The dim glow of an outdated television flickered across the cramped apartment, casting long, broken shadows over peeling wallpaper and piles of unopened bills. The air was thick with the smell of instant noodles and stale coffee. A single cracked window let in the distant noise of city traffic, muffled and tired.
Adrian Voss leaned back on the battered couch, arms crossed, eyes half-lidded as he watched the news anchor prattle on with rehearsed enthusiasm.
"In just a few days, Primordial Abyss will celebrate its first anniversary! With over 300 million active players worldwide, the developers have prepared a special event to reward loyal adventurers."
Loyal. Adrian exhaled a breath that wasn't quite a laugh.
The screen shifted to a suited executive from Titan Corp., smiling that same hollow corporate smile.
"Our AI-driven class evolution system ensures no two players are ever the same!"
Adrian's gaze hardened.
AI-driven class evolution. The same system that had turned him into a walking anomaly—then erased him like an unwanted patch bug.
Bills sat in uneven stacks on the table. FINAL NOTICE stamped in red, a rhythmic reminder of reality.
Titan Corp had used him. Buried behind beta tests and QA logs, he'd been another line of data—a nameless fresh graduate assigned to push the AI in ways no one else bothered. Instead of following the usual path—enter dungeon, kill monsters—he treated the entire structure like an ecosystem. Observing. Healing. Managing the monsters, not fighting them. Testing how far the AI would adapt when faced with the counterintuitive.
The AI responded, evolving a counterintuitive class around his approach—a reflection of balance and control, not conquest.
Dungeon Sovereign.
An accident. A fragment stitched into the system's logic.
His report had been filed, applauded quietly—then forgotten. The big names took the stage, the companies with sponsor deals. Fresh graduates like him were expected to fade quietly, grateful for a pat on the back and a line on their resume.
His report was abandoned, shelved without ceremony. Later, he heard whispers that the classification had been quietly deleted from the official records—buried as if it had never existed.
But code wasn't so easily erased. The system's deeper architecture—the tangled logic and self-learning algorithms—had already absorbed it. Resetting his account had been simpler than rooting out the anomaly completely.
Now, a year later, the remains of his mistake still lingered—a ghost buried under polished updates and smiling press releases.
Adrian leaned forward, elbows on his knees, fingers steepled.
Jobless. Broke. One eviction away from being another forgotten ghost in a city built on broken promises.
His phone buzzed with stale freelance notifications—odd jobs, dead-end gigs, the usual flood of rejection. He flicked them away, almost on reflex.
But buried among them, a different icon pulsed faintly.
An old marketplace app from Primordial Abyss—one he'd never bothered uninstalling. Left to rot in the background like everything else he hadn't had the energy to clean up.
Out of habit more than hope, Adrian opened it.
Gear sales. Loot trades. PvP auctions.
He scrolled absently at first—then slower. Sharper.
PvP loot. Untraceable losses. High-tier gear tumbling into the open market after deaths. No patterns. No signatures.
A resource. If handled right.
Adrian's mind shifted, his calculating brain gears locking into place.
Not fame. Not glory.
Survival.
He stood, grabbed his worn jacket from the couch, and slipped out into the gray evening.
The neon buzz of "NeuroLink 24/7" seeped into the damp air. A low-rent VR capsule café, wedged between a payday loan office and a boarded-up dry cleaner. The front desk clerk barely looked up as Adrian entered.
The place stank of sweat, burnt circuits, and too much energy drink.
Perfect.
Rows of scratched immersion pods lined the back wall. Some flickered with the dull heartbeat of active sessions. Others stood dark, abandoned.
Adrian slid into an empty capsule, pulling the cracked hatch shut. The pod hissed as it sealed, drowning out the outside world.
He connected the neural nodes. The faint hum of initialization rolled through the capsule walls.
Login screen.
His hands hovered.
For a moment, he lingered.
Create a new account? Start over?
He almost laughed at himself. What was he expecting—a miracle?
Most likely, the system had already deleted his old data. Beta testers were wiped when the game went live.
Still.
A quiet, foolish part of him nudged forward.
Try.
He entered his old credentials.
[LOGGING IN...]
A slow pulse of data. Verification pings. Then—
Connection accepted.
The familiar weight of the VR interface settled against his senses. Reality thinned, pixelating into the gray-blue mist of Primordial Abyss' login shard.
Adrian's character loaded:
Level 1.
Base Class: Summoner
Advance Class : Dungeon Sovereign
No equipment. No gold. Empty inventory.
But something was still there.
At his wrist, a flicker.
[Cursed Chain of Dominion — Bound to Class]
Adrian stared at it—the coil of black metal pulsing faintly like a heartbeat.
Not a gift.
An oversight.
An accident.
He remembered now—big corporations didn't waste time on cleanup. They outsourced grunt work to interns. Marked issues "handled" without checking. Buried bugs under new updates.
Someone, somewhere, had ticked a box. Closed a ticket. And left a ghost inside their perfect system.
Their negligence.
His chance.
He opened the dev console hidden deep within the shard's debris—a backdoor leftover from the chaotic beta rollback.
[Global Market — Access Granted]
Still open.
Titan Corp's perfectionism had left cracks. Adrian had lived inside those cracks long enough to recognize their shape.
He paused.
If beta players recognized his name, it could draw attention.
He hovered over the character rename screen.
"Not Dungeon Phantom," he muttered. "That story's done."
He typed a new name.
Raven.
A creature of profit, patience… and scavenged opportunity.
And more importantly, a name that wouldn't raise any flags with the system—or the devs.
[Welcome back to Primordial Abyss.]
He scrolled through the marketplace, slow and methodical.
Orange and red-tier gear—legendary and raid-grade items—stood out like neon signs. Sell those too soon after a PvP kill, and the original owner might notice, might track it. Too much risk.
But mid-tier loot—purples, common dungeon drops—flooded the market in droves. "Dreadlevel Boots," "Warden Gloves." Indistinguishable. Forgettable.
Low attention. High liquidity.
Exactly what he needed.
Blend in. Feed off the chaos. Profit in the spaces no one watched closely.
He pulled up PvP forums next. Watching.
Guilds boasting raid kills. Braggarts parading new loot.
More importantly—arguments. Casualties. Flame wars over dropped gear and unfair losses.
Every angry post meant opportunity.
Every blind death meant resources falling into the system's gutters.
All he had to do was sweep quietly enough.
A soft breath left his lips.
They trained the AI to adapt.
They built a world that rewarded exploitation.
They just never imagined the ghost they created would still be here, quietly sharpening his teeth in the ruins.
Adrian closed the market tab.
The plan was simple.
Find dungeons barely guarded. Find players greedy enough to risk PvP zones with real gear.
Subjugate the dungeon bosses. Control the kill zones. Force mistakes. Harvest drops.
A network of silent farms. Invisible. Disposable.
The corporation stole his work, buried his name, and fed his ideas to their machines.
Now he'd take everything they valued most—not with banners and battles, but in silence. Bit by bit. Until nothing remained but rot beneath the polish.
And no one would even know his name.