(Note: This is just a prologue chapter — you may skip it if you wish, but I highly recommend reading it first before starting the main novel.)
It began not with a bang, but with a chime.
A sound, clear and resonant as a crystal bell, echoed not through the air, but inside the skull of every man, woman, and child on Earth. In the middle of a stock trade, a surgeon's incision, a first kiss, a final breath—the entire human race paused as one, a collective, unconscious intake of breath.
Then, the blue screens appeared.
They were translucent, hovering just at the edge of vision, yet as undeniable as gravity. Words formed in every native language, simple and devastating.
[System Initialization Complete.]
[Welcome to The Crucible of Ascension.]
[Integrating Card-Based Reality... Now.]
Chaos, as a universal constant, is often overrated. The true collapse of civilization wasn't in the screaming or the panic, though there was plenty. It was in the quiet, fundamental breaking of things.
A bus driver in Seoul, his eyes wide with terror and a floating screen, swerved into a crowded sidewalk.
A pilot over the Pacific saw the same screen and forgot the yoke,for just a second. A second was enough.
The global financial network,that delicate, digital house of cards, simply froze, then evaporated. The concept of "money" became as relevant as yesterday's weather.
This was the First Hour.
Then came the Second Hour.
The shimmering tears in the fabric of reality—what people would later call "Gates"—blinked into existence over city squares, in schoolyards, deep in forest reserves. From them emerged things from a collective nightmare. Creatures of chitin and crystal, of shadow and searing light. They did not attack with strategy or malice, but with the simple, terrifying purpose of a natural disaster.
And humanity, for the first time, fought back with more than just bullets and bravery.
A office worker, cowering behind her desk, watched a wolf-like beast of living rock stalk towards her. Desperate, she swiped at the blue screen in front of her, selecting a card at random. A gauntlet of shimmering ice materialized around her fist. One punch froze the monster solid.
A firefighter in New York, surrounded by flames and something far worse, drew a card and found a sword of pure sunlight in his grip.
They were the first. The Awakened. The Hunters.
They were the lucky ones.
For every person who drew a [Fireball] or a [Knight's Aegis], a dozen drew [Keen Sight] or [Minor Tool Proficiency]. Useful, but not against a horde of fanged horrors. And for a tragic, statistically significant few, the draw was even more cruel. The System, in its impersonal logic, offered no take-backs. A man who drew [Water Breathing] while drowning in a flooded subway learned this too late. A woman who drew [Pyretic Body] while trapped in a burning building suffered a fate no one could envy.
The world didn't end that day. It was… revised. Edited by a careless, god-like hand.
In the weeks that followed, new structures formed. Guilds of Hunters, both noble and predatory, rose to claim territory and dungeons. Governments scrambled to form Hunter Bureaus, trying to impose old-world order onto a new-world reality. Safe zones were established, powered by mysterious Cores looted from the dungeons. The powerless, the "Civilians," clung to these enclaves, their lives dependent on the strength and mercy of the Awakened.
The old world, with its worries about rent, promotions, and what to make for dinner, became a faded dream. The new world had a single, overriding concern, a question etched into every heart:
What Card did you draw?
And on a pale, sterile bed in a Seoul hospital, a young man named Kim Dae-Hyun was asking a different, more immediate question. A question that had haunted him long before the blue screens and the monsters.
He coughed, a raw, tearing sound that echoed in the quiet room, and looked at the chart in his doctor's hand.
"How long?" Dae-Hyun asked, his voice raspy.
The doctor's face was a mask of professional sympathy. "With aggressive treatment, perhaps six months. I'm sorry."
Outside the hospital window, a distant explosion lit up the twilight, followed by the faint, unmistakable roar of something that had never evolved on Earth. The city's anti-dungeon sirens began to wail.
Dae-Hyun didn't flinch. He just stared at his own trembling hands, the ones that could barely hold a glass of water anymore.
The apocalypse was here. And for Kim Dae-Hyun, it was nothing more than a noisy distraction.
He was already living in a world that was ending. His own.