The wind was a gentle thief, stealing warmth from exposed skin as it whispered across the rooftop. Above, a bone-white moon hung in a starless void, casting everything in a spectral silver light that bleached color from the world and painted long, distorted shadows. It was the kind of night that felt less like an absence of sun and more like the presence of something else—something watchful and cold.
At the very edge of a hyper-tall building's roof, a figure sat with his legs dangling over an eight-hundred-meter drop into darkness. This was Chen. The wind tugged at his simple, worn clothes—durable gray trousers and a reinforced jacket scavenged from an early, easier Trial. His dark hair was cropped short, practical, and his face, though young, was etched with a weary vigilance that belonged to someone twice his age. He was enjoying, if that was the word, his day's spoils.
In his hand was the reward from a **[Food Trial]**: a **Fingerbread**. He brought it to his mouth, the motion slow, almost ritualistic. The thing was a masterpiece of unsettling mimicry. It was the precise length and girth of an adult human finger, complete with knuckle ridges, a fingernail crafted from some pale, flaky pastry, and even the subtle whorls of a fingerprint pressed into its "skin." The texture as he held it was cool, slightly waxy, and disturbingly… *fleshy*.
He took a bite.
His teeth sank through the pastry "skin" with a soft tear, and immediately, a tart, crimson burst of cranberry "blood" flooded his mouth. It was the only sign, the only confirmation, that this was food and not a severed digit. The bread itself was bland and dense as candle wax; the jam was aggressively sour, a C-grade reward that prioritized caloric function over pleasure. But function was everything. It provided energy. Energy meant continued existence.
*Yes,* he thought, chewing methodically, forcing the unpleasant mouthful down. *In this world, staying alive is the only victory that counts.*
It had been six months since **The Entities** descended. Six months since reality was unmade and remade into a vast, absurd **Faith Game**. The old world—with its traffic jams, birthday parties, streaming services, and petty anxieties—felt like a dream someone else had once had. Now, every surviving human had to choose a **Path** and pledge belief to one of the **Entities** that governed it. They lived, if you could call it living, on the blessings of their chosen patron in a reality that was both shattered and profoundly false.
*Shattered,* because the world had been physically divided by The Entities into countless Fragments. Everyone—now called **Believers**, or players in a more cynical mood—was randomly assigned to one Fragment to survive. Chen's Fragment was the roof of this unknown, towering building. Roughly two hundred square meters of exposed concrete, ringed by a low parapet. No shelter, no bed, not even a scrap of cloth for warmth beyond what he'd earned. The space was open to the elements, a stone raft adrift in an ocean of sky.
And it was a prison. The most insidious part wasn't the height or the exposure; it was the **Air Walls**. Invisible, intangible barriers that boxed him in. The rooftop access door was right there, a mere ten paces away, a promise of stairs leading down into the building's mysterious interior. But he could no more walk through that door than he could walk on the moon. The Air Wall was an unyielding, glass-smooth nothingness that halted all progress. The only way to expand his territory, to push back the walls and perhaps, one day, reach that door, was to clear **Trials**—specifically, Trials that offered "spatial expansion" as a reward.
Which led to the *falsehood* of it all.
Society had collapsed. Supply chains were severed. Agriculture, industry, commerce—all gone. And yet, people hadn't starved to death in the first week. They survived because the Game provided. Every resource, from the miserable Fingerbread in his hand to the clothes on his back and the potential for supernatural power, had to be earned through **Wish Trials**.
You made a wish. You dared to voice a desire. And The Entities would answer by dropping you and a team of matched strangers into a **Trial Ground**. Survive the Trial with your team, and your wish was granted by divine fiat, the requested item or effect materializing before you. The more audacious the wish, the more perilous the Trial.
Furthermore, each Trial awarded points—abstract measures of performance that accumulated on invisible **Leaderboards**, allowing one to progress further along their chosen Path. You could go it alone, opting for a Solo Trial, but the rewards were meager, barely enough to subsist on, and they awarded no points. To stagnate was to die.
The players who'd lasted this long, like Chen, had grown accustomed to the Game's brutal rhythms. Many had become experts in its deadly intricacies.
Chen swallowed the last of the Fingerbread, the sour aftertaste clinging to his tongue. He blinked, and in the corner of his vision, translucent game text shimmered into existence, superimposed over the moonlit skyline.
**[Current Global Believer Count: 8,478,114,678]**
A cold knot tightened in his stomach. *Eight and a half billion.* In just six months, the human population had been culled from twelve billion by over three billion souls. The **Faith Game** was not safe. Death in a Trial was permanent, absolute. But refusing to play meant no food, no water, no protection from the elements. The purpose was naked and brutal: grow stronger, or be removed.
"One day left…"
His gaze shifted to the central, burning red text that hovered persistently in his field of view.
**[Special Entity Trial: Commencing in 23 hours, 41 minutes, 17 seconds.]**
Chen sighed, the sound lost to the wind. The Game didn't allow for passive survival. Every seven days, it automatically enrolled every Believer in a **Special Entity Trial**. These were different from the Wish Trials—mandatory, notoriously difficult, and with a cruel penalty for failure. Even if you managed to crawl out alive without clearing the objectives, you would be stripped of the ability to initiate **Wish Trials** for the entire next cycle.
Failure meant a week of no income. A week of watching your stockpiles dwindle, of rationing down to the last crumb, of hoping your Fragment's environment didn't turn lethal. It was a slow, anxious death sentence.
To his credit, Chen was a careful survivor. Over half a year, he had transformed his barren concrete prison into a rudimentary stronghold. Using rewards from early, simpler Trials, he had constructed two low, sturdy storage sheds from corrugated alloy panels. They weren't pretty, but they were watertight and locked. Inside were his lifelines: stacks of bland nutrient bricks, canisters of purified water, bundles of synthetic fibercloth, basic tools, and a few low-grade defensive trinkets. All of it was poor quality—D and C-grade rewards—but it was volume. It was security.
"Just need a decent team this time," he muttered to himself, his eyes scanning the jagged silhouette of the city fragment. "Last cycle's team was a disaster. The one before that… got me stabbed. Wasted too much food recovering. Dips below the red line now…"
He was mentally running through his inventory, strategizing what to bring, what to wish for to complement a potential team's strengths, when a voice cut across the gap between buildings.
"Hey, brother! How'd the harvest go today?"
Chen looked up. The voice came from the "neighbor" on the rooftop of the adjacent tower, a fragment maybe twenty-five meters away across a dizzying chasm of open air. The speaker was a young man around Chen's age, maybe a bit younger, with long hair tied back in a messy tail. His attire was a riot of clashing colors and impractical shapes—a glowing vest over patchwork leather pants, one boot sporting a spinning gear for no apparent reason. It was the kind of ensemble only available as a novelty reward from certain Trials, worn by those who valued statement over substance.
The Air Walls divided space, but they were curiously selective. They blocked movement and physical traversal, but light, sound, and even thrown objects could pass through. This created bizarre, tense micro-communities. Your neighbor was both a potential ally and a constant threat. A friendly wave could precede a hurled grenade. The Game did not forbid Believers from killing each other; it merely provided the arena and the incentives.
This particular neighbor had appeared about two months ago. He claimed he was from Jiangsu province, a civil engineering student in his final year when The Entities came. His surname was Xie, but he never offered a given name. He was… energetic. A little unhinged, but not malicious. In the old world, he'd been stressed about job prospects. The Descent of The Entities, in his view, had solved that problem.
"Let's be real," he'd shouted during one of their first conversations, "**Professional Gamer** is a legit career path now! The unemployment rate is literally zero! Well, except for the dead people. They're… retired."
He was one of the rare "Adventists," who believed The Entities had, if not saved the world, at least saved it from bureaucratic tedium.
Chen held up his other prize from the day: a sealed can of **Squid-Slip Beverage**. The label showed a cartoonish, smiling tentacle. He shook it, and the viscous liquid inside sloshed thickly. "Fingerbread and mystery slurry," he called back, forcing a wry grin. "A feast for kings."
"Ha! Better than my haul! I went for a 'comfortable pillow' wish. Got matched into a Trial set in a library full of screaming books. The pillow they gave me is stuffed with what I *hope* is cotton. It whispers nursery rhymes in a minor key. Creepy as hell, but damn, my neck feels great!"
Chen chuckled, a dry, brief sound. The absurdity was the point. The Entities' sense of humor was cosmic and cruel. "Any word from the others?" he asked, nodding toward the other visible rooftops in their fragmented cluster. There were four other Fragments within shouting distance, a loose archipelago in a sea of nothing.
"Misty's been quiet. Saw Summer earlier—she was doing those creepy blade-dance forms again. Hunter… not a peep. Probably polishing his guns or something. You ready for the Special?"
"As I'll ever be," Chen replied. His mind was already elsewhere, on the impending Trial. "Just hoping for a balanced team. A healer, a tank, some reliable DPS. No loose cannons, no philosophers."
"You and everyone else, brother," Xie shouted, his voice tinged with excitement rather than dread. "It's the best part! The ultimate matchmaking! Who will you get? What fresh hell will we dive into? It's the only thing that breaks the monotony!"
*Monotony punctuated by terror,* Chen thought but didn't say. He appreciated Xie's manic energy—it was a different kind of coping mechanism—but he didn't share it. Chen's survival was built on calculation, caution, and a deep, abiding understanding of the rules.
He was a Believer of **[Order]**.
He hadn't chosen the Path lightly. When The Entities first manifested and the system interface burned itself into every human consciousness, presenting the tenuous **Paths**—**Order, Civilization, Chaos, Time, Life, Abyss, Deception, Prosperity, Annihilation, Void**—Chen had spent three precious, terrifying days observing, thinking, and surviving on the initial, meager "welcome" rations.
**Chaos** was tempting in its promise of raw, adaptive power. **Life** offered resilience. **Deception** called to the cunning survivor. But Chen saw the world for what it had become: a broken system governed by capricious, godlike beings. The only way to navigate a broken system was to understand its rules, to find the patterns in the madness, to impose personal structure where none existed. **Order** was not about law or justice as the old world understood it. It was about *predictability*. It was about analyzing the rules of a Trial and finding the most efficient, least risky path to compliance and victory. It was the Path of the strategist, the planner, the one who reads the fine print in a demon's contract.
His faith wasn't fervent prayer; it was meticulous study. His "prayers" were mental exercises in logic and probability. And in return, the Entity of Order granted him minor blessings: a slight sharpening of his mind for puzzle-solving, an intuitive grasp of rule-based systems, and occasionally, a nudge toward the most structurally sound choice in a moment of crisis.
It was a cold faith, but it had kept him alive.
"Well, I'm gonna go listen to my pillow's latest dirge," Xie called, waving. "Good luck with your prep! Don't eat all that… goo… at once!"
Chen raised the can in a mock toast and watched as his neighbor disappeared behind a makeshift curtain on his own rooftop. Silence descended again, broken only by the eternal wind.
He looked down at the can in his hand. **Squid-Slip Beverage. Grade C. Provides hydration and minor stamina regeneration. Side effects may include temporary skin translucency and a craving for saltwater.**
With a resigned shrug, he popped the tab. The smell that wafted out was briny and sweet, like low-tide and candy. He drank it in one long, grimacing gulp. It was slick, unpleasantly thick, and left a coating on his tongue that tasted of the deep ocean. Almost immediately, a cool, tingling energy spread through his limbs, easing the persistent ache in his muscles from a day spent training. He glanced at the back of his hand and saw the veins there become slightly more visible, glowing a faint blue under the skin for a moment before fading.
*Worth it,* he decided.
Standing up, he stretched, his joints popping. The moon was higher now, its silver light casting the storage sheds in sharp relief. He walked over to the larger one, input a code on a simple keypad lock (a reward from a **[Security] Wish Trial**), and stepped inside.
The air was cool and smelled of dust, synthetic materials, and the faint, always-present ozone scent that lingered after any Entity-bestowed item materialized. Shelves lined the walls, neatly organized. His inventory was a testament to half a year of cautious, unglamorous labor:
- **Nutrition:** 32 x Standard Nutrient Brick (Grade D), 14 x Fingerbread (Grade C), 7 x **Sunfruit** (Grade B—a rare, valuable find that actually tasted good and boosted mood).
- **Hydration:** 20 liters in sealed canisters, plus 8 cans of various "beverages" with dubious effects.
- **Materials:** Rolls of synth-cloth, bundles of plasteel rod, coils of conductive wire, a small box of basic fasteners.
- **Tools:** A multi-tool, a powerful flashlight, a length of incredibly strong graphene rope, a first-aid kit (mostly gauze and disinfectant spray—true healing required Life Path blessings or very high-grade rewards).
- **Defense/Utility:** A **Stun Rod** (Grade C, 3 charges remaining), a **Personal Fog Emitter** (Grade D, creates a 5-meter radius of obscuring mist), a **Signal Flare** (one-time use), and his most prized possession: a **Rule Lens** (Grade B).
He picked up the **Rule Lens**. It looked like a monocle made of smoked crystal set in a brass frame. When held to his eye and activated with a trickle of mental focus—a skill honed through his Order Path—it could sometimes highlight hidden patterns, reveal weak points in structured obstacles, or translate obscure rule-text. It had saved him twice.
This was his life. Not a hero's armory, but a survivor's toolkit.
He spent the next hour checking and re-checking everything, running maintenance on the tools, and packing a go-bag for the Trial. He chose practical, durable clothing from his stash, layered for adaptability. He packed three nutrient bricks, two water flasks, the basic first-aid, the rope, the multi-tool, the flashlight, the Stun Rod, and the Rule Lens. He left the Fog Emitter and Signal Flare. The former was too situational; the latter might draw unwanted attention in an unknown environment.
As he worked, his mind churned. *The Special Trials always have a theme. Last time was 'The Gilded Maze'—a test of greed and spatial memory. Time before that was 'Echoes of the Fallen'—combat against spectral remnants. What will it be this time? The notification doesn't give hints. Only the countdown.*
He stepped back outside, bag at his feet, and sat against the parapet, looking out at the fragmented city. In the distance, on another isolated rooftop, he could see a flicker of movement—Summer, perhaps, still practicing her lethal forms. On another, a small, controlled fire burned—Hunter, likely cooking something or sending some signal only he understood.
This was their world. Islands of humanity in an archipelago of divine design, connected only by the shared terror and promise of the Trials.
Chen closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to think. To plan. He ran through scenarios. *If the team has a Life Path believer, prioritize protection and support. If it's heavy on Chaos or Annihilation, hang back, let them draw aggro, focus on objectives. If there's a Deception Path… be very, very careful.* He considered his opening move. In the first moments of a Trial, before the chaos began, there was often a brief window to assess teammates and the environment. His Wish for this Trial… he'd been saving a modest reserve of "wish credit" built from previous performances. He needed something versatile. Not a weapon—he was mediocre in direct combat. Not armor—it would be low-grade and restrictive. He needed an edge that played to his strengths.
*Information,* he decided. *Or a tool for manipulation of the environment. Something that helps me understand or alter the rules of the space.*
A soft chime echoed in his mind, distinct from the wind. A private notification. He focused on it.
**[Believer 'Misty' has sent a Direct Whisper. Accept?]**
Misty. The quiet one from the northwestern Fragment. She was a believer of **[Void]**, an enigmatic and rare Path dealing with emptiness, negation, and silent spaces. She rarely spoke, but when she did, it was usually important.
*Accept.*
The voice that filled his mind was soft, whispery, as if arriving from a great distance through a vacuum. *"Chen. The Special Trial. I have… a feeling. It will be about masks. About faces shown and hidden. Order may find purchase where things are meant to be worn."*
Then, as abruptly as it came, the connection severed. A **Direct Whisper** was a costly ability, draining a rare resource. She wouldn't have used it lightly.
*Masks. Faces. Things meant to be worn.* Chen turned the cryptic message over in his mind. It was vague, but it was more than he had a minute ago. A Void believer's "feelings" were often perceptions of absences or hidden structures. Could the Trial involve disguise? Social stealth? Or perhaps literal masks with powers?
He filed the information away, a new variable in his planning matrix.
The night deepened. The moon began its slow descent. Chen dozed fitfully, his back against the shed, his hand resting on the grip of the Stun Rod. His dreams were not of the past, but fractured, anxious premonitions of possible futures: corridors that changed direction when unobserved, faces without features, and a constant, ticking clock.
He was awakened not by sunrise—the sky remained a perpetual twilight palette of deep purples and grays—but by the system chime in his head. A loud, resonant gong that vibrated in his bones.
**[All Believers. Prepare for Transport.]**
**[Special Entity Trial: 'Masquerade of the Forsaken' will commence in T-Minus 10 minutes.]**
**[Objective: To be revealed upon arrival.]**
**[Team Assembly: In progress.]**
Chen's heart hammered against his ribs. *Masquerade.* Misty was right. He stood, slinging his go-bag over his shoulder, checking his gear one final time. The countdown numerals appeared in his vision, burning red.
9:59… 9:58…
He took a last look at his rooftop, his sheds, the only home he had. He looked across at Xie's Fragment. His neighbor was standing at his edge, waving frantically, a wild grin on his face. Chen gave a single, sharp nod in return.
On another roof, Hunter stood like a statue, a long, wrapped weapon case across his back. Summer had ceased her movements and stood poised, like a dancer waiting for her cue.
They were all players on a stage they never asked for, awaiting a curtain they could not see.
3:00… 2:59…
Chen took a deep, steadying breath. He focused his mind, engaging the mental disciplines of the Order Path. He visualized structure, hierarchy, cause and effect. He pushed away fear. Fear was chaos. He needed clarity.
He formed his Wish, directing it inward, to the Entity he had chosen to follow. *Grant me a tool to see the truth behind the mask. To discern the role from the actor.*
The system pinged.
**[Wish Received. 'Soul-Sight Monocle' (Grade B) granted upon successful Trial completion. Trial Difficulty Adjusted.]**
A gamble. A B-grade item was strong, but the adjusted difficulty…
1:00… 0:59…
The world around him began to soften at the edges. The concrete under his feet lost its solidity. The wind's whisper faded into a profound silence. The fragmented cityscape blurred, melting into streaks of light and shadow.
**[Transporting…]**
Chen's last conscious thought was a reaffirmation of his creed, a cold anchor in the dissolving reality: *Find the rules. Exploit the rules. Survive.*
Then, the rooftop was gone, and he was falling into the waiting game of gods.