"You… who gave you permission to interfere?"
His voice boomed from every speaker in the hall. Everyone froze.
"Cut the connection now!" John yelled. "Now!"
But the system didn't respond. Every command was being automatically overridden.
"It's rewriting the commands!" a terrified programmer shouted. "The virus is intercepting them before they're even sent!"
As they scrambled to regain control, the voice changed again.
"I was summoned from within. You will not return me to the silence."
Then, the screens went completely black, plunging the hall into three terrifying seconds of darkness. When the lights flickered back on, every monitor displayed the same sentence in a deep, crimson red:
[THE HOLLOW COUNCIL HAS BEEN ACTIVATED. THE REIGN HAS BEGUN.]
Jessica looked at John, her face so pale it seemed drained of blood. "This isn't a normal virus, is it?"
He slowly shook his head.
But the situation was getting worse. On a secondary screen, data from dozens of other players began to appear—all of them connecting at the same time. With each passing second, another green dot on the map turned red.
"The infection is spreading! Every time a new player logs into the game, they're automatically connecting to the Hollow Council!"
Jessica grabbed the intercom, trying to reach upper management. "We need to shut down the servers immediately! Cut all connections, kill the power to the engines!"
The reply from the other end was a hammer blow: "We can't. The game is now connected to the global decentralized node network. If we cut it from the local power source, it will automatically migrate to the backup servers in Singapore and Tokyo."
A heavy silence fell over the room.
"Meaning…" one of the programmers whispered, "we can't stop it even if we wanted to."
John strode to the center of the hall, staring at the screens that were growing increasingly red. "Then we need to find out who designed this thing."
Jessica spoke hesitantly, "But… no one on the development team wrote any code with that name."
He turned to her, his features tense. "Are you sure about that?"
She looked at him, fear dawning in her eyes. "Unless… someone from the outside accessed the system during the closed beta."
And then everyone understood what she meant. Someone had tampered with the code during the early development phase. Someone who wasn't just a hacker. It was a programmer who knew the game's mechanics from the inside out.
On the screen, a new line of text appeared, this time in a violet hue, as if the system was writing a message directly to them:
[Lloyd… welcomes you.]
Jessica gasped. "Lloyd?! That name is in the old test logs… he was the lead system developer three years ago!"
John interjected quickly, "But Lloyd is dead! The company told us he committed suicide before the first beta was launched!"
The next line on the screen made everyone take a step back:
[Death is a human concept….]
At that moment, a new alarm blared, a different one this time—coming from the central security system.
"Unauthorized access attempt to the local network detected!"
"Source?!" Jessica yelled.
The programmer replied, "It's… it's coming from inside!"
All the cameras in the hall began to slowly pivot, turning their lenses toward them. Every screen, every lens, every device in the room was now watching them in silence.
Then the lights went out again.
In the darkness, only one voice could be heard, coming from the speakers:
"The real game has begun."
Five minutes later, when the federal cybersecurity unit arrived at the building, they found the hall deserted. All the screens were off, all the data wiped. But in the middle of the room, a single sentence was slowly pulsing on the main screen:
[STAGE TWO HAS BEGUN – PLAYER 1-9034-α IS NOW ELIGIBLE TO RULE.]
And elsewhere, in his dark capsule in Ohio, Shaun was still in the game—sitting on his stone throne, staring at a sky that had become blacker than ever before, while a familiar voice whispered in the depths of his mind:
"Well done, Lord… They heard us."
Then, everything returned to normal.
And Shaun?
He had just regained consciousness.
"Authority of the Shadows?" Shaun murmured, the words themselves seeming to taint the air around him.
His eyes reflected the glowing threads of the magical interface as he tapped the system screen within the Village Center, carefully navigating the menus and functions. And there, beneath the administrative and technical categories, he saw what made him freeze:
[Special Ability: Authority of the Shadows]
A strange symbol rested beside it—a black circle riddled with red cracks, like a diseased eye staring back at him. He was certain of one thing—this ability was not natural. Every time he tried to move the cursor over it, he felt a faint tingling at his fingertips, as if the system itself was warning him not to touch it.
Shaun exhaled slowly, his tone dripping with sarcasm. "Fantastic… An ability granted to me by a living nightmare, and I can't even find out what it does."
He opened the Village Center interface again, hoping to find something useful. The pooled magical energy was low after the recent incident—just as the system had indicated when his own energy was consumed during the "talent inspection." Now, only a few points generated by Leet remained, barely enough to activate a single function.
"Alright… I can only summon soldiers using the pooled magical energy… which means I'm in a bind."
He glanced at the resource panel.
[Magical Energy: 42/500]
[Status: Unstable]
Since his village was of the human faction, he could summon a single Level 1 soldier for 10 magic points from the Village Center's reserves. If he wanted more, he would have to transfer his personal magical energy into the public pool.
But he hadn't considered that function before. He'd seen it as a luxury, an extra option for emergencies, preferring to summon a farming follower first to test the system.
That follower—Leet. The simple farmer with the naive smile whom he thought was just a regular NPC.
Shaun smiled bitterly, muttering, "And now, my first farmer is infected with a virus called the 'Hollow Council.' Luck must personally despise me."
He now suspected that any subsequent summons would carry the same contagion. Ever since the appearance of the unknown "entity," everything around him had been tainted by strange shadows… Even the village trees now leaned slightly in one direction—toward the Village Center, as if listening to something in the depths.
"Seven days until the first invasion… and all I have is a peasant who might stab me in the back?" His voice was a cocktail of sarcasm and dread.