Ch. 010: Cosmic Stakes
[Kik, kik, kik, kik… congratulations! Somehow, you all did it. Against all odds, some of you actually survived. I didn't really believe a single one of you could pull it off, but kikikiki, here you are.]
The voice shifted. The mockery didn't vanish entirely, but something beneath it settled into a register that was almost serious.
[Anyways, my darlings, you've defied expectations and successfully cleared the very first trial round of the tutorial. That means, of course, you'll be receiving some generous rewards. Kik, kik... but don't get too comfortable. From here on out, the trials will only grow more tasking. So gamble wisely.]
The laughter faded. The silence it left behind came heavier than the words themselves—the kind of quiet that presses down on you and makes you aware of your own breathing.
Then, without warning, a shimmering screen unfurled before Dssal's eyes.
[Reward Window]
Reward 1: Common Weapon Selection (Choose one: Sword, Spear, Bow, Dagger)
Reward 2: Beginner's Survival Pack (Rations, Clean Water, Bandages, Firestarter)
Reward 3: Attribute Point Allocation (+5 points to Strength, Agility, Intelligence, or Endurance)
Reward 4: ??? (A mystery reward ranging from nothing… to something greater)
Time Remaining to Choose: 1:29:59
Dssal's throat went dry.
'It's different????'
Something was foul.
This wasn't how it was supposed to go. In the original gameplay, after completing the first tutorial quest, participants were given an entire day to select their reward — not an hour and a half. The options themselves were different too. Originally there had been only three, all shrouded in mystery, their contents invisible until the moment of selection. But here they were, laid bare—inviting, tempting, and by virtue of that transparency, dangerous.
Someone was meddling. Or the butterfly effect had already chewed through more than he'd accounted for.
Dssal grimaced.
'Why? Why is it so different now?'
He had planned to boost his stats without hesitation in the original run; that had always been the mathematically correct call. But now there was a fourth option sitting at the bottom of the list, and his eyes kept drifting back to it no matter how deliberately he tried to look away.
Historically speaking, the choice wasn't complicated.
This round's Star Guide was an advocate of Baxl—thee Fearless Heavenly Gambler, a constellation notorious for his all-or-nothing philosophy. In line with that personality, the fourth option was almost certainly where the real prize was buried. The mystery reward wasn't a trap. It was an invitation, dressed up to look like one.
And hadn't she said it herself? Gamble wisely.
Dssal's pulse quickened as he sat with it for a moment—the weight of the decision, the edge of the unknown.
Seconds flew past, turning into minutes.
He ultimately made his choice.
[You have selected Reward 4.]
"Status Window," he muttered.
The screen shifted instantly.
[Status Window]
Name: Dssal Guengji
Age: 25
Trait: Methodical Spectator (Tier: Abnormal, Proficiency: N/A)
Class: N/A
Title: Feeble Wanderer — [You are trash, worse than a dog]
Authorities: Time Dilatation (Tier: Mythical, Proficiency: Crude I)
Disposition: 1st Level Arcane Bearer
Equipment: N/A
Spells
Eleven Sovereign Insight (Tier: Mythical)
Blink (Tier: Heroic)
Physical Attributes (Average 1st Level Arcane Bearer = 20)
Strength: 11
Agility: 19
Vitality: 5
Endurance: 10
Intelligence: 30
Mystic Attributes
Magic: 7
Luck: ???
Arcana: 13
Aura: ???
However, even after his decision, nothing had changed.
Dssal, fully overwhelmed by the day's events, wasn't in the best of moods.
His body went still. Cold sweat crawled down his back in a slow, deliberate line.
Why was this so?
Had he wasted his only chance? Thrown away the one window he'd had to actually strengthen himself, chasing a gamble that paid out nothing?
For a split second — just one — the composure cracked entirely. A thought surfaced, brief and ugly: even killing himself to escape the consequences flickered through his mind before he could stop it. Of course he dismissed it ultimately. But the fact that it had appeared at all told him exactly how far the panic had gotten.
But luckily for him, it happened.
A black void tore open inside his status window without warning. It swirled like a miniature singularity, edges fraying at the seams, pulling the surrounding light toward it in slow, hungry spirals.
'Is this a black—'
Before he could finish the thought, it swallowed him whole.
---
HOW TO USE A WORLD'S APOCALYPSE
Meanwhile.
In a meticulously decorative room, Alice Seorin paced.
Back and forth. Back and forth. Her breathing was uneven, and cold sweat ran freely down her face despite the steady hum of the air conditioning.
'Shit. He's really gone.'
Alice's stomach turned over. Ninety-nine times before, she had tried everything—coaxing, threatening, persuading, even kidnapping—to push Dssal toward a better ending. She had spoon-fed him strategies, cheats, insider knowledge, and the safest routes through the game's worst moments. And still, no matter what she did, he always died. Something always went wrong that she hadn't planned for. Some unknown variable tore everything apart at the seams.
And this time she wouldn't even be able to say a word to him.
Was he simply destined for it?
.
Alice felt her knees weaken beneath her. She locked them out of habit and pressed on.
She also understood why it had come to this.
'It's my fault, shit!'
Each regression returned her memories to her later than the last. During her first, she'd regained them a full year before Dssal was summoned. By the ninety-ninth, she had them back only hours beforehand. And this time, her hundredth regression had given her memories back a single minute before his summoning. One minute. Far too late to do anything at all.
If she regressed again — when she died again — there was no guarantee the book would find her any sooner. It might find her later. It might not find her at all until days after Dssal had already entered the game, leaving her standing on the outside of everything, useless.
She glanced down at her phone.
The only way forward was to hope something still existed in this world that qualified as a miracle.
Seconds ago, Dssal's contact had been saved in it—she'd checked. Now the entry was gone. Erased completely, like every other trace of his existence on the planet. According to cosmic law, once a chosen one entered the game, they vanished from the world entirely. No record. No presence. As though they had never been.
That makes sense.
Her trembling hands found the thick black book on the table beside her.
Her User's Manual.
She opened it, barely holding herself together, and flipped to the center. There, pressed flat between the pages, was a single iron key—cold to the touch, heavier than it looked.
"I can't keep doing this." Her voice came out quieter than she intended. "There's no other choice. I have to contact the Eighth God."
She picked it up.
Originally—in both the game's internal cosmology and the real cosmos beyond it—eight High Gods reigned supreme. But they were not unified. On one side stood the Seven High Gods, the Zodiacs, united by mutual convenience and a shared appetite for control. On the other, alone, stood the eighth.
Chaos versus Order.
By all rights, the numbers should have favored the Seven.
But they didn't. Order still reigned.
The Eighth's strength was singular: he alone was equal to all Seven combined — every lesser god and Zodiac included. His power was not a matter of debate.
The only fault was his faction had been worn down.
Trickery. Politics. The slow erosion of influence.
Ruling with benevolence and without violence sounds noble. But in practice, it allowed his dominions to be stripped from him one by one without triggering the mutual destruction that open war would have brought. And so they were—galactic holding after holding, surrendering not in battle but in quiet negotiations where the rules had been written by his opponents.
Until only one world remained under his protection: Earth.
A fragile, improbable planet. His final foothold, preserved by an unspoken agreement among the gods: if Earth fell, the Eighth would be forced to join the Seven. And the Seven, for all their scheming, had not yet found it beneficial to push that outcome to its conclusion. So the war simmered on in silence, fought in proxies, probabilities, and games within games.
Alice stared at the key. Took a deep breath and then twisted it into the lock embedded in the final page of her black book.
The pact. The regressions. The apocalypse. Everything hinged on this.
Churn.
The lock clicked open. Strange golden symbols rippled across the page, glowing faintly before warping into shapes that had no analogue in any human language.
She frowned.
Without warning, something burst into her room, a black void—eerily similar to the one that had opened inside Dssal's status window—formed above the book, hovering in the still air of the pink room.
'Huh? This isn't how we communicated before.'
Alice cautiously steadied herself. Something was already different. She opened her mouth to speak—
The void shuddered violently.
And then, without warning, it spat someone out.
A battered figure hit the soft pink carpet hard and didn't immediately move.
Alice stared.
She rubbed her eyes. Looked again. The figure was real—she could hear him breathing, ragged and wet; could see the state of his clothes, the dried blood, and the way his hands shook even now against the floor. Even his stench.
"Dssal…?!"
However, before she could process what she was looking at, he proved conclusively that it was him.
'Pink hair. Arrogant blue eyes.'
Dssal, bloodshot, now analyzed her for a second, veins crawling across the whites. And somehow, inexplicably, he lunged at her before he'd fully gotten to his feet.
"BITCHHH!"
Alice tried to dodge—with a regressor's violence she was capable in a fight, more than capable—but Dssal was faster than any human should have been. The world folded for a fraction of a second.
//Blink//
In seemingly the next instant he was directly in front of her, close enough that his ragged breath hit her face. His hands—shaking violently—clamped onto her shoulders.
"You're real." The words came out cracked, split somewhere between disbelief and something that had moved past madness and come out the other side. "You're not some hallucination."
Then the calculation caught up to him. She was real; he was here, which meant—
Dssal bent backward at the waist, face tipping toward the ceiling, and screamed.
"I AM BACK! I MADE IT BACK ALIVE!!!"
'He's insane!!'
Alice flinched hard. She had seen Dssal across dozens of lifetimes. She had watched him die more ways than she could catalogue without going numb. But she had never seen him like this—untethered, raw, laughing at the ceiling of her bedroom like something had finally snapped loose inside him.
"Dssal, wait, listen—"
"LISTEN? SURE, I AM LISTENING!" He shook her hard enough that her head snapped back. "Ho ho, bitch, I'll listen to you forever if you'd like keke; surely you wouldn't understand! To even know what it feels like?!" The laugh that came out of him didn't sound human. "Of course, of course you don't. It's just a sick man's rambling. You've always been ahead, haven't you? Always wood-picking, eh? I know I smell too, and considering I'm uncharacteristically waking up back in your room of all places, you had something to do with me being sent into Pantheon. Didn't you."
It wasn't a question.
Alice bit down on her lip.
'Apart from the stench.'
He was wrong. More often than not, he was right. He had no idea about the regressions—about the hundred lifetimes she'd spent trying to keep him alive—but he'd correctly identified that her fingerprints were on his fate. In some shape or form, they always were.
'It no his psychic is very dangerous.'
If Dssal assumed too much too soon, without context, he might even reject her entirely. No she didn't have time to lose him now — not on regression one hundred.
"You may be right but I don't have time to explain everything," she said, forcing her voice steady. "See here.... I've been trying to keep you safe. If you'll just calm down—"
He stared at her.
"Calm down, oh?" He repeated it like he was tasting the words and finding them poisonous. "Just calm down. No hell is this a game?" His body twitched, an involuntary thing, like Pantheon's atmosphere was still gnawing at him from the inside. He staggered back half a step, one hand pressing against his chest. "No wait. Something's wrong."
Alice's heart dropped.
'Is he corrupted?'
She could see it too.
Something was off about the way he was standing, the way his breath kept catching. He shouldn't have been spat out here at all. The void was meant to connect her to the Eighth God. So where was the Eighth? What had happened on the other side of that void?
Then the status window reappeared — but wrong. Not just in Dssal's vision. It materialised in the open air between them, visible to both, its symbols overlapping and glitching, the display stuttering like something that had been forced through a connection it wasn't designed for.
[Reward granted]
[One hour of chance to obtain invaluable information — a bonus reward courtesy of the Eighth God]
HOW TO USE A WORLD'S APOCALYPSE
(END OF CHAPTER TEN)