On the day the world ended, the loudest sound in my life was the buzz of cheap fluorescent lights.
They hummed overhead, flickering every few seconds like they were breathing their last. The air conditioner in the corner rattled weakly before giving up and exhaling nothing but warm breath. The shelves smelled faintly of cardboard, dust, and stale oil from the fries the manager insisted on deep-frying too close to the snack aisle.
I was crouched in front of the instant ramen section, sliding cup noodles into a neat row, all the logos facing forward like little soldiers.
"Aiden, you done with that yet?" the manager called from behind the counter. His voice carried that familiar mix of laziness and irritation. "Lunch rush starts in ten. Don't fall asleep down there."
"I'm moving, I'm moving," I muttered, though my knees protested as I shifted to grab another stack.
The plastic crinkled under my fingers. Somewhere inside my pocket, my phone vibrated twice in quick succession, bumping against my thigh. Probably Sujin. She'd been messaging all morning about some math problem that "humanity was not meant to solve."
I told myself I'd check as soon as I finished this box.
I balanced three cups in one hand, slid them into an empty space, and reached for the last one—
The light changed.
Not the flickering fluorescent. The entire world.
A pale blue glow seeped through the front windows, washing over the faded advertisement posters and the yellowed lottery signs. The air felt suddenly thick, like the moment before a summer storm when the sky holds its breath.
The hair on my arms stood up.
"What the…?" someone near the drinks fridge said.
The humming of the store's refrigerators faded, swallowed by an eerie, layered silence. No traffic sounds. No distant honking. No footsteps from the apartment floors above.
Just silence—and that unnatural blue light pressing against the glass.
Slowly, heartbeat thudding in my ears, I stood up.
The convenience store door faced the main intersection—a crosswalk, a bus stop, a never-ending line of cars. I'd seen that view so many times it had become background noise in my mind.
Now, through the glass, there were no cars. No buildings. No street.
Just a curtain of thick, roiling gray mist stretching in every direction, lit dimly from behind by that same blue glow. It moved, almost like it was breathing.
"Is that… fog?" a college kid at the counter whispered.
Fog didn't swallow a whole city in a heartbeat.
Before I could form a thought, something enormous moved above the mist.
The sky—what little could be seen above that gray curtain—fractured into a colossal pane of luminous blue, as if someone had laid a translucent screen over the world. Lines of text burned across it in crisp white.
[GLOBAL ANNOUNCEMENT]
Intelligent life detected.
Planetary Integration in progress…
Initializing Tutorial Phase.
My throat went dry.
"What is that?"
"Is that a projector?"
"Hey, is this a prank—?"
Voices overlapped, high and panicked. Someone's drink slipped from their hand and burst on the floor with a wet thump, soda fizzing over the tiles. The smell of artificial grape filled the sudden stillness.
My phone buzzed again in my pocket, frantic vibrations against my leg.
"Sujin…" I breathed, without meaning to.
Before I could grab it, another light blinked into existence—this time right in front of my face.
A floating rectangle of pale blue, almost transparent around the edges, hung in the air at eye level. No projector. No screen. Just there.
[Welcome, Candidate.]
You have been selected to participate in the Planetary Tutorial.
Survival during the Tutorial will grant access to the New System.
The letters were sharp enough to hurt to look at. Like they were written directly on my eyes.
"…What?" I whispered.
As if my confusion was a button, the text shifted.
[Please select your Tutorial Mode:]
– Easy (Solo)
– Normal (Solo)
– Hard (Solo)
– Random (Party)
Underneath, glowing red numbers started to count down.
[Time remaining: 00:00:59]
A timer.
My pulse stuttered, then kicked into overdrive.
Around me, people were swearing, shouting, pointing at the same invisible screens only they could see. One woman in a business suit half-ran, half-stumbled to the door, yanked it open, and thrust her arm into the mist outside.
"S-stop!" someone shouted.
Too late.
The gray swallowed her hand up to the wrist. For one horrible second, nothing happened.
Then she screamed.
A raw, animal sound tore from her throat as she jerked her arm back. Frost clung to her skin like shards of glass, crawling over her fingers in jagged patterns. Her nails had turned a dead, bluish white.
"Oh my God—!"
"Oh my God, call someone—!"
"There's no signal!"
Panic clawed at the air, thick and suffocating. The manager shouted something about staying inside, about waiting for the police, his voice cracking halfway through.
The timer ticked down.
00:00:45.
I swallowed, forcing myself to focus on the floating options.
Easy (Solo). Normal (Solo). Hard (Solo). Random (Party).
It looked like a tutorial difficulty screen from a game.
Except the woman near the door was sobbing, cradling her injured hand. The smell of burned skin and chemical ice mixed with the sharp scent of spilled soda.
This wasn't a game.
Tutorial.
The word echoed in my head, hitting every memory of late-night gaming I had: tired eyes, cheap coffee, the dull ache in my fingers from gripping a mouse too long.
Tutorials were usually safe.
Usually.
But this… this was being announced to the whole sky. The world didn't change colors for patch notes.
My hand went automatically to my pocket. My phone buzzed again, frantic. I curled my fingers around it, feeling the warmth through the cheap fabric of my uniform.
If Sujin was seeing this too, somewhere across the city—
I forced my mind away from the image of her in a classroom suddenly covered in blue text.
Think, Aiden.
Easy mode, normal mode, hard mode… and random.
If this "System" stuck around, if this "Tutorial" was just the first step, then the choices here weren't just about the next hour.
They were about everything that came after.
On the bus, in the break room, in the rare quiet moments between work and sleep, I'd read webnovels about stuff like this. Worlds turned into games, tutorials that decided your starting stats, people who picked higher difficulty for better rewards.
It had always been fiction. Convenient fiction.
The timer slid down to 00:00:30.
My palms were slick. My heart pounded so loud it drowned out everything else.
Easy meant safety now. Probably. Maybe.
But if I barely survived an Easy tutorial, what would I be when this "New System" fully integrated? Weak. Useless. Someone waiting to be protected.
Useless wasn't an option.
Not with a little sister who still thought the world was something exams and grades could control.
"Hard" glowed faintly red when my gaze lingered on it.
Everything in my body recoiled at the idea. If this was like the games I knew, then Hard didn't mean "kind of challenging." It meant "you will die if you make a mistake."
I imagined Sujin's face when she messaged me about some stupid meme last night. The light in her eyes when I brought home cheap kimbap on the days I had a little extra. The trust there, unspoken but heavy.
If this was real—and the woman with the frostbitten hand was proof it was—then what I chose wasn't just about me.
It was about whether I'd have the power to keep her alive in whatever came next.
The timer hit 00:00:20.
My throat felt like sand.
"You kids and your games," the manager snapped at someone near him, voice trembling despite the words. "Just pick the easy one and wait for the government to fix—"
He cut himself off when his own eyes focused on something only he could see. His mouth worked silently.
People were making their choices all around me.
"I'm not dying here, I'm picking Easy!"
"Normal can't be that bad—"
"Yo, party mode! Let's just go random, we'll carry—"
Their voices blurred into noise.
The options hovered in front of me, patient and uncaring.
My fingers dug into my phone, knuckles white.
I exhaled slowly.
"Hard," I said, voice barely above a whisper.
The selection pulsed.
[Hard (Solo) selected.]
Confirm selection?
– Yes
– No
My thumb twitched, as if I could press the glowing word in the air.
00:00:10.
Regret tried to whisper: pick Easy, survive now, figure it out later. Like I always did. Patch things after they broke. Work extra shifts to cover the mess.
But death couldn't be covered with overtime.
If I picked Easy and the world stayed like this—fog at the door, sky full of text—what use would a weak brother be?
My heartbeat steadied, just a little.
I lifted my chin and focused on Yes.
"I confirm," I said.
The System didn't hesitate.
[Selection confirmed.]
The world came apart.
The shelves, the lights, the manager's stunned face, the crying woman, the buzzing refrigerators—all of it shattered like glass struck by a silent hammer. Shards of light tore free from solid matter, each tiny fragment hanging in the air for a split second before being sucked upward into the blue sky-screen.
My stomach lurched. It felt like an elevator had dropped out from under me, but magnified a thousand times.
The hum of the lights vanished. So did the smell of oil and dust and artificial grape.
For an instant, there was nothing but white noise and falling.
Then new text flickered into view, lines overlapping, stuttering as if the System itself coughed.
[Assignment Error.]
Candidate ID: A-1937467
Requested Mode: Hard (Solo)
Standard Instance: Unavailable.
Reassigning…
The words glitched, tearing and reforming, letters snapping into jagged shapes before straightening.
[Reassigning…]
[Reassign—]
[Error.]
[Candidate allocated to Tutorial Instance: #000 – Infinite]
[Warning: This instance is not calibrated for standard candidates.]
Proceed?
– Y
"Wait—" The word scraped out of my throat, useless.
There was no cursor. No option to choose.
[Y selected by default.]
Initializing…
The sense of falling twisted, turned inside out. Pressure crushed my lungs, my ears, my eyes, like I was being squeezed through a space much too small for a human body.
Then gravity slammed back into me.
I hit the ground hard enough to see stars.
The impact drove the air from my chest in a soundless wheeze. Dirt and something sharp—pebbles?—bit into my ribs. For a second, all I knew was pain and the metallic taste of blood on my tongue.
I lay there, eyes closed, listening.
Wind.
Not the manufactured whisper of an air conditioner, but real wind, rustling through leaves. It carried the scent of damp earth, wildgrass, and something sharp and green.
No cars. No voices. No humming machines.
Slowly, I opened my eyes.
The sky above me was wrong.
It wasn't the dull gray of Seoul's smog-choked afternoons. It was a pale violet, deepening to amethyst near the horizon. Wisps of silver cloud drifted lazily, too slow, like someone had turned down the speed of the world.
Two moons hung there.
One full and white, cratered and vast. The other a thin red crescent, tucked close to its side like a younger sibling hiding behind an elder.
My breath caught.
This isn't Earth.
I pushed myself up onto my elbows, gritting my teeth against the ache in my arms. Grass brushed against my skin, cool and a little damp. I was lying in a small clearing, ringed by tall, towering trees with dark, rough bark and leaves so thick they turned the space beyond into a shifting wall of green-black shadow.
No roads. No buildings. No store.
Just me.
And the notification still hanging above my head.
[Welcome to the Tutorial.]
Instance: #000 – Infinite
Mode: Hard+
Time Dilation: 1 : ?
Objective: Survive until Clearance.
"'Infinite'?" I rasped.
The word sat there like a joke told by someone who'd never laughed in their life.
Hard+.
Time dilation unknown.
Survive until Clearance.
No timer. No friendly mascot. No detailed instructions.
My chest tightened. The urge to panic fluttered against my ribs, trying to get out.
I forced it down.
Panicking wouldn't make that woman's frostbitten hand go away. It wouldn't make Sujin any safer.
"Status," I said, because that's what you did in every story, every game.
Nothing happened.
"Menu?"
The System remained stubbornly silent.
"Inventory? Help? Tutorial manual?" I tried, voice edging toward hysterical.
A tiny line of text, so faint I almost missed it, appeared at the very bottom of the main window.
[Basic Interface locked until initial lesson complete.]
"Of course it is," I muttered. My laugh came out thin and hollow.
A twig cracked in the trees to my left.
The sound snapped through the clearing like a whipcrack.
Every muscle in my body locked. I turned my head slowly.
Something moved between the trunks. A shadow, big and heavy, too large to be a person. The ground trembled, just barely, with each muffled thump… thump…
The leaves rustled in its wake. Birds—or whatever passed for birds here—fell silent.
Adrenaline surged through me like ice water.
Don't move. Don't breathe.
My heart pounded so loud it felt like the whole forest could hear it.
The thing in the shadows stepped closer.
The air grew heavier, as if its presence pushed the atmosphere ahead of it. A low, almost subsonic growl vibrated through the soles of my shoes.
The trees at the edge of the clearing shuddered—
—and then exploded outward.
A massive shape burst through, splintering branches like twigs, showering the clearing in leaves and shards of bark. A hot, wet stink of meat and rot slammed into me like another impact.
I stared.
The creature was easily twice my height at the shoulder, maybe more. Four thick, powerful legs ended in claws as long as my forearm, each one digging trenches into the earth with casual ease. Its hide was a nightmare of overlapping bone-white plates and black, leathery skin, as if someone had tried to fuse a skeletal bear with an armored tank.
Two curved horns swept back from its skull, framing a broad face dominated by a gaping maw lined with uneven, jagged teeth. Its eyes burned with sickly pale light, focused directly on me.
Its breath came out in hot, steaming clouds, carrying the rich, stomach-churning scent of blood and decay.
My brain went very, very quiet.
This isn't a game model. This isn't CGI.
This is real.
My legs refused to move. My lungs refused to fill. Every part of me was suspended between get up and die where you sit.
The creature took one step forward, the ground juddering beneath its weight.
The System, apparently satisfied I'd had enough time to marvel, added one last line to the floating notification.
[First Lesson: Run.]
The monster roared.
The sound hit me like a physical wall, a deafening blast that rattled my teeth and sent a spike of pure terror down my spine. Birds exploded out of the treetops, shrieking.
My body chose for me.
I ran.
I turned and sprinted for the opposite side of the clearing, shoes slipping in the grass, lungs already burning. Branches whipped at my arms as I stumbled into the tree line. Behind me, the ground shook as the creature lunged, another roar tearing through the air.
Something massive crashed into a trunk just behind my back with an ear-splitting crack. Splinters stung my neck.
I didn't look.
I didn't need to.
If this was the tutorial—
I didn't want to know what came after.