The phantom screams were the first thing to return.
They rang inside his skull like broken bells...familiar screams, too many to count, rising from a world long burned away. Heat still lingered on his flesh, phantom and cruel, as if the Calamity Demon hadn't finished with him. The memory twisted: claws sinking, bones splitting, something wet and wrong tearing apart. Blood...metallic, thick....filled his mouth. And above it all, the sky, red and wrong, drowning in ash and wings that didn't belong to any god.
Alvian's eyes snapped open with a choked gasp.
Air tore into his lungs...too sharp, too alive. His chest thudded, wild and uneven, as if his heart was trying to escape. Each beat hit wrong, loud in his head, heavier than it should be. Sweat clung everywhere, sticky, cold. The shirt on his back felt damp, unfamiliar, like it didn't belong to him at all.
He stared up at a plain white ceiling, a single, boring light fixture hanging in the center.
'Wait. Where am I?'
Not the battlefield...no smoke, no shattered ground, no bodies. Not the afterlife either; too plain for that. Just a room. His room. Small, cluttered, alive in a way the world hadn't been. His eyes flitted everywhere...old posters peeling from the wall, a crooked tower of books daring to fall, the desk buried under half-finished things. The air carried that faint, greasy scent of instant noodles, oddly warm, almost mocking.
His eyes landed on the monitor of his PC. A sleek, futuristic logo pulsed on the screen, surrounded by a digital countdown timer.
[gods domain]
[Worldwide Server Launch In: 00:02:14]
Alvian stared, his mind refusing to process the information. Two minutes. The launch of gods domain. That was… that was three years ago. Three years before the Convergence, the cataclysmic event where the game world had bled into reality, unleashing hell upon Earth.
"BOOM!"
His thoughts split open...blank at first, then flooded, tangled, drowning in pieces that didn't fit.
One life bled through: a man crawling through ruin, three years of smoke and screams. He saw the end again...mud, blood, the dull edge of dying. Comrades falling. Elara's voice, small, terrified, cut short by something he couldn't fight. The guilt stuck harder than any wound. Weakness tasted like rust.
Another life pushed against it...too bright, too clean. A kid barely twenty, chasing pixels and dreams. He'd scraped coins together for that glossy headset, hoping to live as someone else. Trailers, promises, the world's fake sun shining just for him.
Both lives tangled, crashed, fused. The weight of centuries pressed behind his eyes, but when he blinked...seconds, maybe less.
He was back.
It didn't hit like joy...more like ice sinking into his spine. A second chance, sharp-edged, wrong, undeserved. His body moved before his mind caught up; the chair screeched, the floor tilted. Legs weak, jittery, not trusting their own weight.
The desk loomed in front of him...junk scattered, crumbs, a crumpled chip bag bleeding grease. Amid the mess sat a photo, frame slightly cracked. His parents, smiling like time hadn't touched them. And Elara, caught mid-laugh, eyes too bright, too alive for someone buried in memory.
They were all gone in his previous life. He had watched them fall, powerless to stop it. The memory was a fresh, gaping wound in his soul.
His breath hitched. He wasn't just a traumatized veteran. He was a regressor. A time traveler. Sent back to the very beginning.
'This isn't a dream. This is real.'
He looked back at the screen. The timer was ticking down.
[00:01:28]
The world worshiped god's Domain...the perfect illusion, entertainment made divine. To most, it was fantasy polished to shine. To Alvian, it was a trap wearing beauty's face. Not a game. A rehearsal. A butcher's stage built to sift the strong from the ones meant to die.
A year. That was all the world had before the Convergence...when the veil would split and fiction would start breathing. Monsters would crawl out. Magic would tear through cities. Ninety percent gone before anyone understood why.
He'd lived through that timeline once. Late start, weak talent, a rank barely worth the screen it flashed on. C-rank....laughable. He'd stumbled, bled, begged, survived out of spite until even luck abandoned him. Everything he cared for...smoke, ash, gone.
Now, the fear inside him fractured, burned, froze. Something colder took its place. The noise in his mind dimmed. What remained wasn't panic...just a single, cutting purpose.
Vengeance.
Not just against the monsters, but against his own past self. Against his weakness. This time, he wouldn't be a victim cowering in the ruins. He wouldn't be the one watching his family die.
This time, he would be the one holding the sword.
He reached for the neural link helmet on his desk. His hand, once shaking with trauma, was now perfectly steady. He had future knowledge. He knew the hidden quests, the exploits, the locations of legendary items that players wouldn't discover for years. And most importantly, he knew how to break the system from the very beginning.
[00:00:10]
He secured the sleek, silver helmet over his head.
[00:00:09]
He took a deep, centering breath.
[00:00:08]
He closed his eyes, the faces of his family burning in his mind's eye. This was for them.
[...00:00:03]
"I won't fail again," he whispered, the words a solemn vow to the ghosts of his past.
[...00:00:02]
The fire in his gut blazed into an inferno.
[...00:00:01]
He pressed the activation switch.
[Ding! Neural Link Established. Synchronizing with gods domain.]
[Welcome, Player.]
The world fractured...light, static, everything folding in on itself. His room blinked out first: walls, clock, the stale air heavy with memory. Gone. The rest followed like dust in a storm.
Alvian fell through code and color, no up, no down, only motion. His pulse hammered, too alive, too certain. Vengeance coiled tight in his chest, whispering promises he half-believed. This time, maybe...no, definitely...he'd carve something different out of the ruin.