The clock on Akira Tanaka's monitor read 23:59:47 when the servers of YGGDRASIL began their final shutdown sequence. Twenty-three years old, a night-shift convenience-store clerk by day and a max-level necromancer by night, Akira had spent the last twelve years inside the game's sprawling virtual world. His avatar, Nyx Voss, Guildmaster of the ossuary-themed guild Ebon Ledger, stood alone atop the floating mausoleum that served as their headquarters: a cathedral of black marble and bone, suspended in the poisoned skies of Helheim.
The guild chat was silent. All 41 members had logged off hours ago, leaving voice messages of farewell. Akira played them one by one—tears he refused to acknowledge stinging his eyes—as Nyx Voss surveyed the horizon. Skeletal dragons circled the spires; wraiths drifted between tombstones that floated like islands in the void. This was his empire, built spell by spell, raid by raid, betrayal by betrayal.
00:00:00.
The countdown hit zero. A system message in crimson kanji flared across his vision:
"Thank you for playing YGGDRASIL. The service will now terminate."
Akira expected the usual fade-to-black, the polite disconnection. Instead, the world inhaled. The mausoleum shuddered. Gravity inverted. The bone floor beneath Nyx's feet cracked like porcelain, and a pressure—real, physical—crushed his ribs. His HUD flickered, then burned. Every icon, every status bar, seared itself into his retinas as if branded there.
He tried to scream. No sound came.
Darkness swallowed him.
He awoke to the scent of wet stone and formaldehyde.
Akira's first coherent thought was that he was late for his shift. His second was that his body felt wrong—too light, too hollow. He sat up. Or rather, something sat up for him. Joints clicked like ivory dice. When he looked down, he saw not flesh but polished bone: a skeletal hand, fingers elongated, wrapped in black funerary silk. Runes of cold blue fire crawled across the phalanges.
A mirror of obsidian hung on the far wall of what had once been the guild's throne room. The reflection staring back was Nyx Voss in full regalia: a lich-king crowned with a circlet of finger bones, eye sockets blazing with twin azure infernos. The cloak of woven shadows billowed though no wind stirred the air.
Akira raised a hand. The lich raised a hand.
He whispered, "Status."
Words unfolded in the air like frost:
Nyx Voss – Level 100 Undead Overlord
Race: Elder Lich (Sovereign Grade)
Karma: -500 (Irredeemable)
Title: Ossuary Sovereign
Unique Ability: [The Ledger of Ending] – All who die within your domain are inscribed. You may summon them as they were in life, or remake them as you see fit.
The numbers were correct. The abilities were correct. But the weight of them was wrong. In YGGDRASIL, power had been pixels and code. Here, every spell slot felt like a loaded gun pressed to the inside of his skull.
A tremor ran through the mausoleum. Dust sifted from the vaulted ceiling. Somewhere far below, something roared—a sound that bypassed ears and clawed directly into bone.
Akira—no, Nyx—stood. The throne of stacked skulls creaked beneath him. He took one step, then another, marveling at the silence of his footfalls. No heartbeat. No breath. Only the dry whisper of bone on stone.
He needed answers. He needed context.
The guild weapon, [Gehenna's Grimoire], floated from its pedestal at his mental command. The book was bound in flayed angel skin; its pages were thin sheets of obsidian. When he opened it, the words rearranged themselves into a language he did not know yet somehow understood:
"You are no longer in the game. The Ledger has opened both ways. Welcome, Sovereign, to the world that will become your ossuary."
Before Nyx could parse the meaning, the double doors at the far end of the hall exploded inward.
A knight in rusted plate armor stumbled through, dragging a broken halberd. His tabard bore the crest of a crimson lion. Blood—real blood—poured from a wound in his side, steaming where it touched the floor. Behind him, the corridor was a slaughterhouse: bodies in medieval garb, some human, some… not. A creature with too many joints and a face of lampreys gnawed on a corpse.
The knight looked up. His eyes widened at the sight of the lich.
"Gods preserve us," he wheezed. "The crypt awakens."
Nyx tilted his head. The knight's karma value appeared above him in red: +120. A hero, then. Or close enough.
The lamprey-thing lunged. Nyx raised one hand. Black script spiraled from his fingertips, forming a circle of runes in the air. The creature crossed the threshold and froze, every joint locking as if flash-frozen. With a flick, Nyx crushed it into a sphere of pulped meat and chitin. The sphere hovered, then unraveled into threads of shadow that stitched themselves into the grimoire.
The knight dropped to his knees. "Mercy, great one. The village—Reidmar—burns. Aberrations pour from the old barrows. Please…"
Nyx tasted the man's fear like wine. In YGGDRASIL, NPCs had been puppets. This one trembled. His pupils were dilated. His pulse—visible in the throat—was 140 bpm and climbing.
Real.
"Speak," Nyx commanded. His voice emerged as a chorus of graves, layered and echoing. "What world is this?"
The knight swallowed. "E-Eostia, my lord. The Kingdom of Selaria borders the Blighted Marches. For three nights, the dead have walked. The barrows split. We thought the old lich kings returned—"
He stopped, realizing what he'd said.
Nyx's sockets flared brighter. Eostia. Not a YGGDRASIL map. Not a mod. A new world.
He stepped past the knight. The mausoleum's outer balcony overlooked a landscape straight out of a nightmare painter's fever: jagged mountains under a moon the color of a fresh bruise, forests of black-leaved trees, rivers that glowed faint green. In the distance, a village burned. Above it, winged shapes circled—harpy-like, but with human torsos grafted onto bat bodies.
His domain sense expanded. He felt every crypt, every grave, every unburied bone within a hundred kilometers. Thousands of potential soldiers. Millions of potential experiments.
The knight was still talking. "…if you are truly the Sovereign of the Ledger, the prophecies—"
Nyx silenced him with a raised hand. "You will guide me to Reidmar. You will speak when spoken to. In exchange, you live."
The knight nodded frantically.
Nyx opened the grimoire again. A new page had appeared, titled "Chapter 1: The First Harvest." Beneath it, a single line in his own handwriting—though he had no memory of writing it:
"Begin with the village. End with the world."
He smiled. A skeleton's smile is a terrible thing.
They descended the mausoleum's spinal staircase—vertebrae the size of siege towers—into the crypts below. Nyx summoned his honor guard with a thought: four Death Knights in baroque armor, each wielding a different cursed relic. Their hollow helms tracked the knight, who walked ahead, halberd trembling.
At the lowest level, a portal of liquid shadow awaited. Nyx had crafted it in YGGDRASIL as a shortcut to Helheim's raid boss. Here, it hummed with purpose. He stepped through.
The other side deposited them on a fog-choked hill overlooking Reidmar. The village was a cluster of thatched roofs and a single stone church. Aberrations—zombie ogres, skeletal wolves, things with too many mouths—had already breached the palisade. Screams rose like steam.
Nyx raised both hands. The grimoire flipped open beside him. A spell he'd never seen unfolded across the pages: [Mass Grave Recitation].
He spoke the incantation. The ground answered.
Every corpse in Reidmar—villager, aberration, livestock—erupted from the earth as spectral script. The letters swirled into a cyclone, then slammed into the grimoire. When the light faded, the village was silent. No living, no dead. Only empty streets and a single church bell tolling itself.
The knight fell to his knees, retching.
Nyx turned a page. New entries:
• 87 Human Souls (Commoner Grade)
• 12 Aberration Souls (Mutated)
• 1 Church Bell (Cursed Object)
He selected the humans. With a gesture, they re-manifested—not as zombies, but as translucent wraiths wearing the faces they'd died with. They bowed.
"Build me a throne," Nyx commanded. "From the church."
The wraiths descended. Stone cracked. Wood splintered. Within minutes, a cathedral of bone and timber rose where the church had stood, its steeple a spiral of ribcages.
The knight watched, pale. "What… are you?"
Nyx considered. In YGGDRASIL, he'd roleplayed a god of death. Here, the role fit too well.
"I am the end of your story," he said. "And the beginning of mine."
Far away, in a palace of white marble, a princess clutched a scrying orb. The image within showed a lich on a throne of bones, azure eyes burning like fallen stars. The orb cracked. Blood ran from her nose.
The age of heroes was over.
The age of the ossuary had begun.