The rain in Busan didn't fall so much as it drowned the city, a heavy, grey curtain that blurred the neon lights of the high-rises and turned the steep hillside alleys of the Sanbok-doro into treacherous rivers.
In a narrow street where the streetlights flickered with the rhythmic pulse of a dying heart, a young man was running. Han Si-woo, eighteen and breathless, clutched a cardboard box to his chest as if it were a holy relic. Inside was a first-generation Aether-Link headset, a piece of technology three years obsolete that he had spent six months of part-time dishwashing to afford.
He didn't see the black luxury sedan until it was too late.
The car didn't screech; it simply glided through the rain like a predator. The impact was a dull, sickening thud of metal against bone. Si-woo was tossed into the air, his body spinning like a broken doll before slamming into the wet asphalt. The box shattered. The headset skittered across the pavement, its internal lenses cracking.
As Si-woo's vision began to tunnel, a silver-haired man in the back of the sedan looked out through the tinted glass. He didn't tell the driver to stop. He simply checked his watch and tapped the glass. The car accelerated, leaving the boy bleeding in the gutter.
In that moment of fading consciousness, the veil between realities thin and frayed. Somewhere across the infinite expanse of the void, a soul that had sat upon a throne of stars—the Sovereign Li Wei—was falling. His physical form had been extinguished by the treachery of the heavens, his golden cultivation core shattered into a billion sparks. One of those sparks, a fragment of an immortal's will, found the only open doorway available.
It plunged into the dying body of the boy in the Busan rain.
"So... this is the end of the path?" a voice echoed in the darkness of Si-woo's mind. "No. This is the mud. This is the beginning."
Two months later, the Busan hillside was sweltering under the summer heat.
Si-woo sat in a rickety wheelchair on the small balcony of their basement apartment. The air here was thick with the scent of damp concrete and the industrial exhaust from the nearby shipyards. Below his waist, his legs were two heavy, unresponsive weights. The hit-and-run had crushed his spine, leaving him a prisoner in a city that had no room for the weak.
"Si-woo, I brought your medicine," a voice called out from the kitchen.
His sister, Mi-rae, stepped out onto the balcony. She was sixteen, but the light had long since left her eyes. She wore a faded school uniform that was a size too small, and her fingers were stained with ink from the extra data-entry work she did late into the night.
"We can't afford the physical therapy this month," she said, her voice flat, devoid of the energy a teenager should possess. "Eomma took another shift at the laundromat. She... she had to take a loan from the neighborhood association."
Si-woo looked at her. To Mi-rae, he was her broken brother. But behind his eyes, the spirit of the Golden Immortal was slowly stitching together the fragments of a shattered mind. He saw the way her energy was being leached away by stress and malnutrition.
"The neighborhood association," Si-woo said, his voice raspy. "You mean the loan sharks."
Mi-rae didn't answer. She just looked at the scuffed, taped-together VR headset sitting on his lap. "You're still going to try it? The doctor said neural linking might be too much for your condition."
"It's the only way to find work, Mi-rae," Si-woo lied.
The truth was far more complex. In the two months since the accident, he had realized that this world was starved of essence. The air was thin, the water was dead, and the people were walking ghosts. But the device—the broken piece of glass and copper—was a portal. It tapped into a frequency that felt remarkably like the spiritual realms he once ruled.
That evening, the apartment was quiet. His mother had returned from the laundromat, her hands red and raw from the harsh chemicals, and had immediately fallen asleep at the small kitchen table. The stack of past-due notices was held down by a half-empty bowl of watery kimchi stew.
Si-woo pulled the headset over his eyes. The tape held the cracked casing together, and the internal cooling fan groaned as it struggled to life.
"Mother, Mi-rae..." he whispered into the darkness. "I will not let us rot in this basement."
He closed his eyes and initiated the sync.
As the digital world began to materialize, Si-woo didn't feel the usual disorienting lag of a budget headset. Instead, his immortal soul reached out and seized the connection. The code of the game didn't just appear to him; it felt like a flow of energy. He didn't see pixels; he saw the rhythm of a world being constructed from thought.
[Warning: Neural Sync reaching 100%...] [User ID: Han Si-woo] [Class: Unassigned] [Location: Fallen Leaf Village]
The weight of the wheelchair vanished. The smell of the basement was replaced by the sharp, invigorating scent of cedar and mountain rain.
Si-woo opened his eyes. He was standing. He looked down at his legs, clothed in simple hemp trousers. He flexed his toes in the dirt.
He wasn't in Busan anymore. He was in the Azure Province.
But as he looked at the sky, he didn't see a programmed sun. He saw the faint, shimmering lattice of the world's foundation. He saw the flow of the wind as it bent the bamboo, not because of a physics engine, but because the spirit of the air was moving.
He took a deep breath, and for the first time in two months, the Golden Immortal smiled. This world was a simulation to the people of Earth, but to him, it was a half-formed heaven waiting for a master.