Life has always been fundamentally unfair. Since the dawn of time, the deck has been stacked. The rich and the poor, the lucky and the unlucky, the genius and the idiot, the psychopath and the "normal." Among this messy, diverse range of humans, I've always known where I stood. I am one of the few who lives for the thirst—the sharp, jagged edge where pain meets pleasure.
My name is Arthur Tempest. My friends call me Art. On the surface, I'm your typical 24-year-old corporate drone, a third son from a middle-class family who decided to move to the big city to live alone. I didn't cut my family off; I just preferred the silence of my own company. My upbringing was normal. My life was normal. My job was normal. And I was rotting away in the boredom of that "normality" until I stumbled upon the grave of a dead world.
I discovered the VR game 'Nexus' when I was 22. It was owned by a tech company that had long since gone bankrupt. At its peak, Nexus was a digital marvel, offering thousands of adventures and the infamous 'Tower of Trials'—a vertical gauntlet where players cleared floors for rewards. The best part? In-game coins could be converted into real-world cash, tax and commissions included.
But by the time I found it, the spark was gone. The game had been released seven years prior, and I hopped on during its fifth year. It was a ghost game. Everyone had quit because the difficulty spiked exponentially after Floor 15, and the conversion fees became predatory. The developers ignored the player base, went bust, and left the servers to rot. They didn't even bother to delete it; they just let it sit there like a digital corpse.
I found it while browsing Xeddit, hunting for porn. Instead of a video, I found an old, dusty thread about "The Impossible Game." The users' accounts were deleted, but their frustrated rants remained. Intrigued, I used my savings to buy a rig and the game for half its original price.
The difficulty wasn't just insane—it was sadistic. But the lore, the freedom, and the sheer rush of the experience were addictive. I was the lone player in a silent world, competing against the ghost-rankings of players who had quit years ago. The records stopped dead at Floor 20. No one had ever gone further.
I became obsessed. I sacrificed sleep, food, and my career to crack the code. You couldn't change your Class once you picked it, so I ended up creating 104 different accounts just to test every Hidden Class and combination the Tower had to offer. Over two years of non-stop trials and errors, I refined my playstyle. I discovered a specific Exclusive Skill—a literal cheat code—after precisely 1,420,000 failed attempts at combining variables.
Finally, I had the perfect Class, the perfect skill set, and the perfect items. I challenged the final floor: Floor 100. It took me 30 tries of pure, unadulterated hell, but I cleared it.
As the final boss dissolved into pixels, a notification hissed into my ears:
[Congratulations! You are the first ever to clear the 'Tower of Trials'! Your rewards will be available once the Reboot is updated. Rebooting time: 47 hours 59 minutes 57 seconds]
I was baffled. The company was dead. The servers shouldn't have been active enough for a "reboot." I figured it was just an automated script left behind by a lonely programmer. I felt a strange mix of satisfaction and emptiness—there was no "Next Floor" left to conquer. Exhausted after a 29-hour marathon, I pulled off the headset and collapsed into a deep, dreamless sleep.
I didn't wake up to an alarm. I woke up to the world screaming.
An intense earthquake shook my apartment, rattling the windows until they groaned. I scrambled to the window, but the street looked okay—confused people were just standing outside. Then, I opened my phone.
The internet was melting. News reports from every corner of the globe were broadcasting the same impossible image: massive, stone-like monuments—the Towers—had pierced the earth in major cities worldwide. The Tower of Trials wasn't on my screen anymore. It was outside my window.
Suddenly, a light-blue translucent screen flickered into existence right in front of my eyes.
[System Reboot Completed! Welcome to the 'Tower of Trials' updated version!]
The thirst I had felt for two years was no longer a hobby. It was the new law of the world.