The first sensation was not pain, but geometry.
Alex woke up gasping, the air in his lungs cold and tasting faintly of ozone and wet soil. He was lying on his back, naked. The ground beneath him wasn't soft grass or warm sand; it was hard, coarse, and aggressively flat. He pushed himself up, his hands scraping against dirt that felt less like soil and more like sandpaper glued to a concrete slab.
He blinked, waiting for the blur of sleep to fade, waiting to wake up in his chair with the hum of his PC tower beside him. But the blur didn't fade. It sharpened.
Alex looked at the horizon, and his stomach lurched violently.
The world was wrong.
It didn't curve. It didn't roll. The horizon cut across his vision in a perfect, razor-sharp line. To his left, a hill didn't slope upward; it stepped up in massive, one-meter increments. The sky met the earth at a perfect, impossible ninety-degree angle.
Alex retched, squeezing his eyes shut as a wave of nausea rolled over him. It was Geometric Vertigo. His inner ear, evolved for a world of curves and organic chaos, was screaming in protest against this oppressive, mathematical perfection. The light was too bright, the shadows were too sharp, devoid of any penumbra. It felt like staring into a high-voltage lightbulb.
"Okay," Alex whispered. His voice sounded flat, deadened by the open air. "Okay. Lucid dream. VR rig. You fell asleep during a stream."
He forced his eyes open again, trying to apply the analytical "gamer brain" that had made him a world-record holder. He scanned the environment.
Biome: Plains. Sparse Oak Forest to the north. Light Level: 15.
The textures were familiar, yet terrifyingly high-definition. The dirt block he was sitting on had the brown-and-green pixel pattern he had seen a million times, but now, those pixels were rendered in visceral detail. The "green" was millions of individual, sharp blades of grass forced into a rigid grid. The "brown" was compacted, dry earth, porous and rough.
He stood up, his legs shaking. A strange, cold pressure sat in his gut—a heavy, hollow void that felt like hunger but heavier. It was the Inventory. It felt like he had swallowed a block of ice that refused to melt.
"Wake up," he muttered, slapping his cheek. It stung. Real skin. Real sweat.
He looked at the nearest oak tree. It stood five meters away, a perfect pillar of brown logs topped with a cube of leaves. The leaves weren't a soft canopy; they were a jagged, tangled mess of sharp foliage constrained within an invisible box.
Alex's breath hitched. Day 1 strategy. Punch tree. Get wood. Craft table. Wood pickaxe. Stone age.
It was muscle memory. It was the "meta." In a speedrun, you didn't think; you acted. The clock was ticking. If this was a twisted VR simulation, the only way out was to play. The only way to survive was to dominate the environment.
He marched toward the tree, the tall grass slicing at his shins. He reached the trunk. The bark was rough, deep furrows running vertically like scars.
"Just punch it," he told himself. "It's just code. Break the block."
He assumed the stance he'd seen his avatar take thousands of times. He pulled his right arm back, visualizing the breakage progress bar, the satisfying pop of the log turning into a floating resource item.
He swung.
He didn't hold back. He threw his entire body weight into the strike, aiming for the center of the block, expecting the wood to splinter into digital particles.
CRACK.
The sound wasn't the digital thunk of Minecraft wood. It was the wet, sickening sound of calcium snapping.
"AHHHHHH!"
Alex collapsed, clutching his right hand to his chest. The scream tore out of his throat, raw and animalistic.
The pain was blinding. It wasn't a reduction in a health bar; it was a searing, white-hot shockwave that traveled up his forearm and exploded in his shoulder. He curled into a fetal position in the dirt, gasping, tears blurring his vision.
He looked at the tree.
There was no floating block of wood. No item drop.
There was just a smear of bright red blood soaking into the hyper-realistic oak bark. A few jagged splinters stuck out of the wood where his knuckles had impacted, but the tree remained immovable. Solid. Real.
Trembling, Alex looked at his hand.
It was a ruin. The skin across his knuckles had split open, revealing white bone and raw meat. Blood dripped onto the perfect green square of grass beneath him. His middle finger was bent at a sickening angle.
"It's... it's real..." he wheezed, the air hissing through his clenched teeth. "Physics... real physics..."
The denial died in that moment, killed by the agony in his hand. The gamer's logic—punch tree, get wood—had collided with a physical reality that didn't care about game mechanics. He had tried to play by the rules of code, and the world had punished him with the rules of biology.
As the initial shockwave of pain began to throb into a dull, rhythmic agony, Alex noticed something on his left forearm.
It was faint at first, but it was glowing.
He wiped the tears from his eyes and looked closer. Etched into the skin of his inner forearm, pulsating with the same rhythm as his heartbeat, was a row of ten heart-shaped scars.
They weren't tattoos. They were brands. They looked infected, the edges red and angry.
As he watched, the half of the tenth heart turned black and withered, looking like necrotic tissue.
Health: 9.5/10.
The Visceral HUD stared back at him. The game interface wasn't a screen overlay. It was carved into his flesh.
Alex sat alone in the silent, square world, cradling his broken hand, the blood dripping rhythmically onto the blocky grass. The sun beat down on him, perfectly square and blindingly hot.
He wasn't a player anymore. He was prey.