One moment Cael was at his desk.

  The next he was flat on his back in a forest, staring up at a sky the wrong shade of blue.

  Not subtly wrong. Aggressively wrong. The kind of wrong that made his brain keep sliding off it the way a tongue found a missing tooth.

  He stayed down and focused on breathing. The air hit his lungs cold and dense, carrying a smell that had nothing in common with recycled office air conditioning. Dirt. Something green and sharp underneath that. And underneath that, something else he had no name for yet.

  He was alive. He was somewhere. Those were the two things that mattered right now.

  The trees above him were enormous.

  Not tall. Old. There was a difference, and these were the second kind. Trunks wider than rooms, bark carved by centuries into patterns that looked almost deliberate. The canopy was so dense that sunlight had to force its way through in isolated beams, and where they hit the ground they illuminated nothing useful.

  "Forest," he thought. "Real forest. Not a park. Not managed land. Something that's been left completely alone for a very long time."

  Then he heard the screaming.

  South of him. Many voices. The kind of sound that happened when hundreds of people realized something at the same time and none of them had words for it yet. Underneath the panic, one voice calling a name on a loop, long past expecting an answer.

  He listened without moving.

  Far enough that he wasn't in immediate danger. Close enough to know he wasn't alone in whatever this was.

  He checked himself.

  Dress shirt. Trousers. The dress shoes he looked at for a moment and said nothing about. Phone dead. He tried it twice because he was thorough, not because he expected different results. Wallet, pen, and the napkin from his desk still crumpled in his right hand, still damp with coffee from a Tuesday morning that had apparently just ended.

  He set the napkin on the root next to him.

  Something large had been moving to the north since he landed. He could hear the weight of it in the undergrowth. Slow, patient, not adjusting its pace for him at all. Whatever it was, it wasn't worried.

  "Note the direction," he thought. "Note the pace. Don't run."

  He sat up slowly, checked the treeline before standing. A dark bird watched him from a branch above, mildly curious, not even close to alarmed.

  Then the panel appeared.

  Not on a screen. Not a reflection. Just there, floating in his actual field of vision, transparent and perfectly still, the way a thought appeared except this one had borders and text.

  "Okay," he thought. "There it is."

  SYSTEM NOTIFICATION Welcome to Eranth. The Game has begun. All begin as nothing. All may become anything. Survive. Grow. Claim your place in this world. The last Sovereign standing shall receive one Absolute Wish. No rules. No mercy. No return. [TAP TO OPEN PANEL]

  He read every line.

  Then read them again.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  No return.

  Not a warning dressed up as flavor text. A plain statement. The door behind him was closed. Locked from the outside. Whatever Tuesday he'd been having was finished and nobody was going to open a portal and ask if he'd like to come home.

  "Right," he thought. "So that's how it is."

  He tapped it open.

  Name: Cael Ardis

  Age: 24

  Origin: Earth Migrant

  Cultivation: Unawakened

  Affinity: Lightning / Space / Void

  Potential: ★★☆☆☆

  Manual: Thunder Void Foundation Sutra ★☆☆☆☆

  Skills: Void Step ★☆☆☆☆ · Lightning Sense ★☆☆☆☆

  He read it carefully.

  Earth Migrant meant the system had a category for him. This had happened before, or had been designed to happen. Neither option was particularly reassuring.

  Three affinities. He had no reference point for whether that was unusual. He suspected it was.

  Two stars out of five potential. Could be average. Could be the floor. He had no comparison data yet, which meant the number was close to useless for now.

  "Manual and skills," he thought. "Those I can actually test."

  He pushed Lightning Sense the way you pressed something unfamiliar, not sure if it would respond.

  Something responded. He wasn't sure it counted.

  A wall of noise hit him all at once, formless and dense, like trying to hear a single conversation inside a stadium. No direction. No definition. His brain had no categories for the input and what it received was static, the kind that came with pressure behind the eyes and absolutely no useful information attached to it.

  He cut it off. The headache arrived two seconds later, sharper than he'd expected.

  "Nothing," he thought. "I got nothing from that."

  He stood there for a moment with the headache.

  "Unawakened. No Qi stored. No pathways open. I just asked a Qi-dependent skill to run on a body that hasn't been prepared for it." He almost laughed. "That's like turning on a machine that isn't plugged in and being surprised it makes noise instead of working."

  It had responded, at least. The skill existed. It just had nothing to run on yet.

  He looked down.

  A beetle was crossing the root near his foot, moving with the focused conviction of something that had places to be and wasn't going to let a stranger's arrival slow it down.

  Then he noticed the second panel.

  It had been there the whole time. Sitting below the blue one, half-hidden underneath it. Darker. Bordered in black. Carrying a quality of stillness that the first panel didn't have, like the difference between a lit room and one that had been dark for a long time and was comfortable with it.

  He hadn't noticed it because he hadn't been looking. He looked now.

  SOVEREIGN'S CODEX: Classification:

  Unknown Seal Status: 1 of 9 Active

  Functions: Appraisal I · Summon Interface I · Dynamic Quest Log

  Codex Fragments: 0

  "Hidden," he thought. "No announcement. No tutorial. Classification: Unknown written right at the top, like even the system housing it doesn't have a proper name for what it is."

  The standard blue panel had arrived with a notification visible to, presumably, every person who had just landed in this world. This one had just been sitting here silently. Waiting for him to look in the right direction.

  "If it was standard," he thought, "there would be documentation. There would be a tooltip. There is none of that."

  He tried Appraisal on the beetle. It was right there and he was curious.

  Name: Forest Scarab

  Type: Small Beast

  Cultivation: None

  Affinity: None

  Potential: None

  Fate: Eaten by a bird. Approximately four days.

  He went still.

  The beetle kept moving. It had no idea.

  Four days. It was crossing a root with complete conviction, going wherever it was going, doing whatever mattered entirely to it, and it had four days left and it didn't know.

  Four days.

  He watched it until it disappeared over the edge of the root.

  "Don't draw conclusions from a beetle," he thought. "One result. Could mean anything."

  But he didn't move for a moment longer than he needed to.

  A notification blinked at the edge of the black panel.

  QUEST: Easy

  Objective: Survive your first night in Eranth alone

  Reward: 3 Codex Fragments

  He accepted it.

  Two panels. One announced to the world, one sitting silent underneath with functions the other didn't have and a classification that didn't exist. A Fate reading on a beetle with four days left.

  "Higher ground," he thought. "I need to see what I've landed in before I make any decisions."

  He brushed the dirt from his trousers, looked at his shoes one more time with quiet resignation, and started toward the slope he'd seen through the trees.

  The thing to the north went quiet as he moved.

  He tracked the direction it had been even without sound to follow, and didn't stop watching that side of the treeline until the slope started rising beneath his feet.

  End of Chapter 1