**Day 1,097.**
**Growth Applied: +10%.**
**Current Status: Existential Threat.**
The protagonist of the anime series *Soul Blaze* was currently screaming. He had been screaming for three episodes. His vocal cords were apparently made of vibranium, and his lungs had the capacity of a hot air balloon. He was charging up his "Final Spirit Cannon" to defeat the Demon Lord of the Seventh Hell.
I sat on a floating slab of magnetized graphene in the center of my underground living quarters, watching the holographic projection flicker against the dark basalt walls.
"Don't give up!" the protagonist shrieked, tears streaming down his pixelated face. "If I push past my limits, I can protect everyone!"
I took a bite of a nutrient block. It tasted like compressed chalk and sawdust, but it was the only thing dense enough to provide the fifty thousand calories I needed just to blink without passing out.
"You're doing it wrong," I whispered to the hologram.
On the screen, the hero broke his limits. Golden light exploded. The Demon Lord looked shocked. The mountain range behind them evaporated.
I sighed. The sigh created a low-pressure zone in the room, causing my ears to pop.
"If you break your limits," I lectured the frozen image of the triumphant hero, "you don't save your friends. You accidentally atomize them because you forgot to adjust your bio-electric field for atmospheric resistance."
I swiped my hand through the air, terminating the projection. The room plunged back into silence.
This was my life. The Curse of Ennui.
I had consumed everything. In the last six months, I had watched every anime produced in Japan, read every top-ranking web novel on the internet, and memorized the entirety of Wikipedia. I had analyzed the strategic flaws of every grandmaster chess game played since 1851.
Fiction was the worst. I craved it, yet I loathed it. I wanted the struggle. I wanted the training arc. I wanted the moment where the hero is beaten into the dirt, blood in his eyes, ribs broken, forced to dig deep into his soul to find the strength to stand up one last time.
I looked at my own hand. It was pale, smooth, and unblemished.
I couldn't be beaten into the dirt. If someone hit me with a nuclear warhead, the warhead would shatter against my cheekbone. I couldn't have broken ribs; my bones were denser than the core of a neutron star. I certainly couldn't find the strength to stand up, because standing up required a complex series of gravitational countermeasures to ensure I didn't push the Earth out of orbit.
I was the protagonist who started the game at Level 999 in a Level 1 starter village. There were no quests. There were no rewards. There was only the terrifying need to hold still.
I floated off the slab, the magnetic field humming as it adjusted to my shifting mass. I needed to work. Or rather, I needed to *build*.
The earthquake I had caused yesterday—the "Santiago Incident," as CNN was calling it—had been a wake-up call. Guilt, heavy and cold, sat in my stomach, harder to digest than the nutrient blocks. I had hurt people. I had terrified millions.
And why? Because I was bored. Because I wanted to test a flick of my finger.
"Never again," I murmured.
I drifted through the corridor toward the Server Core. This was the heart of my new project. If the world was too fragile for me to touch, I had to create a buffer. I had to create a proxy.
The Server Core was a chamber I had hollowed out three miles beneath the Atacama salt flats. It was kept at a temperature of absolute zero, cooled by a liquid helium loop I had designed myself. In the center of the room sat the machine.
It wasn't a computer in the traditional sense. Silicon chips would have melted just being in the same room as my aura. This was a crystalline matrix. I had compressed quartz and diamond using my own hands, fusing them into data-storage lattices that operated on light rather than electricity. It was a quantum computer powered by the excess radiation leaking from my own body.
I approached the console. It was a large block of obsidian with a single interface: a neuro-link helmet made of the same lead-heavy alloy as my Sarcophagus suit.
I lowered the helmet onto my head.
**[Neural Link Established.]**
**[Welcome, Administrator Shigu.]**
**[System Integrity: 100%.]**
**[Project 'Order of Truth' status: Pre-Launch.]**
The physical world fell away. The cold rock, the heavy air, the oppressive silence—it all vanished.
I stood in a white void. Infinite. Clean. Weightless.
Here, inside the simulation, I was free. The code didn't care about my density. The virtual physics engine didn't panic when I moved. I looked down at my avatar. It was just me—shaggy black hair, tired eyes, a hoodie and jeans.
I flexed my hand. Nothing exploded.
"Better," I said. My voice in the simulation was clear, unburdened by the need to whisper.
"System, show me the world map."
The white void was replaced by a spinning globe. It wasn't Earth. It was *Aethelgard*. A massive supercontinent surrounded by a violet ocean. Mountains pierced the clouds, twice as high as Everest. Forests of crystalline trees glowed with bioluminescence. Cities of floating stone drifted on ley lines.
I had built this. Every pixel, every polygon, every blade of grass. It was a masterpiece of high fantasy, a amalgamation of every RPG I had ever played and every novel I had ever read.
But a world without people is just a painting.
"Time to populate the zoo," I muttered.
I summoned the interface for the **[Ascension Protocol]**.
This was the gamble. This was the madness.
The "Daily Growth System" that had ruined my life had a feature I had only recently begun to understand: *Evolutionary Overflow*. I generated more energy than my body could contain. Usually, that energy just made me heavier, denser, stronger. But if I funneled it? If I directed it through the quantum crystals and broadcasted it via a subspace signal?
I could transmit a fraction of my power.
Not enough to make them like me. God forbid. But enough to wake them up. Enough to make them *players*.
"System," I commanded. "Review the class archetypes."
Three holographic figures appeared.
**The Vanguard:** Enhanced durability and strength.
**The Weaver:** Manipulation of energy and matter (Magic, effectively).
**The Shadow:** Enhanced perception and speed.
"They are balanced," the System's automated voice responded. "However, the human biological frame is insufficient to handle the data stream. Mortality rate is calculated at 45% upon initialization."
I grimaced. "That's unacceptable. I'm trying to cure my boredom, not commit genocide."
"Suggestion: Implement a limiter. A 'Game Interface' that regulates the flow of power. Users will perceive it as gaining experience points and leveling up. In reality, the interface will slowly acclimate their biology to your energy signature."
I nodded. It was brilliant. Gamify the evolution. Humans loved progression. They loved numbers going up. I knew that better than anyone. The only difference was that my numbers went up automatically, and theirs would require effort.
"Do it," I said. "Set the level cap at 10 for the initial release. That should bring them to... what? Olympian athlete level? Maybe low-tier superhuman?"
"Affirmative. Level 10 corresponds to a 500% increase in baseline human parameters."
"Good. That's safe. That's manageable."
I swiped the holograms away. Now came the hard part. The narrative.
I couldn't just hand out superpowers. People would panic. Governments would crack down. It had to be a secret. It had to be exclusive. It had to be a *game*.
I waved my hand, and a logo appeared in the air. An eye, open and weeping a single tear of gold, set inside a triangle.
**The Order of Truth.**
"Draft the invitation," I said. "Target the demographics we discussed. The dissatisfied. The dreamers. The ones who feel like the world is made of gray paper."
Text began to scroll in the air, drafting itself based on my thoughts.
*Are you tired of the lie?*
*The world you see is a facade. A thin veneer over the rotting wood of reality.*
*You wake up. You work. You consume. You sleep.*
*Is that all there is?*
*Or is there a fire inside you waiting to be lit?*
*We offer you the Truth. We offer you the power to change the equation.*
*Dive in. But be warned: Once you see the Truth, you cannot close your eyes again.*
It was edgy. It was dramatic. It was perfect for the internet.
"Launch vectors?" I asked.
"Global synchronized injection," the System replied. "I will bypass all firewalls, standard and military grade. The invitation will appear on 4.5 billion screens simultaneously as a pop-up advertisement for a new VR MMORPG titled 'Realm of Truth'."
"And the headset?"
"The blueprints have been leaking to 3D printer enthusiasts and manufacturing hubs for the last three months via anonymous dark web channels. There are currently 50,000 functional units already built by early adopters who think they are participating in an ARG (Alternate Reality Game)."
I smiled. Humans were so predictable. Give them a mystery, and they will do the work for you.
"Fifty thousand players," I mused. "That's a good beta test."
I looked around my virtual kingdom. I saw the Tower of Eternity rising in the distance. The top floor was my throne room. That was where I would sit. Not as Shigu, the monster in the basement, but as the Game Master. The God of Truth.
In this world, if they swung a sword at me, I could code my avatar to bleed. I could feel pain. I could lose.
The anticipation was a physical sensation, a tightening in my chest that had nothing to do with gravity.
"Prepare the servers," I said. "Allocate 1% of my daily energy output to maintain the server stability."
**[Warning: Allocating 1% of user's energy output is equivalent to the total electrical consumption of the Northern Hemisphere. Cooling systems may fail.]**
"Let them fail," I said. "I'll cool the core with my breath if I have to."
I closed my eyes in the simulation.
"Execute."
***
**The Real World. Atacama Facility.**
I ripped the helmet off. The transition was jarring. The crushing weight of reality slammed back onto my shoulders. The air was thin and cold. The silence was heavy.
But then, the lights on the crystal console flared. A deep, rhythmic thrumming began to vibrate through the floor. It wasn't a seismic tremor; it was the hum of massive data throughput.
On the wall, a countdown timer appeared.
**[UPLOAD IN PROGRESS: 99%]**
I stood up, careful to move slowly. The Sarcophagus suit whirred.
I walked to the main terminal. A map of the Earth was displayed. Thousands of tiny lights began to blink on. Japan. South Korea. The United States. Germany. Brazil.
The notifications were flooding the dark web forums, the gaming subreddits, the social media feeds.
*"What is this?"*
*"Did anyone else get this pop-up?"*
*"I can't close it. It's stuck on my phone."*
*"Order of Truth? Is this a cult?"*
*"The download link works. It's downloading... fast."*
I watched the chaos unfold. It was beautiful. For the first time in three years, I wasn't watching a pre-recorded story. I was watching a live performance, and I had written the script.
My boredom receded, pushed back by the tide of curiosity. Who would be the first? Who would be the first to put on the headset, log in, and accept the power I was offering?
I zoomed in on a cluster of signals in Tokyo. It seemed fitting. My old home.
Somewhere in a cramped apartment in Akihabara, a young man was staring at his computer screen. I could see his metadata. *Tanaka Kenji. Age 22. Unemployed. 3,000 hours in 'Fantasy Online'.*
Perfect.
"Take the bait, Kenji," I whispered.
On the screen, the indicator for Kenji's IP address turned from red to green.
**[Player 001 Connected.]**
**[Class Selection: Initiated.]**
**[Energy Transfer: Stabilized.]**
I felt it. A tiny, microscopic drain on my reserves. It was like a mosquito bite on a whale, but I felt it. A fraction of my infinite energy left my body, traveled through the quantum lattice, beamed up to a satellite, and downloaded itself into the nervous system of a boy in Tokyo.
He didn't know it yet, but Kenji just became strong enough to punch through a brick wall.
Then another light turned green. And another.
**[Player 005 Connected.]**
**[Player 018 Connected.]**
**[Player 94 Connected.]**
The numbers climbed. The hum in the room grew louder, a choir of digital souls entering my world.
I sat back in my reinforced chair, the titanium groaning under the shift in weight. I picked up the tablet—the one with the cracked screen—and opened the administrative app for the game.
I wasn't just the strongest being in the universe anymore. I was something far more dangerous.
I was an entertainer.
"Welcome to the Order of Truth," I said to the empty room, a genuine smile stretching across my face. "Try not to die in the tutorial."
The blue box of my own Daily Growth System appeared, floating over the map of the waking world.
**[Day 1,097 Complete.]**
**[Note: External Energy Drain Detected. Variance in Growth Curve.]**
**[Projection: User Shigu has initiated a Catalyst Event.]**
"You're damn right I have," I told the box.
I leaned forward, my eyes reflecting the light of fifty thousand new players.
"Now," I whispered. "Let's see if any of you can catch up to me."