[ Chapter 50: The Solar System ]
**Day 1,230.**
**Location: Low Earth Orbit – The Bridge of the *Indomitable Spirit*.**
**Current Status: Server Maintenance.**
**Mood: Constructive.**
There comes a point in every Massive Multiplayer Online game where the starting zone simply becomes too small.
The boars are Level 1. The players are Level 100. The towns are overcrowded, the economy is stagnant because everyone is selling the same low-tier loot, and the frame rate drops because too many people are casting high-tier spells in the beginner village.
Earth was becoming that village.
I stood at the viewport of the flagship, looking down at the blue marble. It was beautiful, vibrant, and terrifyingly fragile. My HUD was currently scrolling through a list of structural integrity warnings for the planet's crust.
"The reports are coming in from the Pacific Rim," Ren said, standing beside me with a datapad that looked comically small in his hands. He was wearing his new **[High Administrator]** robes, a gift from the Station 9 tailor. "Apparently, when the Guild of the White Lotus practiced their new 'Tsunami Strike' combo, they accidentally triggered a magnitude 6.0 earthquake in Japan. We had to mitigate the damage with barriers."
"And the Amazon?" I asked, sipping a cup of synthesized coffee that tasted vaguely of rocket fuel.
"The Druid Circles tried to grow a 'World Tree'," Ren sighed. "It grew too fast. It pierced the ozone layer. We had to prune it with orbital lasers. The environmentalists are... conflicted."
I nodded. This was the problem.
Humanity had leveled up. The raid on the Avatar of Avarice in the previous chapter had pushed thousands of players past the Level 100 threshold. They were wielding cosmic mana now. They weren't just soldiers; they were walking natural disasters.
If they kept training on Earth, they would accidentally break the planet before the aliens even arrived.
"We need a new zone," I said. "A high-level grinding area. Somewhere durable. Somewhere they can unleash their ultimates without worrying about property values or Geneva Convention zoning laws."
I turned away from Earth and looked out into the blackness of the solar system.
My gaze drifted past the Moon—which was already converted into a transit hub—and settled on a small, rusty-red dot floating in the distance.
Mars.
The God of War. A dead, frozen rock. No atmosphere. No life. No lawyers.
"Ren," I said, setting my coffee cup down on a floating gravity-coaster. "Clear my schedule for the night."
Ren looked up, alarm bells ringing in his eyes. "Boss? What are you planning?"
"Home renovation," I said. "Notify the fleet. Tell them the servers are going down for a mandatory expansion pack update. I'm initiating 'Project: Red Garden'."
"Red Garden?" Ren frowned. "You're going to build a base on Mars?"
I smiled. The golden light in my eyes flared, illuminating the bridge.
"No, Ren. I'm not building a base."
I tapped the glass, pointing at the red dot.
"I'm going to wake it up."
***
**The Commute**
**Location: Space – Trans-Lunar Trajectory.**
**Time: T-Minus 10 Minutes to Arrival.**
I didn't take a ship. Ships were slow. They relied on physics, and physics had a speed limit.
I stepped out of the airlock of the *Indomitable Spirit* and into the vacuum.
The cold of space was absolute—negative 270 degrees Celsius. To a normal human, it was instant death. To me, it felt like stepping into a room with mild air conditioning.
**[Passive Skill: Stellar Body]** kept my internal pressure regulated. My mana formed a skin-tight barrier, recycling oxygen molecules faster than my lungs could consume them.
I oriented myself toward Mars.
**[Distance: 225 Million Kilometers.]**
"Let's test the new engines," I whispered.
I didn't use thrusters. I used gravity manipulation. I designated my own body as a massive object and the space behind me as a repulsion point.
*Push.*
I vanished.
The stars blurred into streaks of neon light. I wasn't warping; I was simply moving fast enough that light had to sprint to catch up. I crossed the gulf between worlds in minutes, arriving in high orbit over the Red Planet.
It hung below me, a desolate wasteland of iron oxide and craters. It was silent. It was dead.
"Perfect canvas," I mused.
I accessed the **System Admin Console**.
**[User: Shigu.]**
**[Mana Pool: Infinite.]**
**[Current Objective: Planetary Genesis.]**
I extended my hands.
Normally, terraforming is a process that takes centuries. You need to melt the polar caps, thicken the atmosphere, introduce microbial life, wait for lichen to grow, and slowly build an ecosystem.
But I didn't have centuries. I had tonight.
"Step one," I said. "Heating."
I focused my gaze on the planet's core. Using **[God's Eye]**, I peered through the crust, through the mantle, down to the iron heart of the world. It was cold, solidified eons ago.
I reached out with my mana. I didn't push; I *ignited*.
**[Skill: Promethean Spark.]**
A pulse of pure thermal energy shot from my hands, bypassing the surface and striking the core.
Deep below the red dust, the heart of Mars restarted. The iron liquefied. The dynamo began to spin. A magnetic field—invisible but vital—erupted from the poles, snapping into place around the planet like a deflector shield, pushing back the solar radiation.
The ground below me rumbled. Volcanoes that had been dormant for a billion years—Olympus Mons, Tharsis Montes—began to smoke.
"Step two," I muttered. "Air."
This was the tricky part. I needed mass.
I looked at the asteroid belt beyond Mars. Millions of rocks, rich in ice and carbon.
I raised my right hand. **[Skill: Gravity Well: Localized.]**
I grabbed a dozen icy comets the size of cities. I yanked them out of their orbits and hurled them toward the planet.
They entered the atmosphere—or what little there was of it—and I incinerated them with precision beams of fire before they hit the ground. Flash vaporization.
Trillions of tons of water and carbon dioxide expanded instantly.
The sky below me turned from black to a hazy, churning grey. Storms the size of continents erupted as the new atmosphere tried to find equilibrium. Rain—the first rain in three billion years—began to fall. It fell in torrents, filling the Valles Marineris, turning the great canyon into a freshwater sea.
"Step three," I said. "Life."
I opened my Inventory.
I had been saving seeds. Not normal seeds. **[Mana-Infused Flora]** from the Elven dungeons. **[Iron-Root Trees]** from the Dwarven strata. Plants that fed on radiation and breathed heavy metals.
I scattered them into the winds.
I poured raw mana onto the surface—a golden rain that saturated the soil.
The effect was instantaneous. Green exploded across the red surface. Forests of towering, crystalline trees shot up in seconds, their roots gripping the shifting soil, stabilizing the new mud. Moss carpeted the rocks.
The red dot was turning blue and green.
I hovered there, watching the transformation. It was like painting with the hand of God.
"Now for the fun part," I said.
A zone isn't a zone without mobs.
I opened the **[Void Storage]**.
For three years, the Order of Truth had been capturing monsters. We hadn't killed everything. The scientists had kept the most dangerous, the most unstable, the most "un-killable" specimens in stasis pods deep beneath the Tungsten Spire.
Giant mutated sand-worms. Cybernetic horrors from the Zorgon wreckage. Elemental constructs that leaked radiation.
"Transfer," I commanded.
Thousands of portals opened on the surface of the new Mars.
The monsters fell out. They roared, confused by the new air, the new gravity (which I had adjusted to 1.0 Earth Standard by compressing the core).
I dropped the **[Behemoths]** into the deep canyons.
I placed the **[Insectoid Hives]** in the new jungles.
I put the **[Mechanical Golems]** near the active volcanoes.
And at the very top of Olympus Mons, the highest peak in the solar system, I placed the boss.
It wasn't a creature. It was a construct I had built myself during a bored afternoon on Day 1,000. A suit of animated armor made of pure neutronium, enchanted with every combat script I knew.
**[Boss: The Red King.]**
**[Level: 500.]**
**[Loot Table: Ascended Gear.]**
I dusted my hands off.
Below me, the planet was alive. It was wild, dangerous, and saturated with enough mana to level a player from 1 to 100 in a week—if they survived.
**[Time Elapsed: 6 Hours.]**
**[Terraforming Complete.]**
I tapped my comms.
"Ren," I said. "Update the server. Tell them 'The Red Planet' is open for business."
***
**The Announcement**
**Location: Earth – Global Network.**
**Time: 08:00 AM.**
Every screen on Earth flickered.
Smartphones, billboards, VR headsets, even the digital price tags in supermarkets. The logo of the **Order of Truth** appeared—a golden eye in a triangle.
Then, text scrolled across the vision of every human being.
**[SYSTEM UPDATE 5.0: EXPANSION PACK LIVE.]**
**[Patch Notes:]**
* **New Zone Unlocked:** Mars.
* **Environment:** Terraformed (Breathable, Lush, Lethal).
* **Level Requirement:** 100+.
* **Features:**
* 3 New Raid Dungeons.
* Open World PvP Zone (The Rust Flats).
* Resource Nodes: Adamantite, Mana Crystals, Alien Tech.
* **Travel:** Warp Gates established in New York, Tokyo, London, and the Space Elevator.
**[Message from Admin Shigu:]**
*"Stop breaking my furniture. Go play outside."*
***
**The Migration**
**Location: The Bifrost Space Elevator – High Orbit Terminal.**
**Time: 2 Hours Later.**
The chaos was immediate.
I stood on the observation deck of the Space Elevator, watching the first wave of players arrive.
They weren't civilians. These were the elites. The Guild Leaders. The top 1% of the player base who had been chafing under the restrictions of Earth.
Damon led the charge. He was wearing his new **[Void-Dragon Plate]** armor, carrying the massive sword I had bought him at the auction.
"Move it!" Damon roared, shoving his way through the terminal toward the glowing red Warp Gate. "The Iron Vipers get first kill! If I see a Lunar Mage tag the World Boss before me, I'm griefing the whole raid!"
"In your dreams, tin-can!" Elena shouted, floating above the crowd on a disc of arcane energy. Her guild, the Lunar Magocracy, was decked out in shimmering silk robes that rippled with defensive enchantments. "Teleport sequence initiated! We'll be there before you can walk through the door!"
"Tickets! Get your tickets!" a Goblin merchant (a player who had chosen a rare race polymorph) was yelling. "Fire resistance potions! Anti-venom! 50% markup because supply and demand, baby!"
It was a stampede. A glorious, greedy, violent stampede.
Ren stood beside me, watching the madness.
"You realize," Ren said, "that you just started a gold rush. They're going to tear that planet apart."
"Better that planet than this one," I replied. "Besides, the monsters I put there? They aren't pushovers. The first week is going to be a slaughter."
"And the aliens?" Ren asked quietly. "The Galactic Council? The Silence?"
"That's why we're doing this," I said, my expression hardening. "Look at them, Ren."
I pointed at the players.
They were arguing, shouting, checking their gear. But their auras... their auras were sharp. They were hungry for power. They weren't afraid of the unknown; they were trying to loot it.
"The Galaxy is scared of the Silence," I said. "Civilizations hide from it. They build walls. But gamers?"
I watched a group of teenagers run into the Warp Gate screaming "LEEROY JENKINS!"
"Gamers run toward the danger because they think there's a shiny hat waiting for them at the end."
I turned away from the window.
"If we're going to fight cosmic horrors, I don't need soldiers. I need murder-hobos with an addiction to progression. I'm building an army, Ren. And Mars is their boot camp."
***
**The Raid: First Contact**
**Location: Mars – The Crimson Jungle (Formerly Cydonia Region).**
**Time: T-Plus 30 Minutes.**
We stepped through the gate.
The air on Mars smelled of ozone, wet earth, and something spicy—likely the pollen from the mana-flowers. The sky was a bruised purple-orange, the sun smaller than on Earth, but bright.
Around the Warp Gate arrival plaza (a stone circle I had fused together), thousands of players were materializing.
"Whoa," a tank whispered, looking up at the trees. They were massive, their bark looking like metallic scales, their leaves glowing with bioluminescence. "Graphics are insane."
*ROAAAAAR.*
A sound tore through the jungle. It shook the ground. Trees snapped like twigs.
From the tree line, a **[Chimera Rex]** emerged.
It was sixty feet tall. It had the body of a T-Rex, the carapace of a beetle, and three heads—one spewing fire, one acid, one lightning.
**[Monster: Chimera Rex.]**
**[Level: 150.]**
**[Aggro Range: Massive.]**
The players froze. On Earth, the biggest monster was a Level 80 Slime King. This thing was a nightmare made flesh.
The Rex roared again, unleashing a cone of fire that vaporized a rock formation.
Silence.
Then, Damon stepped forward. He lowered his helmet visor.
"Level 150?" Damon grinned, his voice amplified by his armor. "Finally. Something that won't die in one hit."
He raised his sword.
"RAID FORMATION!" Damon bellowed. "TANKS FRONT! HEALERS, PRE-HOT! DPS, WAIT FOR THREE SUNDERS!"
The fear vanished from the crowd. It was replaced by the cold, calculating focus of a raid group.
"Buffs up!" Elena shouted. "Haste! Might! Arcane Brilliance!"
Rainbow lights exploded across the clearing as thousands of buffs were cast simultaneously.
"CHARGE!"
The players surged forward. It wasn't a battle; it was a tidal wave of neon violence. Spells flew like tracer fire. Arrows tipped with mana pierced the Rex's hide. Damon slammed into the beast's leg, stopping its charge with a shockwave of kinetic force.
I watched from a floating rock above the canopy, hidden by **[Stealth]**.
They were sloppy. They took unnecessary damage. But they were fighting. They were adapting.
"Good," I whispered.
Then, a notification pinged in my vision. Not a local one. A galactic one.
**[System Alert: High-Energy Event Detected.]**
**[Source: Galactic Core.]**
**[Message Incoming...]**
I frowned. I opened the message.
It was a live feed.
The image was grainy, distorted by distance and interference. It showed a star system—the **Aethelgard Home System**, where Commissioner Vexx was from.
The stars were going out.
Not exploding. Just... disappearing. As if someone had dragged an eraser across the sky.
A black shape was moving against the backdrop of space. It was vast. Bigger than a planet. Bigger than a sun. It didn't have a form; it was an absence of light, a jagged tear in reality.
**The Silence.**
And in front of it, a fleet of silver ships—the Galactic Council's Vanguard—was burning.
"Help us," a voice whispered through the static. It was Vexx. He sounded broken. "The logic... the logic doesn't work on It. It eats the math."
The feed cut to static.
I closed the window.
Below me, the players cheered. The Chimera Rex had fallen. Loot was raining down.
"We did it!" someone screamed. "Level up!"
I looked at the celebrating humans, then back at the dark sky where the stars were waiting.
"Ren," I spoke into the comms. My voice was no longer playful. The bored god was gone.
"Boss?"
"Accelerate the XP gain on Mars by 200%."
"Two hundred? That'll destabilize the economy! Inflation will—"
"Forget the economy," I said. "We don't have years. We might not even have months."
I clenched my fist, and the mana around me crackled, turning the air into plasma.
"The tutorial is officially over. The endgame is here."
I looked up at the stars.
**[Time until Day 1,231: 1 Hour.]**
**[Growth Pending.]**
"Let them come," I whispered to the void. "I've been waiting for a reason to use 100%."
**Chapter 50 Ends.**