Noel Simpson woke to silence so complete it rang.
He lay on his back atop cold stone, staring up at a ceiling that shouldn't have existed. The surface above him was a fractured dome of rock and crystal, split by jagged veins that glowed faintly, like embers trapped under glass. Dust hung motionless in the air, frozen as if time itself had hesitated mid-breath.
He blinked once. Twice.
Okay. This is new.
The last thing he remembered was going to sleep—headphones on, late-night game queue running in the background, the familiar hum of exhaustion dragging him under. Now he was here, wherever here was, lying on a cracked stone platform etched with half-erased runes.
No pain. No panic yet. Just confusion, thick and slow.
He pushed himself up onto his elbows. The stone beneath his palms was rough, ancient, and undeniably real. A circular platform stretched around him, its edges broken away into darkness. Beyond it stood rows of tall, rectangular panels—translucent, glass-like structures suspended in midair.
UI panels.
They were unmistakable. Status screens, quest logs, tutorials—he'd seen enough of them across games, manhwa, and novels to recognize the aesthetic instantly.
Except… they were dead.
Each panel was dim, its surface spiderwebbed with cracks. Lines of text were half-formed and frozen, glyphs cut off mid-render. One panel flickered weakly, stuck on a single word that never finished loading:
WELC—
Torches lined the outer ring of the platform, mounted in ornate iron brackets. Their flames were frozen solid, tongues of fire suspended like sculptures of amber glass. No heat radiated from them. No smoke curled upward.
Noel slowly got to his feet.
The silence pressed in harder now that he was standing. There was no background music—no ominous dungeon theme, no heroic overture. No ambient wind, no distant monster growls, no echoing drops of water.
Just… nothing.
"This is supposed to be the tutorial," he muttered, his voice sounding wrong in the stillness, too loud and too small at the same time.
Tutorial zones were never like this. They were noisy. Safe. Overly helpful. A thousand prompts shouting at you to open your inventory or swing your sword or talk to the glowing NPC with the exclamation mark over their head.
Noel turned in a slow circle.
No NPCs.
No guiding spirit. No floating fairy. No smug instructor waiting to explain mechanics with a grin and a stick.
Only the platform. The broken panels. The frozen fire.
A familiar unease began to crawl up his spine.
"Alright," he said, louder now. "Status window."
Nothing happened.
No translucent screen. No blue glow. Not even an error message.
His stomach tightened.
"…Open status."
Still nothing.
He raised a hand instinctively, fingers curling as if to swipe through invisible menus. "Character status. Inventory. System?"
Silence answered him every time.
The panels around the platform remained inert, mocking him with their shattered interfaces. Noel stepped closer to one and reached out. His fingers passed through the surface like mist, rippling it faintly before the panel stabilized again—unchanged, unresponsive.
"No," he whispered. "That's not how this works."
Every system-based world had rules. Even broken ones. Even death worlds. Even nightmare difficulties.
The system always responded.
A dull pressure built behind his eyes as the implications settled in. If there was no system… then what was this place? And why did it look like the aftermath of one?
Noel took a breath, steadying himself. Panic wouldn't help. It never did in games, and if this was some kind of twisted reality version of one, the principle probably still applied.
He looked down at himself for the first time.
He was wearing simple clothes—dark trousers, sturdy boots, a long-sleeved shirt reinforced at the shoulders and forearms. Starter gear. Unenchanted. Practical. His hands were unmarked, no glowing sigils or class brands burned into his skin.
No class selection.
No stat allocation.
No weapon.
That was bad.
A low crack echoed through the chamber.
Noel froze.
The sound hadn't come from the darkness beyond the platform. It had come from above.
One of the cracked UI panels trembled, a new fracture racing across its surface like lightning. Faint symbols flickered within, distorted and out of sync, as if something was trying—failing—to load.
A pressure filled the air, subtle but undeniable. Not sound. Not wind.
Presence.
Noel took a step back, heart pounding. "Hello?"
The panel pulsed once.
Then a line of text burned itself into existence, jagged and unstable, letters overlapping like a corrupted file forced open by brute strength.
SYSTEM INTEGRITY: 3%
Noel's breath caught.
Another line followed, stuttering into place.
TUTORIAL INSTANCE: OFFLINE
The torches shuddered. Tiny cracks appeared in their frozen flames, hairline fractures spreading outward.
Noel clenched his fists.
"This isn't a tutorial," he said quietly.
The panel flickered harder now, light bleeding from its cracks.
ANOMALY DETECTED
The word anomaly repeated itself, echoing across every broken panel at once, layered and distorted, as if spoken by a dozen voices that couldn't agree on tone or pitch.
Noel felt it then—something shifting, deep beneath the platform, like gears grinding back into motion after a long, enforced halt.
Whatever system had once ruled this place was waking up.
And it had noticed him.
The panel dimmed suddenly, its light collapsing inward before vanishing entirely. The chamber plunged back into absolute silence.
Noel stood alone on the cracked stone platform, heart racing, instincts screaming.
No welcome.
No guidance.
No safety net.
Just an empty tutorial… and a system that had already marked him as something it wasn't supposed to have.
The dungeon waited.