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The headlines were impossible to ignore.
"Legend of Sun and Moon hits 78 million downloads in open beta — think you can beat us? Come try."
"Ninety-Nine Heavenly Dragons shatters records with 1.6 billion concurrent users. Goose Corporation CEO declares the entire gaming market is theirs to command."
"Forest Studio's new title Legend of the Azure Moon: Dungeon enters beta — early buzz says dark horse of the year."
"Everyone Come Shoot quarterly report clears $9 billion in revenue, officially the most profitable game released this year."
"National Game Production Competition now open for registration. Got a dream? Time to prove it."
Max stared at the headlines scrolling across his monitor and felt the last sliver of doubt dissolve.
He had transmigrated.
No question about it. He was absolutely, one hundred percent, in a different world.
Half an hour ago he'd been back home — pizza on the coffee table, some playlist going in the background, completely ordinary Tuesday night. Then something enormous had appeared outside his window. Not a plane. Not a weather balloon. Something that defied every category his brain tried to throw at it. And then the world had gone sideways, and now he was here: sitting at a desk that wasn't his, in a body that was his but felt subtly wrong, staring at a computer screen full of news that made no sense from his original timeline.
He took a slow breath. Okay. Okay. So this was happening.
The world itself wasn't dramatically different — same general shape of civilization, same general vibe of modern life. People still worked desk jobs. Traffic still sucked. The internet still existed. But there was one glaring, era-defining divergence: VR technology in this world had evolved into something that made his original world's attempts look like cardboard boxes with holes cut out.
This wasn't the clunky headset stuff from his memories. This was dive technology — full-consciousness immersion. Put on the gear, and your mind stepped out of your body and into a virtual world so convincing it was indistinguishable from reality. The comparison that kept surfacing in his borrowed memories was Sword Art Online, though that reference apparently only tracked for people who still watched that sort of thing. Which, in this world, not many people did anymore.
That was the other side of the coin. Technology this good had basically nuked the anime and manga industries. Why watch people draw imaginary scenery when you could be inside photorealistic virtual scenery? Why read fiction about adventures when you could live them?
But here was the irony — and Max recognized it as soon as he dug through the memories he'd inherited — the gaming industry had fumbled the opportunity spectacularly. All this incredible VR technology, and what were the biggest titles? Remakes. Reboots. The same dungeon crawler and the same military shooter, just with increasingly gorgeous graphics that let you count the individual blades of grass on a virtual hillside. The underlying gameplay hadn't evolved at all. Everyone had gotten so obsessed with replicating reality that they'd forgotten VR also had the power to create things that couldn't exist in reality.
The original owner of this body had noticed the same thing. He'd been a developer — a passionate, slightly idealistic one — who'd looked at the landscape of VR gaming and thought: someone should make something different. Something that wasn't just a prettier version of what already existed. Something with actual creative vision.
And then the National Game Production Competition had been announced, and suddenly that dream had a deadline and a venue. The competition ran on a player-voting system: your game earned points based on how many players engaged with it and chose to support it financially. Rankings translated to exposure, prizes, and the kind of industry recognition that could launch a studio from a bedroom project to a legitimate player in the market.
The original owner hadn't even cared about the money. He'd just wanted to make something that mattered. Something people would genuinely enjoy.
He'd worked himself to death trying to get there in time.
Max sat quietly for a moment, looking at the reflection of the computer screen in the dark window. The competition deadline was still a month out. The development environment was already set up. The project files were right there on the desktop — a farming sim called Happy Farm, about sixty percent complete, clearly a labor of love from someone who'd poured themselves into it.
He flexed the fingers of this body that were his now. They were stiff. The wrist had that specific ache that came from too many hours at a keyboard with no breaks.
Your last wish, he thought quietly. Your frustration, everything you didn't get to finish — I've got it. I'll take it from here.
He meant it. Not dramatically, not with fanfare — just as a straightforward fact. He was here now. The work wasn't finished. So he would finish it.
He cracked his knuckles, pulled up the project files, and was about to start assessing the codebase when a voice that didn't come from any speaker cut cleanly through his thoughts.
[System successfully bound.]
Max blinked.
[This is the Myriad Worlds Game System, operating to assist the host in becoming the greatest game creator across all worlds.]
[The System has catalogued ACG works from across the Myriad Worlds. The host may convert these into VR source code by spending Emotion Points, or utilize the System to assist directly in development.]
[Emotion Points are generated by players experiencing the host's games. Joy, fury, grief, terror — all emotional responses qualify for collection.]
[However: harvesting net negative emotions will deduct Emotion Points. If the balance reaches zero, the System will automatically unbind.]
[Notice: Newbie Gift Pack ×1 is waiting. Open now?]
Max stared into the middle distance for about three seconds.
Then he thought: there it is.
He'd wondered. When he'd landed in a transmigration story — and he'd read enough of them to recognize the genre — there was usually a system involved. The golden finger, the cheat code, the universe's way of saying okay, you're the protagonist now, here's your toolkit. He'd half-expected it and half-assumed it wouldn't come. The fact that it had arrived forty minutes into his new life rather than immediately felt almost characteristically awkward, like a friend who shows up late to their own party.
He thought: yes, open it.
The response was immediate.
[Emotion Points ×10,000]
[The Count of Monte Cristo Template ×1]
[Memory Palace ×1]
Three items. Not a flood of gear, not an overwhelming arsenal — just three things. But Max, reading the descriptions as they appeared in his mind, felt something shift in a way that had nothing to do with emotions and everything to do with physics.
The Count of Monte Cristo Template wasn't the book. Or rather, it was more than the book — it was the person, drawn from a specific iteration of Edmond Dantès as he existed in the Type-Moon multiverse. And "template" apparently did not mean reference material. It meant the transfer was already done.
Max stood up from the desk.
He walked to the bathroom. Flipped on the light. Looked in the mirror.
The face looking back at him was the same face from the memories — same features, same bone structure. But the body behind that face was different. The exhaustion-puffiness was gone. The slight softness around the middle was gone. What had replaced it was something that looked less like the result of a gym routine and more like the result of surviving things that would have killed anyone else — lean, defined muscle, the kind that comes from necessity rather than aesthetics.
His hair was white.
Not prematurely gray, not dyed — white, clean and bright, like it had simply decided to announce itself.
Max tilted his head slightly. Looked at his own reflection for a long moment.
Okay, he thought. I can work with this.
The physical change was notable, but the more significant shift was internal. The Memory Palace wasn't a building — it was a cognitive architecture. His thoughts, which had been slightly scattered from the shock of transmigration, had reorganized into something orderly and precise. He could feel the difference the way you feel the difference between a cluttered desk and a clean one: the same information was there, but suddenly he could find all of it instantly.
And with that clarity came a vision that had been foggy before and was now sharp and complete.
Happy Farm was still an option. A farming sim was achievable in a month, the development foundation was already laid, and it wasn't a bad game. But.
The system store had just opened in his mind's eye, and sitting at the very top of the rankings — because of course it was, because the universe had a sense of humor — were the works of Type-Moon.
Fate/stay night. The Holy Grail War.
Max stood in the bathroom, hair white, hands steady, staring at a future that had just become significantly more interesting than it had been forty minutes ago.
The path was clear.
If the development of the Holy Grail War game was just a simple idea before, then now the path was completely clear.
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