Chapter 2 Chapter 2: A Reckless Top-Up and a Supreme-Tier Talent

In the endless white nothing, there was no up, no down, no left or right.

Julian felt like a rag being wrung out in a washing machine, a sick, grinding pressure squeezing between every bone in his body.

"Player soul detected. Reconstructing physical data."

The voice rolled through the void from every direction at once, flat and mechanical.

Julian looked down at his hands. His actual flesh was dissolving into translucent, mesh-like strands of data, then reassembling tighter, denser, stronger than before.

[Data reconstruction complete. Generating initial player panel.]

[Name: Julian Vance]

[Level: 1]

[Class: Unassigned]

[Strength: 5 governs physical damage and carry capacity]

[Agility: 6 governs movement speed and evasion]

[Constitution: 5 governs health and defense]

[Spirit: 8 governs mana and resistance to mental effects]

[Life Points Available: 4,000]

"Spirit's my highest stat. Guess all those years running spreadsheets in my head weren't wasted after all." Julian rolled his neck.

The mechanical voice returned.

[Initial talent awakening sequence beginning.]

[NOTICE: A Supreme Authority: Dual Talent Awakening Scroll has been detected in player inventory. Use now?]

"Use it."

The gray scroll in his grip shattered into a storm of gold dust that poured into him through his nose and mouth.

His organs felt like they'd been shoved into a furnace. The burn ripped a curse out of him before he could stop it.

"This garbage game tortures you just to give you a talent?"

The pain lasted only seconds.

[Scroll consumed successfully. System restriction overridden. Player granted two additional talent slots.]

[Talent extraction in progress...]

Deep in Julian's soul, the Eternal Star Core gave a sudden pulse.

[Supreme relic detected: Eternal Star Core. Privilege Two Divine Grace activated.]

[This draw will forcibly lock in one Supreme-tier talent.]

In the void ahead, dozens of glowing orbs began spinning wildly white, green, blue, purple, gold, faster and faster until they blurred into streaks.

Then three orbs slowed, drifted forward, and stopped in front of him.

One pulsed with an unsettling deep-purple light. One shimmered like pure platinum code. The last was a bottomless well of dark blue, like staring into a black hole.

[Extraction complete.]

[Talent 1: Warden of All Beasts (Supreme Tier)

Description: Born to command every creature that crawls, flies, or burns. Bypasses all level and rank restrictions on taming. Any beast you bond with transfers 100% of its base stats and core abilities directly to you, permanently.

Current bond limit: None.]

[Talent 2: System Loophole (Legendary Support Tier)

Description: You've found a crack in the game's underlying code. You can see hidden data on anything enemy weaknesses, unmarked maps, true drop rates. You may also spend Life Points to nudge local probabilities for anyone below your level, and to shrug off certain negative status effects entirely.]

[Talent 3: The Long Line (Epic Adventure Tier)

Description: Your fishing line reaches across dimensional barriers. Cast it into any body of water even open void for a small chance at rare drops, lost techniques, or forgotten treasure. Catch quality scales with bait quality.]

Julian stared at the three glowing descriptions and felt the corner of his mouth twitch, over and over, completely against his will.

"This isn't a game. This is a shopping spree."

The Supreme-tier Warden of All Beasts alone blew past every restriction a normal summoner class would ever face. Other players used their pets as backup. He'd just absorb their entire stat sheet directly into his own body. Ten thousand tamed monsters meant the combined stats of ten thousand monsters, permanently his. Pure, brute-force scaling.

System Loophole sounded crude, but the function was filthy in the best way full map vision and a built-in weakness scanner, essentially.

And The Long Line that one just suited him. Find a quiet spot, sit down, drop a line, and let the loot come to him. A landlord's dream talent.

[Talents locked in.]

[Teleporting to Origin Camp #10086 (Starter Zone).]

Good luck. Try to survive.

White light. Weightlessness again.

The moment Julian's feet hit solid ground, the smell hit first sweat, mud, and noise loud enough to rattle his teeth.

He steadied himself and opened his eyes.

A massive stone basin stretched out around him, walled in by towering gray rock. Faint blue runes flickered across the stone, forming a half-dome of shimmering light overhead.

Origin Camp #10086.

The place was packed shoulder to shoulder as far as he could see, nothing but heads. Office workers still in suits. Middle-aged women in pajamas. Bare-chested men covered in tattoos. Every walk of life crammed into the same square mile with no warning and no say in the matter.

The air had gone thin from too many people breathing it at once.

"Quit shoving, you're on my foot!"

"What is this place? I want to go home! Somebody let me out of here!"

"Where's my money?! I closed an eight-figure deal an hour ago where did it GO?!"

Panic rippled outward through the crowd like a physical thing.

Julian used his newly rebuilt body to shoulder through a gap and lean against a thick wooden support beam.

He looked up. A massive red hourglass floated in the air above the camp, endlessly counting down. Beside it, glowing text hung suspended:

[Survival Rule One: Your starting Life Points equal your remaining natural lifespan, converted. In Godsfall, 1 Life Point is deducted per day survived.]

[Survival Rule Two: Life Points reaching zero means true death soul and all.]

[Survival Rule Three: Life Points can be earned through kills, quests, or trades with other players.]

A wail rose from somewhere in the crowd.

"My lifespan's ticking down?! I'm seventy years old, how many years do I even have left?! And it's already draining?!"

"Where are the monsters?! They said kill monsters, where the hell are the monsters?!"

Julian watched all of it, unmoved.

The land around the camp was barren scrubland. Hundreds of thousands of people had just been dumped on it simultaneously even the weeds had been trampled into mud within minutes.

Players at the edges of the crowd, eyes bloodshot, tore through the dirt hunting for anything to fight. A single level-1 rabbit spawned near the wall and lasted less than a second before three hundred fists reduced it to paste. It dropped a measly 0.1 Life Points, snatched instantly by the fastest guy in the scrum.

"Too many mouths, not enough food. Textbook oversaturation." Julian shook his head.

In a crowd this dense, most of these people wouldn't even earn back the single point they'd lose today, let alone level up. They were going to sit here and starve out in real time.

A wall of muscle plowed through the crowd toward him, sending a skinny guy sprawling.

"Move! Coming through! Get out of the way!"

The voice hit like a jackhammer.

A man built like a refrigerator pushing six-foot-three, arms like tree trunks, still in a security guard's uniform carved a path through the crowd like a human bulldozer, a rusted length of rebar gripped in one fist.

Julian recognized him immediately.

"Duke?"

The big man spun at the sound of his name, rebar raised defensively across his chest. Then his eyes landed on Julian leaning against the beam, and his hard face split into a grin.

"Boss Vance! Thank God, a face I actually know! This place is a nightmare!"

Duke Harmon former head of security at Northgate Apartments, ex-Army, dumb as a brick in the best possible way, and the frequent recipient of Julian's leftover cigarettes and beer.

"That build of yours is a serious asset in here." Julian sized him up. Duke's base Strength had to be pushing double digits already.

"Boss, what the hell IS this? I was on night shift, blinked, and I'm standing here. Saw something in the sky about my life running out am I gonna die?!" Duke scratched his shaved head hard enough to leave marks.

"Short version the world flipped. Used to be, you worked to eat. Now you fight monsters to survive." Julian said it flat, like he was reading off a weather report.

"Fight monsters? WHERE. Those people out there nearly killed each other over one rabbit!" Duke brandished the rebar. "I tried to jump in, got shoved out, walked away with nothing."

Julian didn't answer right away. His gaze drifted to a sheer rock wall on the north edge of the camp.

To anyone else, it was a dead end smooth stone, polished like glass, nothing to grab onto.

But Julian activated System Loophole.

A faint red grid bloomed across his vision, laid directly over the gray stone. At one intersection of the grid, a shimmering seam glowed like a stitched-up scar.

[Map texture overlap bug detected. Hidden zone located behind this wall: the Hollow Deep Level 1–5 elite monster zone.]

[Trigger condition: Simultaneously press the three raised stones in the lower-left corner of the wall.]

"There it is." Julian's mouth curved.

Information nobody else has that's always been the sharpest weapon in the room. A hundred thousand people out there tearing each other apart over one rabbit, and here was an untouched gold mine, hiding in plain sight.

"Duke. You hungry for real meat?" Julian pulled a beat-up pack of cigarettes from his pocket one of the only personal items that had survived digitization and lit one.

Duke's throat bobbed. "Boss, you got connections in this place already?"

"Stick with me. You fight what I point at, tank what I tell you to tank, and you get a cut of whatever we pull. Deal?"

"Say no more!" Duke thumped his own chest with a fist hard enough to echo. "Country owned my life before. Now it's yours, Boss. Point and I'll walk."

"Move out."

Julian stubbed out the cigarette and, with Duke at his side, started shoving toward the north wall.

The walk wasn't peaceful.

In a crowd packed that tight, friction turned into shouting turned into shoving every few feet.

"You blind? That's my foot!"

"Move! You're blocking the path!"

Julian didn't so much as raise a hand. Duke just planted his six-foot-three frame in front, rebar loose in one hand, and the crowd parted like the Red Sea without another word needing to be said.

They reached the base of the north wall a few minutes later.

The area was oddly open a dead end nobody wanted to waste time near.

Except for the dozen or so men blocking it in a loose half-circle.

At the front stood a tall, wiry guy with bleach-blond hair and a loud floral shirt, waving a short knife at anyone who got too close.

"Back off! This spot belongs to Mr. Teague! Says this wall's got a weird vibe to it, might be a hidden quest. Anybody gets close, this knife doesn't care whose face it meets!"

Julian stopped walking.

Mr. Teague. Corbin Teague Meridian City's favorite spoiled tyrant.

The same man who, in the diary's version of events, had bled Marcus Dade dry and left him to starve in Sector Zero. Small world. Except the servers had only just opened right now, Corbin's crew was just a handful of street thugs muscling territory with numbers, nothing more.

"Boss, want me to clear these clowns out?" Duke's grip tightened on the rebar, knuckles going white.

"Not yet."

Julian held up a hand to stop him, eyes sliding over the bleach-blond kid.

[Target: Bleach (Corbin Teague's subordinate)]

[Level: 1]

[Stats: STR 4, AGI 5, CON 4]

[Status: All bark, hollow inside extreme nerves are cutting his swing speed by 30%]

Data, laid out free of charge.

Julian stepped forward.

"Stop right there! I'm talking to you! You looking to die?" Bleach saw him coming and raised the knife in warning, voice cracking on the last word.

Julian kept walking like he hadn't heard a thing.

"Screw this" Bleach lunged, knife aimed at Julian's shoulder.

Julian didn't dodge.

A half-second before the blade touched fabric, Duke moved.

CRACK.

Duke's rebar caught Bleach square across the wrist. The knife hit the dirt. Bleach's scream came out an octave too high for a grown man.

"GET THEM!" Bleach shrieked, cradling his ruined wrist, and the dozen men behind him surged forward.

"Duke. Thirty seconds," Julian said, stepping back with both hands in his shorts pockets, bored as a man waiting for a bus.

"Ten's plenty."

Duke tore through the group like a wolf through a flock of sheep. Years of real combat training against street-brawler instincts wasn't a fight it was a demonstration. He went for wrists and knees, methodical, almost gentle about it.

Screaming filled the dead-end lot.

In under fifteen seconds, all twelve men were on the ground, writhing, out of the fight for good.

The bystanders who'd been too scared to say a word earlier just stared, slack-jawed.

Julian ignored the groaning on the ground and walked straight to the wall.

He crouched, followed the red grid burned into his vision, and found the three faintly raised stones arranged in a triangle in the lower-left corner.

One breath. He pressed all three at once, hard.

BOOM.

The smooth stone face buckled inward with a low groan, splitting open into a dark crack just wide enough for one body to slip through.

Cold, foul-smelling air rushed out.

"Duke. With me."

Julian squeezed through the gap. Duke spared one glance back at Bleach, still whimpering in the dirt, s

pat once in his direction, and followed Julian into the dark.

The stone wall sealed shut behind them with a grinding roar, fitting back together like it had never been broken at all.

Outside, a crowd of stunned onlookers was left staring at solid rock and no answers.