No need to dwell on introductions here. Players from multiple worlds could now connect with each other online, and the boost this gave to overall replayability was enormous. Just as Kairos finished purchasing those four modules, the system chimed again.
[Ding! Host has purchased the required number of advanced modules. Special module unlocked.]
[Special Module: The Border Between Illusion and Reality.]
[Purchase cost: 500,000 points.]
[Effect: Erases the boundary between the game and the real world, allowing objects from within the game to manifest in reality in some form, or allowing real-world objects to enter the game.]
Kairos stared at the description, completely dumbstruck.
A special module — what was this, and what did it mean?
Erase the boundary between game and reality?
Surely it couldn't mean what he thought it did.
But if it really did...
God. This was nothing short of a world-shattering ability.
He didn't yet know the specifics of how it worked, but just from the description alone, it was clear how terrifying this module could be.
There was only one goal now.
Grind out five hundred thousand points, no matter what it took.
Kairos drew a slow breath and closed the system panel.
At that moment, the system chimed again.
[Ding! New main quest triggered.]
[Quest Name: Dawn of Virtual Reality.]
[Objective: Travel to the Fifth World. Using that world's advanced technology, release a virtual reality game and reach two hundred thousand players within seven days.]
[Rewards: 50,000 emotion points, one random advanced module.]
Kairos read the quest details and furrowed his brow.
The difficulty on this one was no joke.
Two hundred thousand players in seven days was no small number. Especially in a world he knew nothing about. To attract that many players in such a short window, he would need to bring something genuinely impressive to the table.
He would have to get a proper read on that world first before forming any plan.
While he was still thinking it over, the system chimed once more.
[Ding! Transit Scroll fully loaded. Ready to activate.]
Kairos nodded and rose to his feet.
He first released Chandelure from her ball and told her to stay close.
Then he turned to Marshadow.
"Stay home and do whatever you like, but don't go wandering where people might see you. If you want to head out, remember to turn invisible."
Marshadow gave a nod to show it understood.
Kairos took a slow breath, drew out the scroll shimmering with pale light, and said, "Activate."
A flash of white light swept through the villa, and both Kairos and Chandelure vanished without a trace.
The Fifth World.
Neon City, Lower District.
Kairos felt as though someone had cracked him hard over the head. His skull was thick with fog.
He pried his eyes open to find himself lying in a cramped, suffocating space.
The air carried a foul layered stench, machine oil and mildewed walls and some kind of chemical solvent all tangled together, enough to make a person gag. He pushed himself upright with a grimace and peered out through a window smeared with holographic advertisement residue.
Outside, a grey and sullen sky pressed down over everything. A dark green rain fell in a thin, listless drizzle. The way it looked, it was probably acid rain.
Blinding neon signs strobed and flickered through the curtain of rain. Enormous holographic dancers gyrated in midair, flanked on all sides by advertisements for cybernetic implants, every image drenched in temptation and violence.
Somewhere nearby, a siren wailed. A drill-like whirring rose from the street below, threaded through with a few screams that made his scalp prickle.
Then a vast tide of memories flooded into Kairos's mind.
This world was called Neon City, a city with a distinctly cyberpunk character, technologically advanced in every regard.
The original occupant of this body had been a junior "neural architect" in Neon City's Lower District, responsible for writing the underlying code for VR environments.
He was a wretched figure buried in debt. He had refused to embed "psychic addiction code" into a violent gambling game his company was developing, and for that, he had been squeezed out, docked pay, and now stood on the edge of being laid off entirely.
On top of that, he had taken on enormous loans to cover his mother's surgery, and his life had collapsed into something that offered no way forward.
What a start.
Kairos let out a long sigh and turned to look at Chandelure, drifting quietly in the air beside him.
The blue-and-white flame Pokemon seemed deeply unhappy with these surroundings. The fire burning around her body had dimmed noticeably.
"Bear with it," he said. "We're only here for a while."
He reached out and gave Chandelure a gentle pat on the head. Something in his chest loosened slightly.
The opening was miserable, but it didn't matter.
As long as the mission got done, the rewards would be generous, and this world itself might change for the better.
"Since the task is to launch a VR game, I need to get a feel for what this world's Hyperdream Network is actually capable of." Kairos crossed to a desk buried under coils of discarded data cables and takeout boxes, and sat down.
He found a black metal headset wedged into one corner of the desk. This was the terminal device used to access the Hyperdream Network.
Kairos took a breath, drew on the original owner's memories, and felt along the back of his neck until his fingers found a coin-sized metal port at his neural interface. He plugged the headset's cable into it.
"Activate."
A faint electrical hiss followed, and the scene before him seemed to twist and warp.
The next instant, he was no longer in that narrow, lightless basement. He was standing beneath a vast and glittering canopy of stars.
[Welcome to the Hyperdream Network. Neural synchronization rate: 99.9%.]
A cold mechanical voice rang through his mind.
Kairos raised an eyebrow, genuinely surprised.
The level of immersion...
This world's technology really was something else.
Touch, smell, taste, sight, and even pain had been reproduced with flawless fidelity. If Kairos hadn't known he was connected to a network, he might have believed he had crossed into an entirely different and entirely real world.
"No wonder people fall into this and never find their way back out."
He looked at the streams of data flowing and weaving all around him, and nodded slowly.
Where virtual reality technology was concerned, this world had genuinely reached its peak.
That also meant he couldn't do what he had done on Earth and simply overwhelm the local game companies with better visuals and deeper immersion. If the gap couldn't be opened on the technical side, then content and gameplay were the only levers left to pull.
"Let's see what games are actually popular right now."
With a single thought, he transformed into a streak of light and shot toward the Hyperdream Network's central hub: the Game Plaza.
It was the Times Square of the gaming world. Countless enormous virtual screens hung suspended in the air, cycling through promotional footage for every game imaginable. The sensory overload was staggering, colors exploding in every direction, and sound effects crashing directly into the skull.
Kairos looked up at the most prominent display: the Hot Games Ranking Board.
Number one: Blood Colosseum.
Number two: Cyber Casino.
Number three: Virtual Idol: Zero.
His mouth twitched as he took in those three titles.
Quite a consistent aesthetic, he had to admit.
"Let's start with number one."
He tapped the Blood Colosseum icon and was immediately transported into a massive arena built in the style of a Roman colosseum. Tens of thousands of feverish spectators packed the stands, waving glowsticks and unleashing a wall of sound that shook the air.
In the center of the arena, two hulking figures bristling with oversized mech components were locked in a fight to the finish.
No technique. No artistry. Pure, uncut brutality.
One of them tore off the other's mechanical arm outright. Blood erupted in a wide spray that spattered across the screen.
The crowd ignited instantly, cheers and screams threatening to lift the roof off the place.
Kairos lasted less than five minutes before he'd seen enough.
Naked violence, nothing else.
He quit without hesitation.
"Number two."
He opened Cyber Casino.
This time he found himself in a gleaming, gold-saturated hall.
The roar of countless slot machines blended into a disorienting wall of noise.
The players around him all had the same look: bloodshot eyes locked on their screens, fingers hammering buttons in a frenzy.
Win, and they howled and shrieked. Lose, and they cursed the air blue before throwing themselves at the next round with even greater desperation.
Kairos watched from the side for a while. The game's underlying logic was brutally simple. No strategy, no thought was required. It existed purely to exploit greed and the compulsions of a gambling mind.
The so-called "jackpot" was nothing more than bait dangled by the system, keeping the players hooked like fish on a line.
"This? This garbage, stuffed with monetization traps and hollow odds, is sitting at number two?"
He shook his head and stepped out.
"Number three. Please, something with a little originality."
He opened Virtual Idol: Zero.
The scene shifted into a pastel pink bedroom, warm and cozy in its presentation.
A young woman with a perfectly proportioned figure and immaculate features was sitting on the bed. She looked up at the camera and blinked.
"Master, you finally came to see Zero. Zero missed you so much."
Her voice was very sweet.
Kairos tried a simple line: "How has your day been?"
The girl held her perfect smile and replied in a voice stripped of any real feeling. "As long as Master is here, every day is wonderful for Zero. Oh, Master..."
He asked a few more questions. Every answer came back the same way, a different arrangement of the same hollow words.
Her expressions and movements were executed with extraordinary realism. Even the veins beneath her skin were rendered in fine detail. But her eyes held nothing. They were still and empty, a void behind the performance. That was not a person's gaze. It was a carefully written program running its algorithm, doing exactly what it had been built to do: reward the user in front of it with precisely calibrated affection.
Virtual companions. And people actually liked this?
Kairos sighed and disconnected.
He stood in the middle of the Game Plaza and looked out at the players around him, all of them lost in killing, gambling, and fabricated emotion. He pressed a hand to his forehead and felt a quiet sadness settle over him.
"All that technology, and the tree grew crooked."
This world had virtual reality indistinguishable from lived experience. It had the computational power to simulate every human sense in perfect detail. And this was what they had chosen to do with it.
They had taken the most advanced tools humanity could build and used them to manufacture the cheapest possible pleasures. That really was something.
But if that was the situation, then what kind of game needed to be made was already obvious.
A sharp gleam passed through Kairos's eyes.
Just then, a violent wave of hunger surged up from somewhere deep in his stomach and broke his train of thought.
It was only now that he remembered: the original occupant of this body hadn't eaten or drunk anything since the previous evening.
The hunger had a grip on him, a hand twisting and clawing at his insides, sending dizzy spells rolling through his head.
"Need to find something to eat first."
Kairos cut the connection and removed the headset.
The brutal drop from that luminous world back into this one hit him hard. He grimaced against it.
The room around him was the same as before: dim, damp, loud with the grating noise pouring in from outside.
He looked at Chandelure floating quietly beside him.
"You must be hungry too. Come on, let's see what this world has to offer."
He gave a rueful smile, recalled Chandelure into her Poke Ball, and pushed the door open.
The hallway was choked with garbage. Sensor lights buzzed and flickered overhead. The walls were covered in scrawled graffiti and stains of uncertain origin, and the air held the dense smell of mold and urine.
Kairos pressed a hand over his nose and took the stairs down quickly.
Out on the street, the rain was still falling.
He had an umbrella, but the rain, carrying its sour and rotten undertone, still drifted against his face from time to time, cold and unpleasant.
Both sides of the street were lined with low shop fronts and stalls. Shouted sales pitches, arguments, and music all crashed together into one continuous din.
Most of the people moving through the street wore blank, hollow expressions and walked like they were somewhere else entirely.
Some of them strolled along with neural connectors perched on their heads, a strange smile playing at the corner of their mouth, clearly still submerged in some pocket of the Hyperdream Network.
People passed each other like ghosts drifting through the same space: no words exchanged, not even eye contact. The city was a vast and freezing machine, and every person in it was a lone, interchangeable part.
Kairos stopped in front of a vending machine.
He dug through his pockets for a while and came up with a few coins smudged with grease.
That was all the original body had left.
He studied the options on the machine for a long moment, then chose the cheapest item available: a bottle of Synthetic Nutrient Fluid.
A clunk, and a pale green bottle rolled out.
He bent, picked it up, twisted off the cap, and tilted it back for a long swallow.
A taste impossible to describe detonated across his tongue.
Somewhere between stale wet cardboard and cheap chemical sweetener — with a faint, creeping undercurrent of metallic blood.
It was awful. But it was calorie-dense, and after a few mouthfuls the savage, burning hunger began to ease.
Kairos sighed, bottle in hand, and wandered on through the streets without any particular direction.
He needed to understand this world more deeply. He needed to know what was missing for the people who lived here, what it was they actually wanted.
Without noticing how far he had walked, he found himself at the mouth of a narrow alleyway.
The alley was packed with discarded electronics and scrapped cybernetic components, and several large rats were threading through the refuse. Kairos was about to turn back when something moved in the shadows at the edge of his vision.
۞۞۞۞
~ Push the story forward with your Power Stones