Chapter 1: Final Execution
The screen was the only thing that existed in Han's universe.
To him, the world had shrunk into a bluish rectangle of light and thousands of lines of code parading before his eyes like a procession of electric ants on a black background. As a senior developer, his mind didn't function with words, but with logic, syntax, and optimization algorithms. He was an elite software architect, the kind of genius who could trace a memory leak in a sea of a million command lines, yet was unable to remember the last time he'd consumed anything other than reheated coffee or instant ramen.
His vision, once sharp as a scalpel, began to falter. The rhythmic blinking of the cursor in the terminal felt like a mockery—a metronome marking the end of his own countdown.
"Just one more function... just one more patch for this module..." he repeated to himself, fingers moving by pure instinct over the mechanical keyboard. The sound of the switches—click, click, click—was the only music he knew.
That sickly obsession was his only refuge. Han didn't code for company shares, nor for the promotion that never came. He coded because code was predictable, elegant, and fair. Unlike his social life, which was a cluster of failed connections, or his romantic history, which resembled a corrupt database full of fatal errors, code always had a reason for being. If something failed, there was an error log that told you why. In real life, Han had only received blows without explanation. He had given up on the outside world years ago, isolating himself in an apartment that smelled of hot electronic components and a loneliness that no longer even felt heavy.
He was a ghost in his own life, a background process that no one noticed.
Suddenly, a sharp sting, like a high-voltage cable touching his chest, pierced his heart.
He tried to straighten up, but his fingers froze in an unnatural position over the keys. An immeasurable exhaustion—a weight that wasn't physical but existential—slumped over his shoulders. His vision blurred completely, transforming the code into meaningless smudges of white light.
When was the last time I actually slept? Seventy-two hours? Ninety-six?
He couldn't remember the last time he had felt the sun on his face, or the taste of water that wasn't contaminated by the plastic of an office bottle. His heart took a violent leap, a terminal hardware error that no console command could repair. As his head fell heavily onto the keyboard, sending an infinite string of random characters to the screen, one last thought crossed his mind with cruel clarity:
"Dying from overwork, fleeing from a reality that I turned into an execution error myself... How pathetic," he whispered, or thought he whispered, before the operating system of his life shut down completely.
[SYSTEM ALERT: CARDIAC ARREST DETECTED]
[MAIN PROCESS TERMINATED WITH EXIT CODE 0x0001]
[REBOOTING... UNSUPPORTED ENVIRONMENT]
The pain returned with the subtlety of a freight truck.
But it wasn't the oppressive pain in his chest; it was a stinging burning on his skin, a scorching heat that made him feel as if he were being cooked alive. Han snapped his eyes open, taking a breath so deep that his lungs, unaccustomed to such effort, protested with a sharp pang.
The air didn't taste like office dust and ozone. It tasted of dry earth, cheap incense, and something rancid, like meat rotting in the sun.
"What... what is this?" His voice sounded cracked, high-pitched, almost like a stranger's.
He sat up quickly, but the world turned into a carousel of nausea. He was lying in the middle of a narrow alley with damp stone walls and curved wooden roofs that looked like they were taken from a period movie. The sun was at its zenith, shining with an intensity he had never seen in the city.
He tried to lean against the wall to keep from falling, but upon seeing his hands, the air escaped him again.
They were the hands of a teenager. They were pale, bony, with dirty nails and full of small scars from old cuts. His arms, previously thin from lack of exercise, were now almost skeletal, covered by a rustic fabric robe that was falling apart in tatters.
It wasn't his body. It wasn't his office. It wasn't his era.
As someone who had consumed countless hours of light novels to fill his sleepless nights, the conclusion settled into his brain with the coldness of a command line:
I have reincarnated.
But there was no beautiful goddess welcoming him with a merciful smile, nor a kind tutorial. Only the pain of a body that seemed to have been used as a punching bag by a gang of thugs. Han dragged his body toward a puddle of stagnant water near some wooden barrels. Looking at his reflection, he saw a youth of about sixteen, with tangled black hair and a black eye, but with the same cynical and tired gaze he used to have in his bathroom mirror.
"So... from exploited programmer to beaten-up vagrant," he muttered, letting out a dry laugh that hurt his ribs. "At least the frame rate of this world is impressive."
That was when it happened.
As he tried to focus his gaze on his own reflection, a flicker of golden and blue light crossed his vision. It wasn't a hallucination from the blow. It was something else. Small lines of text, semi-transparent and written in a font reminiscent of a Linux console, began to float over the objects around him.
[OBJECT: Murky puddle (ID: 00452) | Status: Contaminated]
[ENVIRONMENT: White Crane City Alley | Latency: 15ms]
Han blinked hard, but the labels didn't disappear. On the contrary, they became sharper. He looked toward the exit of the alley and saw a person walking in a silk robe. Above them, a flickering dialog box floated:
[ENTITY: Human Cultivator (Level: Low) | Error: Cannot read "Qi" metadata without Admin permissions]
Han felt a shiver run down his spine. His fingers, out of pure habit, moved in the air as if they were typing.
"Even after death, I have to deal with a system full of bugs?" His smile grew wider, almost predatory. "If this world is a program... then I am the last error they should have let in."
[Soul Synchronization Complete: 0.05%]
[Detecting anomaly in world logic... User "Han" has injected attribute: [Eternal Debugger]]
Han stood up, ignoring the pain. For the first time in his life, the code wasn't locked behind a screen. It was everywhere. And he was the only one who knew how to hack it.