Inside Ethereal, Ethan had already descended to the third level of the General’s Tomb. The violent pounding from above, which once shook the walls like the heartbeat of a giant, had dulled into a faint, distant hum.
[Ding... Alert: Your VR Capsule is under external attack!]
He froze. A quick swipe brought up the 360-degree external feed from his capsule. The hallway outside was chaotic—everyone had rushed out. Before Ethan could make sense of it, a figure suddenly darted back toward his capsule.
"What the hell is going on?" Ethan muttered.
The man—Blackie—hurled himself at the capsule door, eyes wide, grinning with a manic fervor. "Ya, hehehe..." he muttered, clawing at the sealed hatch like a rabid beast.
The next second, a bright arc of electricity shot out, throwing him across the floor. The VR Capsule’s high-voltage failsafe had activated.
"What in the world is Blackie doing?" Ethan barely finished before Blackie charged again.
"Just a little more, just a little more, just a little more..." Blackie mumbled like a lunatic, his body convulsing as another surge sent him sprawling. Again and again, he returned, each ti only to be blasted away. Ethan’s system filled with warning alerts.
He tried opening external comms to demand an explanation, only to rember that normal signals didn’t penetrate Ethereal. Phone lines, ssages, nothing worked. Grimacing, he silenced the alerts. If Blackie wanted to keep frying himself, so be it.
With that distraction muted, Ethan turned his focus back to survival. The third level of the Tomb wasn’t ant for grinding. It was a joint spawning ground for Corpse Guard Warriors and Javelin Corpses. With ranged enemies in the mix, there was no safe kiting spot. He wasn’t here to farm anyway. He was hiding.
Finding a corner against a wall where no monsters spawned, Ethan stopped and opened his inventory. He needed a solution. Morzan had warned him: if he didn’t deal with "that creature," he could be trapped here indefinitely.
His body was still in the real world, lying inside the capsule. While his capsule was top-of-the-line—over twelve million, complete with nutrient circulation—it wasn’t a permanent life-support pod. Eventually, the nutrient supply would run dry. Worse, the injection port was locked inside the capsule. That feature, ant to prevent tampering or poisoning from the outside, now worked against him. If he stayed stuck here, he would wither in his sleep.
Ethan’s eyes drifted down his item list until they settled on sothing important.
[General’s Token (Fragnt)]
Description: Combine 100 fragnts to form a General’s Token. Holders may enter the General’s Hall without obstruction.
Note: The first ti a monster is killed, the drop rate is higher. Only 100 fragnts exist across the entire Tomb.
He checked his total: twenty-nine fragnts. He needed seventy-one more.
Legend said the General’s Hall sat on the deepest level of this dungeon. Yet in his previous life, no one had ever entered. By the eighth floor, the monsters were already level 147. The density of undead increased with every descent, and the ninth floor was a nightmare: countless Javelin Corpses, levels reaching 157, all clustered at the entrance.
Anyone who entered was instantly shredded by a storm of spears. Even the strongest tanks couldn’t last a second. Only Divine Judicators—advanced Paladins—could endure with their invincible eight-second Divine Shield. But the monsters’ AI was too smart. They refused to attack shielded targets, waiting until the shield dropped before unleashing hell. Teams tried using squads of Judicators, but even then, eight seconds wasn’t enough. The lee fighters couldn’t bring down even a single corpse before they were torn apart. Every plan had failed.
Ethan stared at the fragnts, a slow smile forming. In his past life, thousands of players had passed through the Tomb. The fragnts had scattered across countless hands. A few collectors tried to buy them all, but three were never found. The deal collapsed. This ti, however, he was alone. Every fragnt dropped here belonged to him.
If the General’s Token unlocked the Hall, what waited inside? A super boss? A trap? Morzan, the one who’d hinted at the existence of Ethereal’s cosmic brain, wouldn’t design sothing useless. It had to serve a greater purpose.
Resolved, Ethan closed his inventory. He needed fragnts, which ant more monsters had to die. The third floor was suicide for soone at his level—62 against level 87 monsters, many of them ranged. Grinding there was impossible. So, he would return to the second floor.
Last ti, he had slain hundreds of Corpse Guard Warriors and pulled twenty-nine fragnts. That drop rate was promising. The description hinted that "first kills" had higher chances of dropping, and since Ethan was killing enemies far above his level, his odds were even better. If he wiped the entire second floor clean, perhaps he could gather the rest of the fragnts.
He wasted no ti.
Back on the second floor, the ceiling above still thundered. That damned creature never tired, hamring endlessly. Yet despite the countless stone supports it had shattered, the Tomb endured. General’s Tomb was built to last.
Ethan mapped out the terrain, marking broken pillars as lures for kiting. Then he went to work, dragging wave after wave of undead behind him like so grotesque shepherd. Switching to his artifact weapon from the Starter Zone, his damage output surged. With his level now at 62, his true damage stat reached 124. Against monsters with millions of health it was still modest, but with his damage-over-ti effects and wide-area skills stacked, his efficiency soared. Every strike splashed damage across hundreds of targets. Ten thousand health shaved away here, ten thousand there. Slowly but surely, the warriors fell in droves.
Days blurred together. Ethan fought endlessly, his only rhythm the ceaseless thunder above.
anwhile, in the real world, chaos spread. Three days had passed, and Ethereal had been locked in server maintenance. Half a year since launch, players had grown addicted to nightly log-ins. Now, deprived for three consecutive nights, the entire world fidgeted like addicts denied their fix. Questions flooded the official site, but as always, they disappeared without response.
Ethereal had never released statents, updates, or patch notes. It was a ga run by ghosts. Normally, such silence would have killed a ga long ago. But this wasn’t any ga. It was the only true virtual reality system in existence. Every competitor had died before launch, bought out or shut down. If you didn’t play Ethereal, there was simply nothing else to play—unless you considered Minesweeper an alternative.
In the Whitmore family’s hidden estate, Ethan’s body still lay locked inside his capsule.
Lyla kept vigil by his side. Over the months, she had seen too much strange, too much unexplainable around Ethan. Once, she would have scoffed at talk of other dinsions or underworlds. But now her worldview had cracked. There really were universes beyond universes.
Seven days slipped by. Ethereal had not reopened. Ethan’s capsule ran out of nutrient fluid two days ago. Lyla had barely left his side since. Astrid often kept her company. Of all the won around Ethan, Astrid seed most attached to her, though she would occasionally wander off when hunger gnawed. Even the others visited often. Ethan could see them all through the capsule’s caras.
Inside Ethereal, his expression darkened. Watching Lyla’s sleepless, haggard face through the feed filled him with unease.
The pounding above had reached a new intensity. Two days earlier, just as the system had warned him his nutrient reserves had expired, he had heard it—the catastrophic roar of stone collapsing. The first level of the Tomb had caved in.
His eyes flicked back to his inventory. Ninety-eight fragnts. Two more. Just two more.
On the second day of his grinding, he’d overheard Victor and Williams speaking outside his room. Leo was missing. Markham had confird the entrance to the Whitmore territory had been opened once from the inside. Only Leo could have done it. Each of them carried a temporary access token bound by blood essence. No one else could use them.
Ethan clenched his fists. Ninety-eight fragnts. Two more. Lyla’s tired face haunted him. Above, the Tomb shook again. Huge stones broke free, smashing into the ground. Then, without warning, the ceiling split open.
A beam of violet light pierced the darkness, carving a hole the size of a truck.
Ethan’s heart sank.
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