World Is a Buggy Mess"
The first thing I saw was a crack.
Not in the ceiling. Not in the wall.
In the sky.
A jagged, bleeding fracture cutting across a sky that was far too blue—too vivid, too fake. Like someone had taken high-definition textures from a video game and slapped them onto reality.
[SYSTEM ERROR DETECTED]
[Tutorial Dungeon Instability: Event Timeline Divergence Detected]
[Initializing Synchronization—]
...Yeah. I've seen this before.
And that was the problem.
This world isn't real.
Or at least, not supposed to be.
---
I was lying on cold stone. Blood trickled from my temple. My left leg was numb, and something smelled like rotting meat.
For a moment, I thought I was dreaming. Delirious, maybe. Fevered.
But then the pain came. White-hot and sharp, twisting through my ribs like a rusty knife.
And right on cue, a familiar transparent screen popped into my field of view.
> [Status Window: Unknown Entity (Jin Roderick)]
Class: —
Level: 1
Title: "Cowardly Third Son of House Roderick"
Skills: None
Attributes: Below Average
Fate: Irrelevant
—This character is scheduled to die in 12 minutes.
…
Oh.
This wasn't just familiar.
This was exactly how the prologue of that goddamned game started.
---
You ever read a story where someone gets hit by Truck-kun and wakes up in a fantasy world?
Yeah, I used to laugh at those.
But me? I didn't even get a truck. Just a black screen and a loading bar.
Now I'm inside Dungeons & Doomsday, the hardcore permadeath dungeon crawler that broke a hundred keyboards and made grown men cry. A game famous for two things:
1. Its insanely detailed world and broken system logic.
2. The fact that no one could ever finish it.
Because no matter what you did, the world always ended.
---
And now I'm in the body of Jin Roderick.
The trash son of a declining noble house.
No skills. No support. No future.
In the original game, he died in the first dungeon. Offscreen. Pathetic.
But I'm not Jin.
I'm me.
And I've played this game.
I know the rules. The events. The twists. The broken mechanics.
And unlike anyone else in this world, I can see everything.
Not just people's names or stats.
Their full status windows.
Hidden skills. Dungeon scripts.
Even the variables running underneath the world.
...Which, by the way, are full of bugs.
---
So yeah. I'm not here to be a hero. I don't care about honor, or destiny, or becoming the strongest.
I just want to live.
Eat hot food. Sleep in a real bed. Maybe get drunk once in a while.
And if I can quietly fix this broken world and avoid its impending destruction while I'm at it?
Then sure. Why not.
But I'm not doing it for anyone else.
This time, I live on my terms.
---
[Synchronization Complete]
[Timeline Shift Confirmed]
[You are now the sole administrator of Branch Timeline 07-B]
I stared at the new message on my screen.
"...Administrator, huh?"
With a sigh, I sat up, wincing as my ribs protested.
A few meters away, something moved in the shadows of the dungeon.
A groan. Then footsteps.
Right. The scripted mini-boss. The one that was supposed to kill me.
I pushed myself to my feet.
"...Twelve minutes, huh?"
I reached into the rotting pack beside me and pulled out a rusted dagger with 5 durability points left.
A trash item for a trash noble.
But my eyes flicked to the error line beneath the monster's spawn code.
And I grinned.
"Let's break this game."