A young man with blond hair and bored blue eyes lays on his bed and stares up at his phone while compulsively tapping on a prompt, “Download failed. Retry?”
Time after time, the download fails without ever downloading a single kilobyte, but the young man doesn’t seem to care as he listens to the music coming from his computer sound system and taps on the prompt as though the beat of the music was a metronome for him to follow.
His room is small and has cheap, university-provided furniture including a bed, dresser, and a desk. On that desk, the only photograph he owns is of a younger version of himself hugging a large labrador retriever.
After a while, he stops receiving the ‘failed download’ prompt and is both surprised and disappointed when he sees the download progress on his phone quickly advancing. His finger hovers over it and begins to hesitantly advance and retreat, as though the young man is considering whether he should continue tapping on the download despite it finally making progress.
He considers it for a moment before letting one of his arms drop to his side, the other still holding his phone above his face.
Almost too quickly, the download completes.
Before he has a chance to open the new program, a capitalized Omega appears on his screen, its bright, electric-blue coloring partially covering the contents behind it.
“That’s new,” the young man mutters, staring up at the symbol.
After waiting a few seconds to see if anything will happen, the young man lifts his free hand up and taps on the screen only to let out a surprised yelp as a current of electricity enters his body and his eyes are blinded by a bright light.
At the same time as the young man is shocked and blinded, he feels a strange churning sensation followed by a loud crack and a heavy jolt that knocks him out of his bed and onto the ground.
He stays still for several seconds as he tries to figure out what happened to him. His first thought is that there had been an explosion in the dorm room, but when he considers the jolt of electricity he received and the bright light coming from his phone, he dismisses that thought and tries to figure out what else could have happened.
However, nothing the young man can think of can explain what just happened so he attempts to open his eyes only to feel a stabbing pain that forces him to shut them tightly again.
“Fucking hell!” He hisses as tears stream down the sides of his face and struggles to feel around on the ground for his phone that had escaped his grip when he was knocked out of bed.
He is immediately confused as his hands search through what feels like weeds or long strands of grass, but he ignores the sensation as he continues searching for his phone.
A moment later, his right hand brushes across the surface of his phone’s rubber case, but as he grabs it, he notices that it feels strangely more spongy than usual. He runs his fingers across the back of the case and the screen of his phone and immediately notices that it is warmer than it should be and that the screen is cracked and seems to be warped under the gentle touch of his fingers.
Hoping that it still works despite the bad shape it seems to be in, he finds and attempts to press the power button only for it to fight against his thumb as he applies pressure to it. When he tries to apply a little more pressure to the button he hears a small crack as the button depresses before becoming loose and losing its springiness.
A pit seems to form in the pit of his stomach as he forces himself to squint through one of his eyes and stares at the shattered and melted wreckage of his phone. The reality of the situation is far worse than touch alone could translate.
Ignoring the countless cracks covering the screen, his phone and case both seem to have been partially melted into a strange, wavy piece of abstract art and he quickly tosses his phone away from him in fear that the battery might explode if it hadn’t already.
Unable to see far, he listens while waiting for his phone to land and notices that it never does.
He figures the sound of its landing may have been muffled by the springy stems surrounding him so he forces his eyes open slightly and looks at his blurry surroundings. Nothing much can be made out, but he can see that he is laying on the ground surrounded by grass that hadn’t been cut for a very long time.
For a moment, he thinks he must be sleeping but the constant pain in his eyes tells him that he would have long woken up if this were just a bad dream so he begins worrying about the possibility of his phone catching fire in the long grass and starts crawling away from where he tossed his phone while waiting for his sight to recover.
It takes several minutes for his eyes to recover enough to open all the way, but when he opens them, he begins questioning whether he is actually sleeping or not because he sees the bright objects floating around his head in tight circles without any regard for physics or common sense.
One of the objects is the electric-blue Omega symbol that he had seen on his phone before ending up in his current situation. The other is a golden scroll that seems to revolve around the Omega symbol like the moon around Earth.
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He stares at the Omega symbol in concern while wondering about the strange addition of the golden scroll.
Since the last thing he did before weirdness ensued was touch the Omega symbol on his phone’s screen, he guesses that this entire situation is entirely due to the Omega symbol now floating above his head. As to what its purpose is, he has a guess but doesn’t know how to confirm it other than by possibly touching the symbol once again. But since the last time brought him so much pain, he is hesitant to do so.
He forces his gaze away from the symbol and the scroll and stands up. Even with his eyes open, he realizes that he is still unable to see very far since the grass around him is easily six feet tall and several inches above his line of sight. At most, he can see the starlit sky above him and the area in his immediate surroundings.
“Where am I?” He wonders while he slowly looks around for any sign of his phone catching fire. Noticing that there is neither flame nor the scent of smoke in the air, he decides to pick his way through the path of clearly disturbed grass that he made while crawling his way away from potential danger earlier.
A moment later, he arrives at the spot he believes is where he landed when he fell off his bed and he is gladdened he did fall off because his bed is nowhere in sight and a few feet in front of him is the edge of a cliff so tall that he is unable to see where it touches the ground below.
Then he sighs as he realizes he likely tossed his phone to certain doom if it hadn’t already been ruined beyond repair.
“Well,” he grumbles, “at least I probably don’t need to worry about catching anything on fire.”
Not knowing what else to do in the dead of night and in an unfamiliar area, he turns his attention back to the Omega symbol and the golden scroll revolving around it. He pauses for a moment, not certain whether he wants to take a risk by touching either of them, but since the Omega symbol is probably what got him into his current predicament, he ignores his nervousness and forces himself to reach out and gently tap it.
He doesn’t know what exactly he expected to happen, but when a nearly pitch-black space opens up and swallows his consciousness, he is certain it wasn’t this. His eyes still see the world outside and when he moves his hands he finds he has complete control of his body, but his mind is mired in darkness so absolute that his heart clenches and sweat begins to pour down his back.
It takes all of his focus not to flail about wildly as his sense of touch struggles with the sudden sense of weightlessness his mind encounters in the dark space, and even after waiting a while, the sensation doesn’t completely leave him. But he is eventually able to ‘look’ around the space with his mind.
Within the near-infinite darkness of this strange space, there are only two sources of light. The first is the golden scroll that had been revolving around the Omega symbol. Now it seems to be glowing with a brilliance that belittles the sun on the hottest day of Summer. However, despite how brightly it shines, for some reason, the scroll doesn’t seem to behave like a normal light source as the light it emits doesn’t do anything to affect the darkness of the space.
The second source of illumination is a feebly glowing star. Its light is so insignificant that, in any other location, it would be impossible to see it. But here, it is like the North Star. Though it doesn’t provide enough light to see by, or even enough to do more than make a tiny disruption in the blackness surrounding his mind, it is pleasant and gives him an unusually familiar sense of security.
For a while, he does little more than look between the two objects while wondering what they are good for. When he tries to reach out and touch them with his mind, he discovers the little star can be manipulated to leave behind a trail of stardust. He has the idea that he might be able to manipulate it to create words and possibly pictures, but since the star gets notably smaller after moving it, he chooses not to mess with it just yet.
Instead, he switches his attention over to the golden scroll and looks at it while feeling more nervous. He doesn’t know where the impression comes from, but something about the scroll makes it seem inviolable and incomparably majestic.
Nevertheless, since it is currently inhabiting the same space as his mind, he feels that it is his responsibility to figure out what it is. So he prods it with his consciousness and watches in rapt attention as it immediately unfurls and reveals numerous characters that seem three-dimensional despite being firmly embedded within the golden material of the scroll. To his mind, the characters look surreal and fantastic.
But the most incredible thing is that he can understand them.
‘In the Epoch of the Eternal Emperor’s Fall, in the Age of Many Monarchs, the knowledge of a lesser mortal world was substantiated into a new Principle through the machinations of a human sect formed without Virtue. Their purpose was Found against the Will of Heaven. They were Judged and Found lacking in the face of their Tribulation and were thus scattered to the ends of the world to await reincarnation. Their machination was Found Imperfect. It was Judged and overcame its Tribulation through the Virtue of Innocence. In the absence of Karma, it was grasped by One who reached out to it in Ignorance. He who grasped the newborn Principle was Judged and Found Innocent through the absence of Karma. Though Ascended from his mortal world, his Purpose was found Ambiguous. He shall travel the Path of Reflection and Clarify His Purpose.’
He reads the text multiple times, each time fully comprehending each separate word written on the scroll, but unable to understand the meaning behind the scroll in general.
He realizes that the part referring to the Epoch and Age is probably equivalent to the date in the eyes of whoever wrote the scroll, but the rest of the scroll doesn’t make sense given what he knows.
As far as he can tell, the substantiated ‘principle’ the scroll mentions is referring to the Omega symbol he, truthfully, ‘reached out to’ in ignorance. But the program he installed was just an internet browser called the Omega Browser and it was only released for a pilot run earlier in the day. He doesn’t know how it ‘substantiated’ anything seeing as it wasn’t exactly the most original internet browser on the market, it just combined popular features from other browsers like multiple-language search engines, chat and VOIP services, extension support, and so on.
The only thing the developers supposedly accomplished that their predecessors didn’t do well with was, supposedly, allowing the Omega Browser to run better using fewer resources.
As for everything else, it seems clear to him that people were punished for some vague reason and that the Omega Browser somehow fell into his hands, probably because he was murdering the retry prompt with his fingers, but the scroll doesn’t seem to give a real reason for anything. Or, if it does, he just isn’t picking up on it.
Perhaps the most important thing he gets out of it is that he was ‘ascended’ away from Earth which, to him, means one thing.
“I got Isekaied? For downloading a browser! What the fuck?”