Shanghai — Present
The once-bright city now lay in ruins.
Skyscrapers stood like broken teeth against a sickly gray sky, their glass faces shattered and blackened by fire.
The streets below were half-buried under wrecked vehicles and fallen concrete. Billboards hung by single bolts, swaying in the wind with a metallic creak.
Smoke drifted lazily through the air — thin, constant, and old. Whatever had burned down there, it had been burning for months.
And everywhere below… zombies.
Tens of thousands of them.
They filled the streets like a living tide, packed shoulder to shoulder, staggering endlessly. Some shuffled, others crawled, some just stood still, twitching like broken machines waiting for a signal that would never come.
Luke hovered quietly in the sky, eyes scanning the scene.
"I always wanted to come and try real Chinese food," he muttered. "Guess I missed that chance."
He let out a short, humorless laugh.
"Alright," he said, raising his hand and calling up the system menu. "Time to buy the five-times EXP multiplier."
A faint blue panel appeared in front of him, its glow cutting through the gray light.
[ 5X EXP Booster – Cost: 10,000 SP ]
He tapped confirm.
[EXP Booster Activated | Duration: 60:00 Minutes]
[59:59]
"Good," Luke murmured. "Let's make this worth it."
He reached into his inventory and materialized the Hulk Blood vial.
"Time to sacrifice the Hulk's blood," he said aloud — then paused.
The vial floated in front of him, slowly spinning in the air.
Part of him wanted to drink it — just to see what kind of raw power it would give him. But another part… knew better.
"I'll evolve eventually," he muttered. "Might as well save the real transformation for later."
With a wave of his hand, the vial dissolved into particles of blue light, drawn into the system.
[You have sacrificed: Hulk Blood]
[You have obtained 200,000,000 EXP]
[5× Multiplier in Effect: Total 1,000,000,000 EXP]
[Level Up!]
[Level Up!]
[Level Up!]
[Level Up!]
[Level Up!]
[You have reached Level 29]
Luke exhaled, watching the bar on his status screen shoot upward like a rocket.
"Yeah," he said with a smirk. "One level away from thirty."
That number mattered.
Level 30 wasn't just another milestone — it was a system threshold, the point where everything changed.
At that stage, the system unlocked new core functions:
Race Change. Special Trait Extraction. Skill Combination. Codex Expansion.
Once he hit Level 30, that massive progress bar — the one that took billions of EXP just to move an inch — would finally reset.
There was a reason for the ridiculous EXP requirements up to now.
The system needed an enormous pool of energy to rebuild and evolve itself. Every bit of EXP he earned wasn't just for him — it was fuel for something larger, a framework designed to reforge itself from the inside out.
After Level 30, that structure would optimized. The bloated progress bar that once demanded billions for a single inch would shrink. Future levels would only need around twenty percent of the usual EXP.
And at Level 40, the system would unlock the Second Class Update — a major milestone for any player.
That was the stage where power took its first real leap.
Once that level was reached, the system opened up new class paths — advanced evolutions of the original build.
Players stopped being ordinary humans. Their bodies, mana cores, and senses rebuilt themselves for combat efficiency. Energy flowed through them like a second bloodstream.
Depending on their class, they could flatten entire cities or erase a country with one deliberate strike.
From that point on, they weren't considered human anymore — they were walking arsenals, weapons of mass destruction given form.
Then came Level 60 — the Third Class Update.
That was the stage where balance vanished completely.
Players who reached that point could erase continents and reshape the planet's climate just by fighting.
Their mana fields bent the sky; oceans rose and crashed in response to their presence.
Every motion carried world-ending weight.
Some advanced classes could rupture tectonic plates or ignite the upper atmosphere — power vast enough to unmake civilization itself.
After that came the ultimate threshold — Level 100, the Final Class Update.
At that level, a player achieved what the system called God Status.
Power without ceiling.
Their existence alone distorted reality; galaxies trembled in their wake.
The strongest could twist gravity, fracture time, or rebuild matter from thought.
Entire star systems could vanish under a single command.
Creation and destruction became equal options — both effortless.
And beyond that… nothing.
Luke had never programmed anything past Level 100. He never even had the chance to code it — he was dragged into this adventure before that.