The silver text of Welcome Back, Player Null fractured into a million shards of light.

  The darkness of the capsule vanished, replaced by a sensation that ripped Ethan Tan apart from the inside out. It was not pain in any physical sense, but something worse: a tearing of his very essence. His soul, once whole, was being pulled into quarters, stretched across an impossible distance.

  He screamed, but he had no mouth. He thrashed, but he had no limbs. He was pure, terrified awareness, shredded into ribbons and stitched into something new.

  Then, as suddenly as it began, it ended.

  The tearing was gone. He gasped as sensation slammed back into him—solid ground beneath his back, a cool breeze ghosting across his skin, the scents of dust and petrified wood filling his lungs. And something else—an iron tang, faint but undeniable. The smell of old blood.

  He opened his eyes.

  Above him was a sky of unnatural clarity, a pearlescent dome with no sun, no scattered clouds. Only a single white star, brilliant and cold, traced a slow arc along the world’s edge. Morning, but not a morning he knew. Its light was too sharp, too clinical, painting the landscape in stark, unnatural contrast.

  He sat up.

  Ruins stretched in every direction, the skeleton of a forgotten civilization. Pillars toppled and cracked, their inscriptions worn into anonymity by time. Rusted shards of armor and weapons littered the ground, relics of a battle so ancient it felt less like history and more like geology. The silence pressed down on him with the weight of tragedy.

  A translucent window blinked into existence.