Before stats. Before classes. Before code.

  There was Virex.

  She stood at the edge of the world as it ended—not with a roar, but a fracture. The sky split open like old stone, quiet and clean, revealing nothing behind it. A silence fell that felt too designed, like something had deleted the sound, rather than let it die.

  The wind didn’t touch her. Her emerald hair, braided with the bones of forgotten gods, hung still. Her cloak, stitched from starlight that had never seen time, shimmered as the twin suns bled down behind her. Beneath her, the final godbeast—Hal’uun, the Wound That Dreamed—lay dying. Its body stretched from peak to trench, leaking celestial ichor that twisted light and bent gravity. Even in death, it tried to imagine itself alive.

  Virex exhaled slowly. Her breath left in glowing threads of mana, rewriting the air itself. Behind her, the last beings of the old world stood in silence: dragons whose hoards had long turned to dust, kings forged in fire, sorcerers older than empires. They said nothing. Not yet.

  She stepped toward the carcass and whispered a name into its bones. A true name—one that predated even Hal’uun’s own memory. The air clenched. The stars paused. The beast crumbled, not in death, but in surrender.

  That was when the voice came. Not divine. Not spoken. A presence, imposed across her mind like a brand she hadn't chosen.

  [WELCOME, VIREX]

  [NEW SYSTEM DETECTED: Universal Order Protocol v1.0]

  [Would you like to OPT-IN to System Integration?]

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  [Y/N]

  The others panicked. The Tree-Speaker, once the mouth of forests, stumbled forward. “You cannot say yes,” he rasped. “This is not a god. This is something else. This is theft wearing law.”

  But Virex had already seen it. The shape of the future. The coming layers, the seams. What was happening wasn’t divine intervention—it was industrial. Clean. Calculated. The world wasn’t being saved.

  It was being repurposed.

  Something had breached the barrier between realms—not to worship, not to conquer, but to extract. A System. A protocol, built to consume and rewrite. Reality was the ore. Belief, the fuel. And players? Just the miners.

  "Yes," she said

  The others screamed as they were overwritten. The rules of the world shattered, replaced with parameters and interface. Skills. Titles. Levels. Limitations.

  But the System made a mistake. It could not process her.

  [SYSTEM INTEGRATION: SUCCESSFUL]

  [ASSIGNING USER ID: VIREX_PRIME]

  [CALIBRATING...]

  [WARNING: Power exceeds maximum threshold]

  [STATUS: ANOMALY]

  [All memories retained. All abilities unlocked. Manual tracking disabled.]

  It tried to bury her, hide her deep in its architecture. But Virex was not code. She was the source. And she understood something the System didn’t:

  Every structure has weak points. Even reality.

  And while the new world spun up around her—zones, dungeons, scripted lore, quest chains—she waited. Watching as the players arrived. Studying how they moved. How they leveled. How they learned the world as it was now—not as it once was.

  They didn’t know the ruins they farmed were tombs. That the bosses they hunted had names. That beneath every event was a layer of truth trying to crawl its way back into the light.

  So she hid.

  She changed.

  And in every major event, every reality fracture, every whisper of an "unbalanced anomaly" in the system—there was her shadow.

  Waiting.

  The war hadn’t ended. It had simply been reclassified.

  And one day, the players would have to choose:

  Continue playing the game.

  Or wake up from it.