The world was burning, but this time, it wasn't confined to a single map or battlefield.
It was everywhere.
Across all servers, all instances, all shards of the digital realm, the silence that usually greeted a new day was replaced by chaos — system alerts, screams through chat channels, emergency maintenance messages that flickered and vanished before moderators could type a response.
Villages that had once been tutorial grounds were now crimson fields.
Beginner mobs, the harmless kind meant for players to slaughter and forget, had turned — their eyes glowing with the faint pulse of the Broken Code. Merchants attacked customers. Quest-givers ambushed adventurers. Even the animals — once just background detail — moved with purpose, eyes reflecting fragments of a mind greater than their code allowed.
And above it all, in the sky of every server, a faint red pattern shimmered like a heartbeat. His mark.
> It begins.
