Chapter 1

I am the lead architect of this massive virtual sandbox world.

To save my NPC wife from a fatal car crash, I enabled a cheat code for her and lied, claiming she was a "VIP player" paying to experience an immersive life-simulation game.

She bought it completely. Not only did she openly flaunt her wealth to buy off a male assistant in front of the whole company, but she also trampled all over me, treating me like a "low-level NPC."

"I am the absolute main character of this world, and the system will always bail me out. As for you, you're just a line of junk code. Get out of my sight immediately."

Watching her face become twisted and arrogant from the illusion of privilege, the last trace of warmth in my eyes completely died out.

I calmly signed my resignation, revoked all her financial shields and vitality armor with a single click, then logged off and returned to the real world.

I knew that the moment I left, stripped of my protection, she would be instantly swallowed alive by the brutal laws of survival.

——

The downtown hotel banquet hall was buzzing with voices, the massive crystal chandelier illuminating the center of the room with a brilliant glare.

Tonight was the annual charity gala hosted by the business coalition, and the floor was packed with the city's most powerful investors and corporate executives.

I stood in the shadows near the terrace, holding a glass of flat club soda. My gaze bypassed the glamorous crowd and landed on the dazzling woman right in the middle of the hall.

That was my wife, Irene.

The thirty-four-year-old was wearing a black evening gown tonight, holding a flute of champagne as she chatted with several Wall Street hedge fund managers. As the CEO of the hottest tech firm in the city, she naturally basked in the awe-struck gazes of everyone around her.

Standing beside her was a man nearly ten years her junior.

That was Ryan, the personal assistant she had exceptionally promoted just a month ago. Right now, Ryan was standing next to Irene with an intimacy that completely crossed professional boundaries. He was holding her clutch, frequently leaning in to whisper in her ear, earning light, breezy laughs from her. By all appearances, they looked like the true co-hosts of tonight's event, while I was simply a stranger who had stumbled into a high-society gathering.

Irene pulled a dark blue velvet box from the clutch Ryan was holding and snapped it open in front of a dozen elite executives. Inside rested a $300,000 luxury watch.

"You handled the European market merger beautifully lately, Ryan. You've earned this reward." Irene's voice wasn't loud, but it carried enough for the entire circle to hear clearly.

She didn’t shy away from anyone. She simply grabbed Ryan's left hand and expertly fastened the obscenely expensive mechanical watch around her male assistant's wrist. Once it was secured, she even gently stroked the back of his hand with her thumb.

Uncontainable smugness immediately surfaced on Ryan's face. He took a half-step forward, his shoulder almost pressing against Irene's, his eyes flashing with a youthful arrogance. "Thank you, Irene. This watch goes perfectly with my suit."

Soon, people started glancing my way.

Hushed whispers and undisguised snickers began to ripple through the crowd. Countless gazes—pitying, mocking, or simply hungry for drama—pricked at my skin like needles.

As her husband of three years, by normal human logic, I should be marching over there right now, face flushed with fury, to throw my club soda into that young assistant's face and demand to know why she was humiliating me in public.

But I did nothing of the sort. I just stood where I was, holding my glass, staring at her familiar face while an overwhelming sense of exhaustion washed over me.

To the outside world, Irene was an impeccable business genius. But three years ago, she was just an ordinary entrepreneur drowning in massive debt, barely able to make rent.

Over these past three years, her company expanded at a terrifying, market-defying speed. Every severed funding chain miraculously healed at the last possible second, and the most notoriously difficult investment firms would suddenly give her the green light.

Everyone assumed it was her extraordinary business acumen, but only I knew that all of this was the result of my unseen interventions.

Irene didn't know that the world she lived in was actually an unimaginably vast virtual sandbox program. And I was the external administrator of this system.

My job was to maintain the operation of this virtual environment while secretly observing the life trajectories of specific subjects within the system.

Over our long time together, I had developed genuine feelings for her. To give her the pristine life she dreamed of, I abused my backend privileges to obliterate every obstacle in her path. Those hostile takeovers by competitors, the sudden ruptures in material supply chains—they were all crises I secretly erased with a few keystrokes. I gave her a perfect world.

Everything could have kept running smoothly forever, until a fatal accident happened six months ago.

Late that night, Irene went to bed early after back-to-back meetings. I was sitting in the study as usual, pulling up the operational interface that only I could see, vocally dictating the month's parameters to the external control room.

I hadn't noticed that the study door wasn't shut tight, nor had I realized Irene had woken up to get a glass of water.

She stood outside the door and heard every single word of phrases like "modifying base-level data" and "elevating resource allocation privileges."

When she pushed the door open and asked who I was talking to, I had to cover up the horrible truth that her entire reality was a simulation. To prevent someone as immensely proud as her from having a total mental collapse, I played it off as a half-joking reassurance.

I told her that she was actually a top-tier billionaire from the outside real world, who had paid an astronomical sum for a ticket to experience life in this recreational virtual reality game. To ensure full immersion, the system had blocked the Player's real memories.

And I was simply a tutorial NPC assigned to her by the game system.

At the time, Irene's first reaction was that I was pulling her leg, and she brushed it off completely. That clumsy lie seemed to have been quickly buried under her busy schedule.

Until the car crash a few days later.

It was pouring rain that evening, and the roads were dangerously slick. Irene and I were driving to a restaurant when, halfway across an intersection, a massive eighteen-wheeler loaded with heavy steel lost its brakes, blew through a red light, and plowed directly into the passenger side—right where Irene was sitting.

According to normal laws of physics, she had absolutely zero chance of survival.

But to save her life, I forcefully intervened with the system, locking the defense mechanics of Irene's avatar at the maximum level.

Accompanied by the ear-piercing shriek of crunching metal, our sedan was completely mangled, flipping several times across the asphalt before sliding to a halt. I was lacerated by the shattered windshield and suffered a broken arm.

Irene, however, was completely unscathed. She blinked in daze, unbuckled her seatbelt, pushed open the twisted car door, and walked right out.

In the pouring rain, under the utterly stunned gazes of the arriving paramedics, Irene looked down at her own body. Let alone fatal injuries, her pale skin didn't have a single scratch from the glass or even a bruise.

She turned her head and looked at me, lying on a stretcher with my face covered in blood.

I saw the shift that took place in her eyes. The terror of surviving a near-death experience rapidly faded, replaced by an unfamiliar, ecstatic frenzy.

What had just happened utterly shattered her perception of reality.

She completely bought into the joke I had spun days prior.

She became convinced that this world was a simulation and that she was a Player in this game, blessed with an absolute, invincible halo granted by the system.

From that moment on, the arrogance in her heart began to metastasize.

She stopped treating her company's partners like human beings; the second anyone voiced an objection, she would tear up the contract right in front of them. She brazenly embezzled company funds to buy an exorbitant private yacht because she wholeheartedly believed the system would automatically generate a plausible paper trail to balance the books.

I tried to step in and stop her, but she was completely deaf to my warnings.

A month ago, she hired Ryan into the company. This young man, who had absolutely zero business experience aside from a handsome face, was directly shoved into the executive assistant position.

She didn't bother hiding her favoritism toward him. She would casually hang up on my calls just to go play a round of golf with Ryan.

She wasn't seeking the thrill of a scandalous affair; she was simply high on the rush of trampling over the rules. To her, she was merely interacting with an aesthetically pleasing NPC in a game. And I, her pre-programmed "husband," was structurally incapable of rebelling against a Player.

The smooth jazz drifting through the banquet hall snapped my mind back to the present.

Irene seemed to have grown bored of the sycophants surrounding her. She withdrew her gaze, took her champagne glass, and led Ryan straight toward me.

The crowd parted automatically to make way for her, and every eye in the room zeroed in on the three of us. The vicinity grew so quiet that only the band could be heard.

"Irene, the chairman of the board is here tonight." I suppressed the deep disappointment in my chest. "You represent the company's public image. In a public setting, you need to know how to dial back your behavior."

Hearing my words, the smile on her face turned cutting and cruel.

With sickening naturalness, she reached out to smooth a wrinkle on Ryan's suit, then leaned in close to my face.

"Save your breath trying to bind me with the rules of this coded garbage. I am the Player here. Whether it's this company or this little gala, I'll play however I want. It’s not your place as an NPC to lecture me."

Irene straightened her posture, her eyes sizing me up like a lifeless tool. "Do something useful before I delete you—go to the bar over there and fetch a glass of champagne. Ryan's glass is empty."

A few unsuppressed scoffs echoed from the bystanders.

A husband being ordered by his wife to serve drinks to her boy-toy assistant—this wasn't just a standard humiliation. This was dragging my dignity across the floor.

I stood under the bright lights, looking at Irene.

Beneath that exquisite face, nothing remained but an unrecognizable monster completely corrupted by privilege.

All this time, I thought that even if she had misunderstood the nature of reality, as long as I was by her side, she would at least retain her baseline humanity. But I had severely underestimated how depraved a person could become once handed absolute power.

Staring at her haughtily raised chin, the very last spark of warmth in my heart finally and slowly died out.

Since she was so certain she was a Player, I wondered how many days she could survive on her own if I just revoked all her privileges right now.

I didn't go fetch the champagne for Ryan, nor did I react to the mocking stares burning into my back.

I set my glass of water down, turned around, and walked toward the revolving glass doors of the grand hall.

"The system is going to reset you for a program glitch, Arthur!"

I didn't look back.

The moment I stepped out the hotel doors, the night wind swept a fine drizzle across my face.

I closed my eyes and reached deep into my consciousness, linking to the dormant base-level control panel.

"This is Administrator Arthur."

I issued the final command calmly within my mind, my voice stripped of all emotion.

"Target subject Irene's behavioral logic has completely collapsed. Terminate all backend assistance. Disable security shields and resource protection protocols. Prepare to execute logout sequence. Sever all interventions."