*"It was just supposed to be a game..."*
In the not-so-distant future, the world was slowly collapsing. Not with the roar of an apocalypse, but in the stifling silence of screens and digital debt. People lived, worked, and died in front of their interfaces, connected to everything but themselves.
Then came the revolution: total immersion.
Nexus pods finally allowed humans to immerse themselves body and soul in worlds generated by artificial intelligence. No more controllers, no more screens—we literally lived in the game. Pain, pleasure, fear, euphoria, everything was real. Or at least, the brain believed it was.
Among all these new worlds, one stood out: Erasthia.
A sprawling universe divided into ten distinct biomes, where ancient magic and advanced technology coexisted, where entire civilizations were born and died according to the players' choices. Each race, each class, each power opened up infinite possibilities. Or led to madness.
But that day, something broke.
The Orias—the security system that maintained the separation between virtual and real—failed. A bug? A hack? A higher will? No one ever really knew.
The link corrupted. The virtual world overflowed.
The first witnesses spoke of impossible creatures in the streets of Tokyo. Of entire areas transforming according to the laws of Erasthia. Of game artifacts materializing in reality.
The MMO had become the world. And the world had become the MMO.
Two young people, born on opposite sides of the globe, would find themselves at the heart of this upheaval. Arzane, a cunning Beninese who had sacrificed everything to enter Genesis. Daiki, a Korean-Japanese martial arts master who sought in the virtual world what reality denied him.
They didn't know it yet, but they had just become pawns in a game that exceeded their wildest dreams. A dimensional war. A clash of realities. A countdown to the total collapse of everything they had known.
In Genesis, dying in the game meant dying in reality. But living in the game... what exactly did that mean?
They would soon find out.