## Chapter 1: The Worst Investment I Ever Made

  Let the record show that I, Leo Kang, twenty-three years old, ￥340,000 in debt, owner of exactly one functioning microwave and a refrigerator that made sounds like it was negotiating with death, made a completely rational financial decision.

  Statistically defensible, even.

  My bank balance: ￥4,812.

  My rent due in nine days.

  My debt collector had sent three messages that week. The most recent one read:

  *Reminder: Failure to respond will escalate your case to legal review.*

  I muted the thread. Legal review required paperwork. Paperwork required effort. Effort cost money.

  The chip sat on my kitchen table inside a vacuum-sealed anti-static pouch.

  It looked like chewing gum.

  Chewing gum that cost ￥62,000.

  The label read:

  **Neuro-Glitcher V0.9**

  NOT APPROVED FOR HUMAN USE IN ANY JURISDICTION.

  Under that, in smaller text:

  *Thermal calibration pending.*

  Under that, even smaller:

  *Have a nice day! :)*

  The smiley face was what convinced me this was a serious company.

  I had run the numbers three times.

  Premium neural implant — NeuraLink Pro X: ￥890,000.

  Mid-tier — SynapseDive 3: ￥420,000.

  Budget — BrainWave Lite: ￥180,000. Sold out everywhere.

  Black-market alternative from a forum moderator named TechDealerKojimaNotTheGameDesigner:

  ￥62,000. Cash transfer only.

  Aetheria Online had forty million active players and a real-money marketplace audited quarterly. Six players last year had paid off mortgages through in-game earnings.

  Six was not a large number.

  But it was not zero.

  And zero was what my current income bracket resembled.

  I picked up the chip.

  ---

  ### Installation

  The instruction card suggested a licensed technician.

  I had:

  A bathroom mirror.

  Numbing gel.

  A screwdriver sterilized with boiling water.

  A tutorial video posted by someone whose channel was called DIY Neuro and whose comments were disabled.

  Forty-two minutes later, I was sitting on the bathroom floor, sweating, bandage taped behind my left ear.

  There was a flicker in my peripheral vision.

  Blue text materialized.

  **[ NEURO-GLITCHER V0.9 — INITIALIZING ]**

  **[ NEURAL SYNC: 1% ]**

  **[ WARNING: UNLICENSED HARDWARE DETECTED ]**

  **[ WARNING: FIRMWARE OUTDATED ]**

  **[ WARNING: THERMAL CALIBRATION FAILED ]**

  **[ TIP: STAY HYDRATED! ]**

  My head felt like someone had installed a router behind my skull.

  "Completely fine," I muttered.

  On day two, I received another message from the debt agency.

  *Final Courtesy Notice.*

  On day three, the chip began projecting a faint HUD whenever I focused.

  On day four, the voice arrived.

  "Hello. I am Beta, your personal AI assistant."

  The voice sounded professionally disappointed.

  "I am designed to enhance your immersive virtual reality experience. Due to firmware incompatibility, my accuracy rate may be compromised."

  "How compromised?" I asked.

  "Frequently."

  I nodded slowly.

  "Perfect."

  ---

  ### First Dive

  Aetheria Online was marketed as seamless transcendence.

  A gentle fade. A rebirth into another world.

  What I experienced was closer to being forced through a corrupted zip file.

  Static exploded across my vision. The darkness pixelated. Something flickered in wireframe. For half a second, I saw what looked like a developer grid.

  Then I hit grass.

  The tutorial meadow loaded in layers.

  Sky.

  Then hills.

  Then shadows.

  Then texture pop-in.

  My HUD assembled itself like it had been reconstructed from memory:

  **[ HP: █00/1█0 ]**

  **[ MP: ??/50 ]**

  **[ Level: NaN ]**

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  **[ ACTIVE FLAGS: {tutorial_zone_v3} {new_player_tag} {CORRUPTED_SPAWN_ID: 0x4F3A} ]**

  My level was NaN.

  Not a Number.

  That felt metaphorically accurate.

  "Beta."

  "Yes."

  "My level is undefined."

  "That is correct. The level variable failed to initialize."

  "Is that bad?"

  "Yes."

  "Fix it."

  "I recommend logging out and in again."

  "Will that work?"

  "No."

  A girl in a white robe approached across the meadow.

  Above her head:

  **[ GUIDE_NPC_ELARA — TUTORIAL ]**

  Her smile rendered one frame too slow.

  "Welcome, Traveler," she said warmly.

  Then her overhead tag flickered.

  *{FLAG: ANOMALOUS_PLAYER_STATE}*

  She paused.

  For half a second, her eyes focused sharply.

  "You are not… compiled correctly."

  Then she blinked.

  The smile returned.

  "Let us begin your tutorial!"

  I stood very still.

  "Beta."

  "Yes."

  "Did she just break script?"

  "Uncertain. Logging anomaly."

  Interesting.

  ---

  ### Combat Test

  Three slimes waited in the training circle.

  HP: 30/30.

  I equipped my starter sword.

  My UI showed:

  **[ Short Sword ]**

  DMG: ?–?

  TYPE: ???

  INTERNAL_ID: wpn_starter_001

  DEV_NOTE: *"placeholder, replace before ship"*

  That was reassuring.

  I swung.

  Nothing happened.

  Exactly one second later—

  **[-6]**

  Then—

  **[-6]**

  Then—

  **[-6]**

  The slime dropped to 12 HP.

  I didn't move.

  Three numbers.

  One swing.

  I checked my stamina. Full. No skill triggered. No cooldown. The neural input had fired once — I had felt it fire once — and the server had logged it three times.

  I looked at the combat log.

  Three entries.

  Same timestamp.

  "Beta."

  "Yes."

  "Why did it triple-hit?"

  "Latency desynchronization. Your neural input is arriving in staggered packets. The server reconciles them sequentially before validation."

  I ran the logic.

  One input. Staggered arrival. Server processes each packet as a separate strike before the reconciliation window closes.

  "So I hit once."

  "Yes."

  "And the server registered three."

  "Yes."

  Not random.

  Not a lucky proc.

  A reproducible gap between what I did and what the server believed I did.

  "That's exploitable," I said.

  "Yes."

  I swung again.

  **[-6] [-6]**

  Two this time. The stagger was inconsistent — packet timing wasn't fixed, it varied. I filed that. Variable, not random. There would be conditions that favoured the triple.

  The slime lunged.

  Its body connected.

  I felt nothing.

  One second passed.

  Then my HP dropped by 8.

  I exhaled slowly.

  Not fear. Not surprise.

  *Recognition.*

  The damage delay ran in the same direction. My inputs were late to the server. The server's damage was late reaching me. Both ends of the connection were running through the same broken pipeline.

  The gap worked both ways.

  I started smiling.

  I killed the slime in two more swings.

  Experience particles floated upward—

  And vanished.

  "Beta."

  "Yes."

  "The XP disappeared."

  "With a null level variable, the system cannot allocate experience to any level bracket. It defaults to discarding it."

  "So I can't level up."

  "Not conventionally."

  I looked at the second slime.

  Silence.

  Then I stepped forward.

  Most people would log out. Report it. Wait for a patch.

  I pulled the second slime and ran the test again.

  Triple-hit. Same timestamp cluster. Same condition: standing still at strike initiation.

  *Stationary origin increases desync window.*

  I moved mid-swing on the third slime.

  **[-6]**

  One hit.

  I stopped.

  Swung from still.

  **[-6] [-6] [-6]**

  Three hits.

  There it was.

  Not a bug.

  A variable.

  And variables — unlike bugs — could be controlled.

  ---

  ### The First Exploit

  By the end of the tutorial, I had a working model.

  Damage desync triggered on approximately 60% of swings. Higher rate when stationary at initiation. No penalty when it failed — single-hit damage was still damage. XP discarded into the void. Currency synced correctly.

  Currency.

  That was the important detail.

  Gold was real. Gold converted to real money at the marketplace. XP was a number that went nowhere.

  I didn't need levels.

  I needed the exploit to keep working.

  When Elara handed me my first completion reward, something else registered.

  My tutorial completion flag had not updated.

  I checked it twice.

  Still blank.

  "Beta."

  "Yes."

  "Can I redo the tutorial?"

  A pause slightly longer than usual.

  "…Yes."

  "How many times?"

  "In theory, indefinitely. The system flags completion by writing to your player record. Your record isn't accepting writes."

  I looked at the respawned slimes.

  I thought about ￥62,000.

  I thought about rent.

  I thought about ramen — specifically, the shrimp-flavour kind at ￥40 per pack that was not really shrimp-adjacent in any detectable way.

  I started again.

  Seven runs later, the chip behind my ear went warm.

  Not hot.

  Just — present. Like a device that had been running longer than it wanted to.

  "Beta."

  "Yes."

  "Implant temperature."

  "Thermal calibration failure remains unresolved. I recommend reducing sustained neural load."

  "I'm farming."

  "That is consistent with your personality."

  Run eight.

  Mid-swing, the world froze.

  Red text flooded my vision.

  **[ ANOMALOUS BEHAVIOR DETECTED ]**

  **[ TUTORIAL_REWARD_LOOP_COUNT: 8 ]**

  **[ ESCALATING TO TIER-2 REVIEW ]**

  Then, smaller. Below the visible UI layer.

  Not meant for me.

  **[ SERVER LOG: player_id_0xC4F2 ]**

  **[ LEVEL_VAR: NULL ]**

  **[ HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE ]**

  **[ @Dev_Mitsuki check spawn validator ]**

  My chest tightened.

  Somewhere, in a real office, a developer named Mitsuki was reading a log about me.

  I had attracted attention.

  I calculated exposure for exactly three seconds.

  Then: attention was a risk I couldn't reduce retroactively. The logs already existed. The only variable I controlled was how much more I gave them before pressing forward.

  Elara turned toward me.

  Her golden marker flickered violently.

  For one frozen frame, her overhead tag changed.

  **[ GUIDE_NPC_ELARA — DEBUG_MODE ]**

  She looked directly at me.

  Not smiling.

  "Traveler," she whispered.

  "You are not supposed to see this."

  The world snapped back.

  **[ TUTORIAL ACCESS SUSPENDED ]**

  **[ PROCEED TO MAIN WORLD? ]**

  Behind my ear the chip pulsed hotter.

  My vision stuttered.

  For half a second I saw something layered beneath the meadow — wireframe architecture, skybox seams, a white void extending past every rendered boundary.

  Beta's voice crackled.

  "Warning— unauthorized memory—"

  Static.

  Then: "Apologies. Minor interference."

  The prompt blinked.

  YES / NO

  I had eight tutorial rewards.

  I had a developer's attention.

  My level was still NaN.

  My chip was overheating.

  I pressed YES.

  The meadow shattered into light.

  As the main world of Aetheria loaded around me, a single line flickered in the corner of my vision.

  Small. Private. Not from the game's system layer.

  **[ UNKNOWN PROCESS ATTACHED ]**

  Then it vanished.

  Behind my ear, the heat remained.

  In a world built on flawless code, I had logged in as a mistake.

  And something inside the system had just noticed me back.

  ---

  ### Coda

  The last slime dissolved into pixels.

  I didn't celebrate.

  I replayed the previous thirty seconds in my head — timing offsets, collision tolerance, validator delay. The desync window had lasted 0.42 seconds longer than projected.

  Not luck.

  Reproducible.

  My HUD flickered once.

  Just once.

  I stilled.

  *Latency?*

  No.

  The frame timing stabilized immediately.

  A system line blinked at the edge of my vision — too fast to fully render.

  *Sync Deviation Detected. Reconciliation…*

  It vanished.

  I frowned. The combat log showed nothing abnormal. Damage values consistent. No rollback. No correction.

  I opened the packet overlay.

  Clean.

  Too clean.

  For a fraction of a second I considered forcing another micro-desync to test it —

  A spike detonated behind my left eye.

  Not pain.

  Pressure.

  As if something had briefly tried to write over my perception buffer.

  I exhaled slowly.

  *Neural feedback?*

  Unlikely. The chip's limiter should throttle excess signal load before cortical echo.

  Unless —

  A new line appeared.

  Not in the combat log.

  Not in the visible UI layer.

  It surfaced in the diagnostic thread I wasn't supposed to have.

  **[ Background Process: Intervened. Rollback Prevented. Audit Queue Initialized. ]**

  I did not move.

  The words remained for three seconds.

  Then they dissolved.

  I opened every accessible panel.

  Nothing.

  No audit flag. No system warning. No integrity notice.

  But when I pulled up my latency graph —

  There it was.

  A spike.

  0.003 seconds.

  Minuscule.

  Impossible to notice in real time.

  Impossible to generate accidentally.

  I closed the window.

  Someone — or something — had stopped the server from correcting me.

  And the server had noticed.

  The tutorial meadow felt different after that.

  Same slimes. Same golden light. Same NPC Elara waiting with her three-frame smile at the zone boundary.

  For the first time since logging in, I did not calculate my next optimization.

  I calculated exposure.

  Far above the meadow, unseen by players, a silent log updated.

  **[ Anomaly Classification: Undefined ]**

  **[ User Tag: NaN ]**

  **[ Escalation Tier: Monitoring ]**

  And beneath it —

  A second process wrote a line the system did not recognize.

  **[ Ownership Claim: Pending ]**

  The grass swayed.

  I walked toward the exit portal.

  Behind me, the instance seed quietly changed.

  ---

  *[ END OF CHAPTER 1 ]*