“See you in the game!” Wyatt said after they had dinner. The walk he’d just taken had calmed him down. While his mind was still throbbing a little every now and then, he chucked it up to overstimulation. His hands had also gotten back to work again. Not going to lie, it felt pretty good!

“Remember to put the dishes into the washer,” August said and went to his room.

“Fine,” Wyatt mumbled. “Still so much of a clean freak.”

He looked at the gaming chip that was on his palm. The thing was roughly as big as a Coke bottle cap and could be separated into two different parts. The pinnacle of human invention in the last two centuries, it had the ability to connect to the consciousness and directly upload it to the system that spread throughout the Milky Way galaxy.

Hell, it even worked near the event horizons of those data-swallowing black holes!

One had to wonder how this thing was made. Maybe the little shit knew. The thought suddenly came to Wyatt. Hmph! Acting mysterious for no reason. Just watch how I’ll make you dance!

Lying down on his raggedy bed, he put the two parts of the chip on both of his temples. Then, he felt a jolt through his brain and quickly passed out.

. . . . . . . . .

Wyatt found himself in a white blank space. He hadn’t seen this in forever, but he knew this was his prototype of his Mind Space, which would change when he selected his Class.

｢Welcome, Adventurer.｣ A warm female voice sounded.

“Hello, Main God,” he said, a matter of reflex.

｢Oh? You know who I am?｣ The Main God replied, a little surprised.

There was a sudden flash. Then, Wyatt saw a young woman, roughly in her mid-twenties, with a holy yet enticing look that even the gays would have to take tips from.

This… Fuck! Trouble!

She wore a smile as well, which chilled his heart.

“Hi… Main… Main God. What… what are Your Majesty doing here?” he stuttered.

Damn, he forgot all about this shit!

This precise thing that was about to happen to him had made headlines some months into the game’s inception. The Galactic Daily followed the trials closely, while the lawyers on both sides clashed like ninja warriors on drugs!

The subject? Invasion of memory privacy.

With the heights of technology right now, this was a controversial topic that had strict laws and even stricter penalties for transgressions. The one thing that everyone, from the richest man of the Milky Way to the poorest sot that lived on the slum planets, agreed on was that memory checks could only be carried out for crimes against humanity and terrorist prevention.

The problem was that whoever wrote the Galactic Laws had the audacity at the time to only separately sanction all the different ways that a memory check could be carried out. No memory could be searched of any airport or spacecraft arrival if the passengers had valid visas, for example. The same went for the Olympic Games participants, petty crimes, and a few hundred thousand other things.

When the law first came out, the public went haywire with protests of possible loopholes. The Galactic Council, long story short, said fuck it, leave it if you don’t like it! They, a group of wizened old men and secretaries—cough, old women, had slaved themselves over these laws while appeasing the corporations that had Council votes. The fuck did these young whelps with no experience know? They thought that they could universally ensure privacy of all data and memories? Hah! Pipe dreams! The ravings of lunatics!

The set of Memory Laws, as they were later called, was a tightly written piece of legislature with few loopholes and fewer… overt violations. The top brass of most Fortune 1,000 companies did their private memory searches with legally-binding contracts that held out the middle finger to a fuming but helpless Galactic Council every—single—day.

Games, though, never incorporated this piece of dark technology. So nobody even tried to look at this loophole. Indeed, when all the game makers in the world were trying to pander to lusty young men and foul-mouthed witches, who in their right minds would put a memory check on their players?

Alas, War of Gods had the capital to big-dick through all of that. The game read memories without discrimination, the developers said, in order to create content, in this case Quests, Classes, Professional Assignments, NPCs, and more. If you didn’t like that, then go ahead and protest. Don’t come back to us crying about your dying mothers that had been banned when we succeeded in evolving our time dilation system!

The lawsuit played out… as anyone thought it would. The game was given a slap on the wrist, since it violated no laws, while the ever-worsening Galactic Council… deliberated for two months without coming to a conclusion on the issue of memory reading by game developers.

They weren’t fools as they were portrayed by the masses. And while they were far from protectors of humanity—scratch that, while anyone would be happy if they didn’t call for galactic wars every now and then—these old hags and goblins were still proven wise in their… greed? The time dilation setting of the game would evolve to a one-to-ten ratio by the fifth year. A natural day meant 10 War of Gods days. All of humanity, be they young, old, decrepit, or athletic—all of humanity joined the game without fault, the galaxy suddenly turning… creepily quiet.

Wyatt bathed in his own pool of thoughts, the Main God not interfering. Her eyes in the meantime, though, sparked light while data was stealthily swiped out from the young man’s brain.

To be honest, he wouldn’t really mind if it had been him from the first run around. But now….

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“Hehe, what have we got here?” The Main God finally spoke. “Sweet memories!”

Wyatt broke out in cold sweat. What memories?! These are the things he hid in his mind, the things he was banking on! His capital! Call them memories again and he’d duke it out with anybody, Old God or New! He’d call the Arbitration System! He’d… he’d… he… was in deep shit now….

“Hmm,” she stroked her chin, a little amused as she saw the thoughts in his head. “Perhaps this would break the balance of the Myriad Realms….”

“What—what—are you talking about?” Wyatt stuttered.

Sigh…. Royally fucked he was.

“It’s alright,” the Main God sniggered after a pause. “Things may develop differently with you knowing… many things.”

Not knowing if she was heard, or perhaps wanting to see a young man’s heart rise up to his throat, the woman added, “Since you know a lot already, I might as well….”

“Might as well...?” Wyatt blinked, unable to comprehend.

But then the woman seemed to disappear into thin air. Wyatt shouted for clarification to no avail, while his Mind Space settled back to tranquility.

A long time passed before an AI-like, genderless voice called out to him.

｢Adventurer, you may now choose your name.｣

“Huh?” Wyatt blinked, a little lost still.

｢”Huh” is already chosen. Please choose another name.｣

“I mean, I’ll choose Wyatt if nobody has,” he said. This was one of his dreams—to have his own name be an available option in the game. Alas—

｢Also chosen. Please rename.｣

“Damn it! How about Runes?”

｢Also chosen. Adventurer, the whole dictionary has already been chosen by now. Please be more creative.｣

“….”

“Fine. I’ll choose Nox,” Wyatt said, a little speechless. Who could he blame, though? Time? Or those beta testers? So he chose a word that still fitted his criteria without being in the dictionary.

｢Nox successfully registered. Please choose your Race and Class.｣

“Human, Mage,” he said.

Wyatt looked at the Class details that projected themselves onto the blank space in front of him, a little nostalgic.

Mage, Warrior, Thief, Pirate, and Ranger: these were the five basic combat Classes that used Runewords, Divine Tattoos, Hidden Weapons, Ships, and Ranged Weapons to blitz their way through the Myriad Realms.

Creator and Harvester, on the other hand, were the two Professional Classes that encompassed almost all types of productions and trades in the War of Gods. The supply line, so to speak, that many, many combat players would come to envy in the years to come.

While all of that would morph into a much grander picture with better outlines and more diverse choices… hehe, this period was going to make some people cry!

Wyatt remembered this because he, too… cough, this handsome fella never cried!

If the timelines were still on track, a lot of people—trillions, even—would choose to be a Mage. Why? Because they could showcase their “creativity,” hehe.

Mages used Runewords, special characters from the Runic Language of the Magus Civilisation, to create spells. They could alter the atmosphere, call down thunder, lightning, fire storms, wind walls. They could even turn back time and compress space. All that yin-yang bullshit.

Problem was though, Wyatt snickered, all that creativity would have to be put to the test of the system. Runic Combinations and Runic Arrays were messy and complicated. Drawn in a circle, they held each character in place with their balance. A well-made Runic Combination or Array was beautiful to see and powerful to use. A badly-done one, ho, ho, ho, was a disaster that could blow up entire planets!

It took time to learn to balance these characters, since each character was like a German noun in a compound word. Two characters coming together didn’t have prohibitive difficulty—who didn’t know how to compound “schadenfreude”?—but when the numbers came to the hundreds…. Hehe.

Luckily, he still remembered a lot of it, the Know-It-All that he was.

Mages would cry, too, when they found out that there were no Legacy Classes that they could Transition to. Warriors could, Thieves could, Rangers could. Hell, even Pirates could. But Mages were stuck, their Legacies being Runeword Knowledge. It was a one-way trip straight to hell for those naïve souls that were about to make this dastardly choice.

Nonetheless, Wyatt… was looking forward to it. Was it his inner masochism? Shit.

His mind pounded a little still while the hopes and dreams of the young Human Mage were whispered aloud over and over.

“Please let me be a Fire Starter. Please let me be a Fire Starter.”

｢Wyatt Yarrow, otherwise known as Nox, a Human Mage of the Great World Ursir, the Realm Ordin, the Utgard Galaxy, Planet Pandora, Village of Mount Arcas. You’ll be transported out of your Mind Space in three, two, one.｣

｢Beginning teleportation.｣

“Arghhhhhhh—”

He screamed as his figure began to fade out. The first time was always painful, they said.

Being ripped apart by space with a 100% pain simulation rate was, no doubt, a foolish decision.

But, cough, he forgot to tune that down.

. . . . . . . . .

“Hello! There are some strange chickens that have mutated in my farm. Can you…?”

“This is a little embarrassing. I have no money left. Is it possible for you to give me some bread, Sir?”

“I need you to get me some materials for my wine brewery. It’s urgent! Thanks. You’re a good bloke!”

“My child needs an escort back from the village school in the mountain. Can you please, Lady?”

“You look very healthy, young lad. Want to join me for a late-night chess game?”

Many voices kept pouring into his head. Wyatt rubbed his temples, a little discombobulated.

These are the newcomer Quests in this world, huh? He thought. Sounds quite… diverse—for a Village….

Players in the War of Gods, as Wyatt remembered, would start out in Villages or Towns, depending on their luck. Each had different means of accumulating wealth and power, as well as different difficulties.

Villages, for example, generally gave more Experience than did the Town settings, whether it be the mobs or the Quests. The difficulty would be in getting to other places—which would be solved at Level 10, when players would have access to the Caravans or Teleportation Arrays, depending on the Village’s wealth.

Towns, on the other hand, would give less Experience for both Quests and mobs, although trade would flourish. Players would also find it hard to level up because of the scarcity of resources, mainly because there would be many, many more players in a town than in a Village.

That was relative, of course: a Town in the center of a Planetary System was much more prosperous than a Capital City on the outskirts, that was for sure.

The same went for the differences between Planets, Planetary Systems, Galaxies, and even Realms.

Certain Classes would only have one type of starting point as well, such as the Creators, who could only start their Apprenticeship in Towns, and so on.

Wyatt took a long look at the dilapidated place, adjusting slowly to the dim light of the gas-lit lamps and the moonlight.

It was midnight when he logged in, so even though the game currently had a one-to-two ratio of time to the real world, it was still pitch black beyond the wooden fences that gated the village.

Because of the many players, though, the space seemed to bustle with a cacophony of voices.

He took a light breath and stood up while he tried to remember something—anything—about the village.

“This seems to be…,” he took a deep, debilitating breath. “There would be a beast tide soon.”

One of the many hobbies of War of Gods players once they had developed enough power and had enough wealth would be to travel. Naturally, this applied even more to the Secret Dynasty, where the trade of information about anything at all was prioritised.

He’d even memorised Galaxies and Realms down to the Villages and Events, as it happened. This was the requirement of a near-the-top member of the Guild at the time. And he’d made a lot of money selling such information as well.

Wyatt remembered reading about this on his third day on the job. This place had been, in fact, not far from where he’d landed his first play around.

To think that he would land here….

Beast tides were a source of wealth, but only if one had enough power.

The Village of Mount Arcas experienced a beast tide in Year 6 of the New Gods Calendar.

The time was three days from now!