Chapter 1: Eve of Transmigration
Night had settled over the city. The skyline wore a permanent grey haze, the kind that no longer surprised anyone.
Factory chimneys out on the industrial belt never stopped working, pushing thick coils of black smoke into a sky that had long since forgotten what stars looked like. Apocalyptic, by most standards. Here, it was just the evening commute.
Arakaki Tomoya moved quickly through the broken streets, head down, and turned in at the gate of a rundown apartment block. It was the kind of building that looked cheap even by the standards of its neighborhood, which was already cheap. The other tenants were mostly manual laborers, people living on thin wages and not much else. Tomoya, with a university degree and a mid-level management title, was the obvious anomaly.
The people close to him understood why he lived this way. One word covered it: YGGDRASIL. The majority of his paycheck went directly into the DMMO-RPG of the same name.
YGGDRASIL had launched in 2126 CE, leveraging network and nanomachine technology to achieve full-body immersion so convincing that the virtual world was essentially indistinguishable from a physical one. Its extraordinary freedom of gameplay had drawn in vast numbers of players from across the globe.
That golden age had lasted twelve years. Now it was dying.
Tomoya stepped into his apartment, pulled off the disinfectant mask he never left home without, and breathed.
"Even after thirty-some years in this world, I still can't stand it here." He looked at the wall. "But that ends tonight."
The calendar was the only thing hanging in an otherwise bare room. One date was circled. Today. The day YGGDRASIL's servers went dark.
"Twelve years of preparation." Something a little unhinged crept into his voice, and he didn't bother correcting it. "Finally. Finally I can get out of this place."
He meant every word.
Arakaki Tomoya was not from this world. He had arrived via the classic method: one semi-truck, zero warning, and a one-way ticket somewhere he had initially assumed was a distant future timeline or a parallel Earth. It looked plausible enough. The pollution, the overcrowding, the relentless grind of a society that had long since squeezed out any margin for comfort.
Working from knowledge carried over from his original life, he had passed the fiercely competitive examinations this world was so fond of, enrolled in a university, and eventually clawed his way into a mid-level management position. Respectable, technically. Still miserable.
Then YGGDRASIL appeared, twelve years ago, and something dormant inside him finally cracked open.
He had poured nearly every spare hour and every spare coin into the game since that day. When the official shutdown notice dropped, he sold his apartment. He rode the initial wave of player panic and bought up game resources and World Items at drastically reduced prices, moving quickly and deliberately while everyone else was still processing the news.
The players watching him do it thought he was the most committed bagholder they had ever seen. Tomoya knew what those lines of data actually represented.
He ate the last piece of bread in the apartment, settled into his chair, and pulled on the gaming helmet.
A brief unmooring, a sense of the floor going sideways, and then everything sharpened.
The cramped bedroom was gone. In its place stood a cathedral of almost unreasonable grandeur, its vaulted ceiling catching the light in sheets of gold.
The Cathedral of Faltil. Tomoya had joined this guild in the game's later years, and when the steady exodus of senior members had thinned the ranks enough, he had stepped into the leader's chair.
It was the right call. Building something from the ground up, from server launch to final shutdown, was a slog with questionable returns. The smarter play was to join an established organization, let them absorb the early costs, and position yourself for the chair when it opened.
His early years were better spent on something more valuable anyway: cataloguing YGGDRASIL's near-infinite class combinations, mapping out build synergies, tracking down the hidden classes that had never made it into any public documentation.
That had been the plan. Then a World Item had fallen into his hands almost by accident, and the plan had quietly grown into something much larger.
Tomoya stood alone in the empty guild hall and ran his thumb across the ring on his finger.
The Ring of Ouroboros. One of the Twenty. The highest tier of World Item in existence.
The admin permissions he had applied for from YGGDRASIL's management team -- if everything unfolded the way he expected...
A chime from the GM communication system interrupted his thoughts. Messages on the friend channel.
"You're always on whenever I log in, leader. How much do you actually love this game?" -- Silshana
"Didn't I tell you to get some rest after work? Why are you still on?" -- Judgment Knight
"Leader, you're one to talk. You're playing too."
"Knew it. Leader didn't want to miss the shutdown." -- Silshana
Silshana. Her ending in the original work wasn't one he liked to dwell on. But her conduct there, and her actual performance as a team member in the real world, both pointed to the same conclusion: she was a genuinely good person. There was no version of events in which Tomoya turned that down.
"Did you want to come join us?"
"Leader? You could come over here."
A few seconds passed.
"Fine, fine. Everyone's here on our side, but leader just had to say the old guild wasn't strong enough and run off to that new one."
"We'd all have more fun if you were here. Leaders who only chase strength, honestly..." -- Silshana
She kept going.
"I'm docking your pay tomorrow." -- Judgment Knight
Tomoya knew exactly which lever to pull. The perks of being someone's actual manager.
"Th-that's not allowed!!" -- Silshana
He let the protests run without responding.
His gaze moved to the second World Item sitting in his inventory: the Yggdrasil Fruit. Picked up in the same shutdown-panic sweep that had netted most of his stockpile. Not one of the Twenty, but World Item strength was World Item strength. As long as Silshana wasn't killed by something in the Saint Slayer Spear's category, it would bring her back.
He had prepared what he could. There was nothing left to do now but wait.
The server clock ticked down.
23:59:58
"So it really is happening."
23:59:59
"My new life."
00:00:00
"Kehehehehehehe."