The alarm clock didn't ring. It didn't need to. Dan Guzman's anxiety woke him up at 4:30 AM, just like it did every single day for the past five years. Dan was twenty-three, but if you looked at the dark circles under his eyes and the permanent slump of his shoulders, you'd think he was forty. He sat on the edge of his bed, staring at the peeling paint of his small room in the humid heat of the city. The air was sticky, smelling of exhaust fumes from the street below.

  Just get up, he told himself. If you don't get up, they don't eat.

  He moved like a machine. Shower. Cold water because the heater was broken. Cheap instant coffee. The commute was a blur of sweating bodies on the train, elbows in his ribs, and the blank stares of other people just trying to survive.

  At work, it was the same script. "Dan, I need you to finish this report. I have a date tonight". His supervisor, panicked and wearing a fake smile, dropped a stack of papers on his desk.

  "Okay," Dan whispered.

  "Speak up, man! You're such a quiet guy. Thanks, you're a lifesaver".

  He wasn't a lifesaver. He was a doormat. A pushover. He knew they laughed at him in the breakroom—the guy who never said no, the guy who wore the same two shirts because he couldn't afford new ones. But he took the work. He finished it. He clocked out.

  When he got home, the real job began. "Did the overtime pay come in?" That was the greeting. Not "How was your day?" or "Are you okay?" Just his mother, standing in the kitchen, scrolling through a shopping app on a phone that was newer than Dan's. She was wearing a dress she bought last week—"investment pieces," she called them, priced in thousands of pesos, to look like the high-society woman she desperately wanted to be.

  "Not yet, maybe next week," Dan said, placing an envelope on the table. It was 80% of his salary.

  "This isn't enough!" his mother said. Dan just ignored her because of the fatigue from work, but before he could go to his room, he heard his father's voice booming from the living room. The older man didn't even look at Dan and just said, "The neighbor's son just bought his parents a car. What are you doing with your life? You're ungrateful. We raised you, we fed you, and this is the best effort you could show us? Pathetic bastard!"

  The words were like dull knives. They didn't cut sharply anymore; they just bruised the already battered parts of his soul. Constant swearing, Narcissism, and Gaslighting. It was a daily ritual from an Asian household where nothing is ever enough.

  Dan looked past them toward the small room where his two little sisters were doing homework. They looked up, their eyes wide and worried. They were the only reason he hadn't walked into traffic yet. They were the anchors.

  "I'm sorry. I'll try even harder," Dan mumbled, following the usual response script.

  He skipped dinner. He wasn't hungry. The guilt his father shoveled onto him filled his stomach like lead. He retreated to his room, the only place where Dan existed for himself. He locked the door and let out a breath that shuddered in his chest.

  Why do I have to be the parent? he thought, booting up his old, noisy PC. Why did I have to raise myself? Why does nobody take me seriously? He clicked on the icon that was his only escape: [Chronicles of Aethelgard].

  It was his obsession. A web novel he had read a thousand times, finally adapted into an open-world RPG. In this world, you could play anyone. The Hero. The Villain. The Shopkeeper. The Beggar. Dan loved it because he could see the story from every angle. He knew every plot twist, every tragedy. He knew that some characters had "Fixed Fates"—deaths you couldn't stop, only delay.

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

  He scrolled through the character selection screen. Knight Captain. Magic Tower Master. Village Idiot. He had lived a hundred lives in this game to escape his one miserable reality. But there was one portrait, greyed out at the bottom of the list, that he always skipped.

  [Character: Dominus Re Leviathan] [Status: Unlocked] [Difficulty: Impossible]

  Dan hovered the mouse over the portrait. It was a young man with stark white hair and deep purple eyes that looked like a gate to the abyss.

  "Dominus," Dan muttered, shaking his head. "The most useless character in the game and even in the lore". He leaned back in his chair and chuckled sarcastically. "He's literally just a gender-bent version of Elsa from Frozen, except he doesn't get a catchy song or a talking snowman. He just sits in his room, freezing, until he dies alone. Who would play this pathetic character?"

  Dominus wasn't weak because of low stats. He was weak because he was cursed. In the lore, he possessed the "Curse of Absolute Zero". He couldn't touch anyone without freezing them. He couldn't hold a single copper Ruvia without it becoming brittle and shattering. He lived in isolation and died in the prologue in a tragic, dumb way before the main story even began.

  "Why would anyone play a character whose only purpose is to die in the prologue?" Dan scoffed. "A depressing life inside a game? I already have that out here".

  His eyes felt heavy. The screen blurred. The exhaustion of the double shift, the emotional weight of his parents, the hunger—it all crashed down at once.

  "Just... five minutes..."

  Dan rested his head on the desk, his hand still resting on the mouse, hovering over Dominus's portrait. The hum of the computer fan was the last thing he heard before the darkness took him.

  [System Synchronization Complete.] [Welcome, our Dearest Pathetic Player.]

  It's Cold.

  That was the first thing Dan felt. Not the sticky, humid heat of the tropics. It was a biting, needle-sharp cold that went straight to the bone. "But wait did it say 'pathetic player'? but anyway, where am I?"

  Dan gasped, his eyes snapping open. He wasn't at his desk. He wasn't in his cramped room with the peeling paint. He was lying in a massive king-sized bed, surrounded by silk sheets that felt like ice against his skin. The room was cavernous, lit by the pale blue moonlight streaming through a gothic window. The furniture looked expensive—dark mahogany, silver trims—but everything was covered in a thin layer of frost.

  "What the f..."

  His voice stopped him. It wasn't his voice. It sounded like Death: deep, and utterly devoid of warmth. Dan sat up, his heart hammering. He looked at his hands. They were pale. Deadly pale, with long, elegant fingers. The calluses from typing reports were all gone.

  He scrambled out of the bed and stumbled toward a large mirror in the corner of the room. Staring back at him wasn't the tired Asian salaryman. It was a boy of maybe eighteen. He had hair as white as fresh snow and chilling, deep purple eyes. He was beautiful, in a terrifying way, but he looked sickly and fragile.

  As Dan placed his hand against the mirror to steady himself, a web of white frost instantly spread from his fingertips, cracking the glass with a sharp CRACK.

  [Passive Skill Triggered: Leviathan’s Blood (0 Kelvin)]

  [Current Body Temperature: -273.15°C]

  The blue system window floated in the air, seemingly mocking him. The realization hit him harder than his father's insults ever could. He knew this pathetic face. He knew this vibe. He knew this cold.

  He was the one character he had refused to play. The one with the inevitable death. The one with the curse that made intimacy and creating children impossible.

  Dan stared at his reflection and felt a vein pop in his forehead.

  "Son of a bitch," he whispered, his breath coming out as a cloud of white fog. "Not this character... is my depressing life not bad enough already?"

  "I have enough misery in real life," Dan whispered, his eyes drooping. "I don't need to roleplay it, too."

  He sighed in defeat like it’s the end of the world.