CHAPTER 1

  Creation

  Bash was dead, irrevocably.

  Yet awareness remained, suspended in the dark.

  Not by chance or miracle, but because he had planned for this. One final contingency. His consciousness streamed to the Shard. Technology built for the obscenely rich, those few who could buy forever. So advanced it was basically science fiction.

  Bash, however, was never one to pay cover. He'd found a backdoor instead. A deprecated side project in gamified afterlife. The catch? Unlike normal players who could jump between Shards, he was locked into one. Forever stuck in a role-playing game.

  Focusing his thoughts outward, Bash began to push against the void that surrounded him. Slowly, he gained the faintest sense that there was an edge, where his awareness ended, and the dark began. Just as he was starting to probe that boundary, a mechanical voice, slightly feminine, flickered into existence.

  > “Welcome, player. Initialization complete.”

  Bash hesitated, trying to speak, “Uh... hi?” It felt weird to talk in this place, it was more like projecting his thoughts rather than a physical act.

  > “Please select from the following menu.”

  The void pulsed, and three glowing words materialized out of nothing.

  Lovely. Shot in the head and sideloaded into a mobile game. Bash stared at the minimalist interface. “Hey, uh... whoever you are? Any tips on what to do before I ruin my reincarnation?”

  > “Unable to complete request, please make a selection.”

  “Of course not. That’d be too easy.” He paused. “Can you at least tell me what you are?”

  > “I am the Shard AI Assistant. No designation currently specified.”

  Bash hadn’t planned on getting his own personal AI. Still, it was a welcome bonus. The real question was what to call it. Maybe Shardy, Shardet? Or… Sharday?

  “I’ll just call you… Shai. Does that work?”

  > “Name assignment accepted, new identifier; Shai.”

  “So, Shai. What can you actually do?”

  > “After you make selections, I will confirm your input.”

  “So, you’re basically a worse version of Clippy?” He snorted at his own joke. “Alright, let’s try picking a Race.”

  The panel opened, displaying a surprisingly short list of options.

  Again, the surprising lack of lore and epic cutscenes reminded Bash of fantasy, circa 1995. “Can you tell me what these races do?”

  > “Unable to complete request, please make a selection.”

  Right. Less annoying paperclip and more four-word encyclopedia. Bash stared at the nearly blank panel, a rather boring start to his new life. He pushed down the annoyance and said, “Human.” Not a clever choice, but it had the least number of question marks.

  > “Selection confirmed.”

  Next, the Class panel opened, with only two options.

  “Seriously? Only two options!? What about Skills?”

  The panel switched, showing more plain text.

  At least this time, each option opened into secondary menus with at least a dozen options each. All the classics were there, including Swordsmanship, Archery, Fireball, and Healing. But there was still a surprising lack of flavor or descriptions. “Anything you can tell me about skill synergy?”

  > “Unable to complete…”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Bash cut in. “Forget I asked.”

  He continued to skim, but without any details, it was all basically guesswork. “Alright, Shai, please just select Warrior and five random skills.”

  > “Selection confirmed.”

  Next, a gaudy overlay blinked onto the screen.

  The sudden message made Bash freeze. What am I doing? Three lousy panels to decide the rest of my existence. Human or Elf? Warrior or Mage? Sword or Bow? Were those really the only options?

  ‘You can’t find new solutions by following instructions.’ His father’s words, or maybe it was a quote from The Lego Movie… Either way, it applied here. Somewhere behind these perfectly straight lines, there had to be cracks.

  Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

  With an effort, he scanned left to right and around the edges of his periphery. The only other thing that stood out was a tiny, unassuming gear icon in the bottom right.

  Settings. Always the most underexplored dungeon. Mentally clicking on the icon, a new menu appeared.

  Wait, why accessibility? Bash thought. Did they really care about disabled users in the afterlife?

  He clicked into the menu and found the usual suspects. Screen reader, text-to-speech, high-contrast mode. But buried among them was something unfamiliar. “Shai, do you have any idea what Perspective Shift does?”

  > “Alters visual orientation for improved interface.”

  “Ha! So you can talk! Why didn't you mention this?“

  > “Information was not requested.”

  With a sigh, Bash toggled it on, and the void shivered. Panels fractured, duplicating images. His viewpoint shifted left, right, up, and down simultaneously.

  Nausea overwhelmed him as his sense of direction collapsed. He tried to close his eyes but couldn’t. The realization that he didn’t have eyes anymore added to the mounting panic. Together, they crushed him down.

  “Shai... Shai! Turn this off!”

  > “Unsupported function. User control is required.”

  The fractured viewpoints crowded him, each angle fighting for attention. Yoga... yes, yoga. I’ve never done yoga. Why am I thinking about yoga? Not the point. Focus. Concentrate.

  He tried to focus on a mostly empty spot, and the spinning slowed. This is just a bad UI, isolate the variables. Narrowing his focus to a single point, the other angles became translucent, layering over one another. The viewpoints settled into translucent images, revealing layers of data and notes, with panels stacked behind panels.

  Bash reopened the Race menu. It now displayed stat distribution charts, with each option having twenty-five total points distributed across five different categories.

  The allocations varied slightly between races, but the totals were perfectly balanced. Thanos would be proud.

  When he focused on Human, a tooltip popped up.

  “Shai, is this real, or just leftover dev spam?”

  > “Transformation occurs if requirements are met.”

  Bash dove back into the menus. The tooltips had all the real details. Some of it was standard RPG math, but a few things made him pause. For example, Strength and Wisdom made sense. They scaled in opposite directions. One boosted physical damage, the other magical.

  Intelligence, though? It was overpowered. It increased the rate at which you leveled and how quickly skills improved, including those related to Intelligence. Recursive loop, anyone?

  He opened the skill menu next. A tooltip that had been hidden before now provided context. Each skill granted plus one stat, based on its category. The mapping was obvious once he saw it. Fighting boosted Strength, Athletics gave Dexterity, Tempering increased Constitution, Spells enhanced Wisdom, and Utility boosted Intelligence.

  Bash read each skill and looked for anything that would stack or enable game-altering abilities. After skimming the list several times, he narrowed it down to his four favorites.

  With four picked, he just needed one more. He skipped past Fireball and Swordsmanship. Too obvious. And everything else seemed way too linear. Then, he found something strange. There was something faded and shoved between two useless crafting skills.

  Bash was about to click away. The fact that it was one-time use and wouldn’t improve made it garbage tier. But the ability to rearrange your stats was pure RPG, and it kept calling to his inner min-maxer. At the very least, it deserved to be played with. Not like I’m in a rush or anything. I’ve got the rest of my afterlife.

  Bash started to move the numbers around. If he dumped every stat point into Intelligence, he’d level faster, and his skills would improve more quickly. Combined with Skillful and Insightful, new skills and improvements would stack with his leveling rate, creating exponential growth. However, that is the very definition of a glass cannon.

  He experimented with lopsided distributions, close to discarding the skill when something caught his eye. He froze and stared at the space where the flicker had been. Nothing. He shook his head and continued.

  It happened again. Fainter this time, barely there. Bash stopped and rewound his last few changes. What had he just done? He replayed the sequence, dumping all his points into Intelligence. There, a brief pulse from the class menu, gone before he could focus on it.

  He reset everything and tried again, this time watching the class menu directly. Intelligence was creeping upward, and right when he hit maximum, the class menu flickered once more. Switching his focus to the class menu, he found a new option that hadn’t existed before.

  “Now THAT’S what I’m talking about.” Bash mentally fist-pumped.

  He ran the numbers again. And again. And again. Different stat combos. Different races, classes, and builds. Hours passed. Or what felt like hours. Time moved strangely in the void, and Bash lost himself in the obsession. Empires could have risen and fallen back in the real world. The sun could have even burned out, and still he wouldn't have noticed.

  And despite all his efforts? Nothing. Not one goddamn thing offered a similar hidden option. But that was fine. He'd already found the jackpot.

  Sure, Oracle was the ultimate all-in bet. But the math didn't lie. It was the only real choice, and Bash had never been one to shy away from a calculated gamble.

  With every exploit ready, there was only one more thing to do. “Okay, Shai. Time to see how this game really looks.”

  Permanent termination didn't sound good. Before Bash could ask about the error, the void collapsed around him.