I followed the instructions in the manual.
I expected darkness.
Instead, I woke inside white.
Not the white I’d learned to hate: not hospital ceilings, not flaking paint, not humming fluorescent tubes.
This white was… smooth. Padded. Calm in a way that felt wrong, like fingers smoothing your hair while a knife waits just out of sight.
A pod enclosed me, its walls curving around my body like a cocoon.
A voice spoke — not into my ears, but across my thoughts:
Welcome, Akai.
You may choose your form now.
The air in front of me split open, empty space turning into a surface. Outlines shimmered to life — waiting for me to imagine a form I could wear. Taller, sharper, winged, armored, glowing, powerful.
Fantasy shapes that felt like lies.
This is your world, the voice said. Be what you want to be.
What I want to be.
As if I’d ever had the time for that question.
I’d never hated my face, but I’d never had the luxury of disliking it either. Survival doesn’t leave much room for vanity.
Heroes, monsters — none of those labels were ever offered to me in reality.
And all this process did was make my anxiety coil tighter.
Every second in this menu felt like it was pulling me further from Airi.
Did this world not understand that every moment wasted here was another tick closer to losing her?
That the hospital’s month limit didn’t care if I was busy choosing a skin in a dream?
“I don’t care,” I muttered. “Just… leave it.”
The thought barely formed before the interface reacted.
My current self appeared on the surface: tired eyes, ordinary frame, work-weary posture.
Choice confirmed.
Form locked.
The white walls cracked, then parted.
A reflection of me waited in the gap. Not perfect, but close enough that I recognized how exhausted I looked even when rendered by… whatever this was.
I stepped forward and the reflection stepped into me — or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, something tugged behind my eyes, like alignment settling into place.
Akai,
Form stabilization complete.
You have unlocked: Level 0.
The pod flickered and dissolved.
A translucent system window appeared:
Reward: 200 Dream Coins
Gate to Utopia: Unlocked
I stepped out.
Color hit me like a slap.
The landscape was almost aggressively beautiful — too saturated, too vivid, like a brochure version of a world that had never seen rust or mold or hospital corridors.
Grass hummed at the edges.
The sky looked painted but alive.
Everything here felt like it had never heard the word scar.
I hated it instantly.
The window flickered.
A new category unfurled:
UPLIFT REALITY
My heart lurched.
There was only one item listed:
Elixir to Life
Cost: 1,800,000 coins
I stared at the number until it blurred.
It felt like mockery.
As if this place also wanted to prove I couldn’t save her — not even in a fantasy.
But the hospital wasn’t offering anything either.
It had handed me an ending and asked for my signature below it.
This, at least, was something.
A shape. A path.
An impossible number is still a number.
“If this is my only bet,” I whispered, “then fine. I’ll grind. I’ll crawl. I’ll do whatever it takes.”
The world hummed like it had heard me.
The training started that night.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
The system called it Phantasm Calibration — a poetic way of saying: let’s rake your trauma open and call it a tutorial.
The first scenario dropped over me like a curtain.
The orphanage.
The smell of damp floors and cheap detergent.
The manager’s footsteps.
His ring tapping the metal bedframe.
Airi’s small fingers gripping the fabric of my sleeve.
Except here, he wasn’t just a man.
His shadow stretched too long.
His smile too wide.
Phantasm: ORPHANAGE WARDEN
Threat Level: Low
Low.
Right.
My short sword felt unfamiliar.
In the real world, all I’d ever had were lies, stubbornness, and a barely functioning door lock.
Here, I had steel.
He moved toward Airi.
I didn’t think — I lunged.
The first swing was messy, fueled by old rage more than technique.
The second carried every night I’d stayed awake listening for his keys.
The third was for every time I’d swallowed my fear so she didn’t have to taste it.
The blow landed.
His form shattered into shards of shadow and static, dissolving into nothing.
For a moment, the silence felt… clean.
A notification chimed:
Calibration Progress: 12%
Reward: +180 coins
Satisfaction pulled tight in my chest — sharp and guilty.
I’d never laid a hand on the real man.
This was just a construct.
But watching him fall — even here — felt like something inside me finally stretched its cramped limbs.
If the Night Lattice wanted me to fight ghosts for points, then fine.
I had plenty of ghosts.
The next drill after clearing phantasm was something the system called the Wild Layer.
The pod and white walls were gone.
The world shifted into a sprawling zone of strange forest and metallic growths, nature redrawn by a tired architect.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.
A floating system message only said:
Cryptic.
Which, honestly, fit my life perfectly — getting dropped into worlds with half-baked manuals while others get full walkthroughs.
My musings didn’t matter.
The first warning came as a blur.
Something tore through the air toward me — all teeth and motion and intent.
Instinct shoved my hand to my short sword.
I swung.
The creature clipped the blade and scattered into glitching fragments.
Grim Bat – Defeated
Reward: +30 Coins | Sync +2%
Before I could breathe, more shapes stirred at the edges of my vision — bats, jointed things, gliding shadows, all tagged by the system, all eager to make me the tutorial corpse.
I fought.
Badly, at first.
Every misstep cost me breath.
My arms burned.
My lungs betrayed me.
Every weakness carved into me by years of exhaustion surfaced as my body tried to mutiny.
But I kept moving.
Every point felt like it slid straight onto Airi’s bedside table.
Time blurred.
My muscles trembled.
The sword grew heavier by the second.
Then I got sloppy.
Something slammed into my side, knocking me flat. Air ripped from my lungs.
When my vision cleared, I saw it above me:
A stag—but wrong. Antlers lined with pale fire. Eyes like empty static.
Echo Deer – Hostile
I threw my arms up instinctively.
“Wait—! Stop—!”
The words ripped out of me, desperate and useless.
All I could think was: If I die here, does my chance die with me? Does my one ridiculous bet end because I wasn’t fast enough?
The Echo Deer’s antlers came down—
And split.
Not because of me.
A clean strike severed the creature at the neck.
It dissolved into sparkling static.
I blinked through the fragments.
She stood there, sword lowered, framed by metallic trees.
A Dreamer.
An actual Dreamer.
“Thanks,” I said, voice rougher than I wanted. “Guess I wasn’t built for wildlife.”
I meant it as a joke.
It sounded like a confession.
She didn’t laugh.
Her eyes sharpened, studying me like she was trying to categorize me in a system that hadn’t bothered to include a category.
“Name?” she asked.
A simple question.
But in this world, even a name felt like a commitment.
“…Akai,” I said after a beat that stretched too long.
I wasn’t sure why I hesitated.
Maybe I wanted to check if my name still felt like mine here.
It did.
Just quieter.
She nodded.
“You new?” she asked.
My instinct was to say yes — because I felt new, raw, barely glued together.
“No,” I heard myself say.
Then I corrected, “Yes. …Actually, I don’t know.”
The words tumbled out awkwardly.
I wasn’t used to explaining myself to strangers — especially not in nightmare forests with invisible systems watching.
We walked because standing still made it feel like the world would bite us again.
The forest hummed around us.
Metallic undertones in the leaves.
Light bending wrong.
Shadows stretching without a sun.
“What brings you here?” she asked. “Did you end up bruised too?”
Bruises?
I wasn’t sure what she meant.
But her voice wasn’t like the hospital’s.
Or the committee calls.
Or the cautious sympathy of relatives who avoided tragedy like it was contagious.
So I answered honestly, carefully.
“No bruises. I got a notification,” I said. “On my phone. No source. Just… appeared. It said it could grant me what I wanted.”
I felt her attention sharpen.
“I know it could’ve been a trap,” I continued. “Spam. Scam. Cult. Whatever makes it easy to walk away. But what it offered meant more than my life.”
She paused.
“What did it offer?”
Not greedy.
Just curious.
Maybe a little worried.
I looked away, watching the weird light catch on the edges of the trees.
“I came here hoping I could find something. Or someone,” I said. “Some proof she’s still… somewhere.”
“She?” she echoed.
I nodded, throat tight.
“Yeah. My—”
The world froze.
Not metaphorically — literally.
Sound cut out.
Wind. Hum. Footsteps.
Even the air stilled in my lungs.
Colors sharpened into unnatural clarity.
A low resonance rolled beneath us.
The trees flickered, roots glowing pale white — the same shade as the pod walls.
For one impossible moment, I felt eyes.
Not hers.
Not mine.
The system’s.
The word sister never left my tongue.
The world yanked me — upward, sideways, nowhere.
She widened her eyes — hand twitching toward her weapon.
And the forest tore away.
My last thought before the white swallowed everything:
Even in a dream, I’m not allowed to finish my sentences.
After that, she was gone.
I wished for her help — selfishly.
She was strong.
Maybe strong enough to help me save Airi.
I saw her a few more times.
But every time I tried to connect, something shifted between us — like the system couldn’t handle two people sharing space.
I wondered if it couldn’t serve two wants at once.
I don’t really know how games work.
Eventually, we met again.
I learned her name — Amaya.
And somehow, it was easy to tell her about Airi.
Maybe because I never had a space to share my thoughts.
Maybe because I never had the luxury of things like friendship.
Maybe that’s why I was so desperate for our grind together.
Maybe that’s why the world kept pulling us apart.
