Congratulations. You obtained a Divine Blessing Scroll. Use it now?
Blaze King did not hesitate.
"Obviously I'm using it."
He clicked confirm, and his starting attributes—all of which had been pathetic enough to insult him personally—jumped from 1 across the board to 10.
He stared at the screen.
Then he shouted.
"What the hell? Ten times?"
The class instructor appeared again almost immediately.
The man's entire attitude had changed.
"It seems I misjudged you," he said. "I didn't expect you to be a once-in-a-generation genius. Take this basic training manual. It's yours. My test delayed you from seeing your mother one last time. For that, I owe you an apology."
"Take these weapons and supplies as well. When you reach level ten, come to town. I'll personally introduce you to every class mentor there. Whatever path you want, they'll take you."
Then he turned and left.
Blaze sat there in stunned silence for a full second before opening the manual.
A new selection panel appeared.
Choose one:
Basic Aura Training
Basic Arcane Meditation
He picked Aura Training.
The result was immediate.
His level jumped again.
Then again.
Then again.
The village chief appeared not long after, looking at him as if he had just witnessed a miracle.
"Blaze King," the old man said, "I never imagined you were actually a genius."
Blaze exploded into laughter.
"That's right. I am a genius. Obviously I'm a genius."
The release hit him all at once.
The earlier humiliation, the starving mother, the insults, the dead-parent revenge bait, the hidden scroll—all of it suddenly snapped into place and converted into the purest kind of low-stakes triumph.
"Now this is good," he said, grinning at the camera. "This is really damn good."
The chief continued.
"There are low-level magical beasts outside the village. They may drop mana cores. Absorbing mana cores can increase your aura, and meditation can increase it too."
"I've heard that once someone rises high enough in the Empire, they can ask a high priest of the Holy Temple to cast resurrection magic. If that happens, your mother may still have hope."
Blaze froze.
Then he leaned toward the camera.
"Hold on. NPCs can resurrect people?"
His chat detonated.
"This game is insane."
"No, really, this game is incredible."
"Blaze, send the link. Right now."
"I'm making a mage. Nobody stop me."
"The emotional manipulation is disgusting. I'm playing it."
Blaze burst out laughing, copied the link into chat, and then slammed it into his stream title.
"Come on, then," he said. "Let's save Mom together."
Ethan watched the audience curve bend upward and knew this had done exactly what it needed to do.
It was all a setup.
Game design was not just mechanics. Not at this stage.
At this stage, it was emotional sequencing.
Pressure. Humiliation. Loss. Reversal. Reward. Hope.
The player did not need to understand the structure consciously.
The structure only needed to leave them too invested to quit.
He opened Wendy Frost's stream on the second monitor and repeated the process.
The same intrusion.
The same forced redirect.
The same opening trap.
The results, however, were entirely different.
Where Blaze cursed, Wendy nearly cried.
The starving mother hook hit her so hard she had to mute for a few seconds to steady herself.
Then the reversal came, the hidden scroll appeared, and instead of exploding with triumph the way Blaze had, she went quiet and started playing with complete concentration.
By the time she reached the grind, she was already fully trapped.
"I'm going to revive my mom," she whispered.
Then, a little louder, as if saying it made it more real:
"I'm definitely reviving my mom."
Ethan clicked his tongue softly and leaned back.
A game could hook people through power fantasy.
It could hook them through competition.
It could hook them through collection loops, guild identity, or public prestige.
But none of that reached as quickly as a simple emotional promise.
Save someone.
Get stronger.
Undo the loss.
Arcane Realm had all the normal machinery underneath that, but the machinery was not what players saw first.
First they saw the wound.
Then they saw the possibility of fixing it.
That was enough.
Inside the apartment, the secondhand server wheezed under the load.
Ethan checked the live numbers.
Two hundred seventy-three online.
He nodded once.
Stable enough for the moment.
Plenty of people were yelling that they wanted to play.
Much fewer had actually acted. That was normal. Interest was cheap. Friction filtered people.
But once the clips spread, once chat memes formed around the starving-mother opening, once players started boasting about hidden encounters and different class paths, the flood would get worse.
He did not need massive scale yet.
Not with this hardware.
The machine was old, patched together from used components and modified far past what any sane person would ask of it.
Even after all his changes, he doubted it could carry more than a thousand concurrent users without turning the game into a slideshow.
For now, that was enough.
He left the live dashboards open, shoved the game to one side, and returned to code.
Browser games were a starting point.
Nothing more.
In Ethan's real plan, once the server problem was solved, Arcane Realm would have to become a full PC game.
Even a small one would be enough.
A downloadable client could hold systems a browser never could. Better data handling. Better visual control. Better expansion paths. Better player retention.
A browser game could open the door.
It could not hold the house.
So he kept working.
Three more days disappeared.
He barely noticed them.
During that time, Ethan had no clear picture of what was happening outside his apartment.
He knew the numbers were climbing.
He knew the machine kept groaning.
He knew the clips were spreading.
What he did not fully see—because he had no official website, no real forum, and no public-facing company structure worth the name—was how furious the players had become.
The game was too good.
The server was too bad.
Every step lagged. Every movement stuttered. Every crowded zone felt like dragging your body through wet cement.
And still they kept playing.
That was the problem.
If the game had been mediocre, the server issues would have killed it.
Because it was addictive, the server issues only made people angrier.
Streams filled with complaints.
Chats filled with complaints.
Players cursed the developer, cursed the server, cursed the queue, cursed the lag, and then logged back in again the second they got disconnected.
Then they ran into a new problem.
There was no company name.
No official studio page.
No customer-service account.
No proper recharge portal.
No normal payment channel.
It took the players embarrassingly long to realize that the game they had been obsessing over was basically a black-market miracle with no front door.
On Blaze King's stream, he finally sat up and addressed the issue directly.
"This can't keep going," he said. "Seriously. The game is amazing, but it's lagging so badly it feels like every step is negotiating with God. Everybody knows why, right? Too many players, not enough server space."
His chat immediately agreed.
"Say it louder."
"The server is fighting for its life."
"I'd spend money if the game would let me."
Blaze pointed at the camera.
"Exactly. That's the point. The developer made something this good, and we all rushed in at once. That's good because it means the game blew up. It's bad because the server clearly can't carry the load. So what do we do? We fix it."
He slapped the desk.
"We crowdsource some servers for this guy."
A flood of agreement rolled through chat.
Then a viewer with a heavy spender badge sent the question everyone should have asked sooner.
"Great idea. Where's the recharge page?"
Blaze stopped.
His momentum died in full public view.
The silence lasted just long enough to become funny.
Then he pointed helplessly at the screen.
"That," he said, "is a very good question."
The answer, obviously, was nowhere.
The game had no normal recharge path at all.
Blaze sank back into his chair and laughed in disbelief.
"I've been playing this for three days," he said, "and I just realized this lunatic put out a game with no payment system."
On another stream, Wendy Frost was still grinding.
Of the major public players, she had gone the hardest and slept the least. Even when she was offline, she had been leaving her character meditating, hoarding resources, and pushing every possible edge the game would allow.
It was starting to show.
There were shadows under her eyes now, but her focus only looked sharper.
She glanced at the experience bar and inhaled sharply.
"Everyone," she said, voice tight with anticipation, "I'm almost there. As long as this mana core works, I'm hitting level ten."
Her chat surged instantly.
"The first player out of the starter village!"
"Come on, Wendy!"
"Three days. Seventy-two hours. Absolutely terrifying."
"This is gaming history for people with terrible sleep schedules."
Wendy laughed despite herself, then consumed the mana core.
The bar filled.
Level ten.
For half a second she just stared.
Then she pressed both hands over her mouth and made a sound halfway between a laugh and a gasp.
"I did it."
Her chat erupted.
The reaction was not only about her.
It was about what waited beyond the starter village.
Arcane Realm had done something most games only pretended to do.
The village actually felt like a place. Not a decorative box with three NPCs and a shop icon.
It had roads, farms, houses, boundaries, and enough real scale that even hundreds of players packed into it had not made it feel fake.
If the starter village was that large, what would the town be?
What would the class mentors be like?
What new traps, rewards, and hidden systems would open up once someone finally crossed the line?
Wendy swallowed, steadied herself, and looked at the village gate on-screen as if it were the edge of another world.
"Okay," she whispered. "Let's go."
Back in the apartment, Ethan glanced at the server stats again.
The machine was surviving.
Barely.
He took a drag from the cigarette burning low between his fingers and watched the cooling readout wobble in a way he did not like.
They were already past the point where this could stay small.
Good.
That had always been the plan.
A/N: If you enjoyed the chapter, add it to your library and drop a power stone. It really helps support the novel.