The alarm clock didn't ring. I had disabled it two years ago because the sudden sound startled me, and a startled twitch from my left eyelid released enough kinetic energy to shatter the sapphire-glass windows of my bedroom.
Instead, I woke up to the silence of the Atacama Desert, and the familiar, glowing blue text that hovered in the darkness of my retina.
**[Day 1,096.]**
**[Calculation Complete.]**
**[Growth Applied: +10% to Base Reality Parameters.]**
I lay perfectly still. My bed was a custom-fabricated slab of aerogel and high-tensile polymer, suspended in a magnetic field generated by industrial coils buried in the floor. It was the only way to sleep without waking up in a crater.
I ran the internal diagnostic—a habit I couldn't break. How did I feel?
Yesterday, I felt like a compressed ocean trapped inside a glass bottle. Today, the bottle was ten percent smaller, and the ocean was ten percent angrier. The sheer density of my own existence pressed against my skin. My heartbeat was slow, perhaps one beat every two minutes, but each contraction sent a slurry of hyper-pressurized blood through veins that had hardened into something tougher than carbon nanotubes.
"Status," I whispered. The air in the room rippled, a visible distortion wave rolling away from my lips.
**[Current Status: Critical. Local physics strain detected.]**
"Tell me something I don't know," I muttered.
I initiated the morning protocol. Before I could move, before I could even think about swinging my legs off the floating slab, I had to engage the limiters.
I mentally accessed the external rig I wore to bed. It was a suit of sorts, though it looked more like a skeletal harness made of dull, heavy lead and depleted uranium, woven with circuitry that manipulated gravitons. I called it the Sarcophagus.
"Engage Gravity Seals. Level Ten."
**[Acknowledged. Increasing localized gravity field to 500 Gs.]**
A hum vibrated through the room, deep and sickening. The air instantly grew heavy, turning into a thick soup that would have crushed a normal human into a red smear instantly. The magnetic bed groaned, sparks flying from the emitters as they fought to keep me suspended.
Weight. Glorious, crushing weight.
For a moment, I felt almost normal. The crushing pressure simulated the sensation of having a body that obeyed the laws of physics. I took a breath, the dense air fighting its way into my lungs, and sat up.
I swung my feet down. They touched the floor—reinforced titanium plates over a tungsten foundation.
*Clang.*
The sound was dull, heavy. I stood up. The Sarcophagus whined, its micro-thrusters firing to compensate for my movements, trying to drag me down, trying to bind a god to the earth.
I walked toward the kitchenette I had carved out of the mountain rock. Every step was a calculation. *Lift leg. Apply 0.0000001% force. Place foot. Shift weight.*
If I miscalculated the friction coefficient, I would slip. If I slipped, I would instinctively put a hand out to catch myself. If I put a hand out, I would accidentally slap the tectonic plate hard enough to rewrite the geography of Chile.
"Coffee," I said. "I need coffee."
The coffee machine was a marvel of engineering, designed by a terrified team of German scientists I had anonymously funded. It was built into the rock wall, operated by voice command because touchscreens didn't register my fingers—or rather, they registered them as armor-piercing projectiles.
"Brew. Black. Ultra-dense cup."
The machine whirred. A mechanical arm extended, holding a cup milled from a solid block of aircraft-grade titanium. It filled with steaming liquid.
This was the test. The daily humilitation.
I reached out. My hand, encased in the gravity-dampening gauntlet of the Sarcophagus, hovered over the handle.
*Focus, Shigu. You are not a supernova. You are a leaf. You are a breeze.*
I pinched the handle.
The metal groaned.
"Too hard," I hissed through my teeth.
I relaxed my grip. The cup began to slip.
I tightened it again, just a fraction. A microscopic adjustment.
*CRUNCH.*
The handle sheared off. The titanium cup, unable to withstand the conflicting forces of gravity and my pinch, imploded. Boiling coffee exploded outward.
I didn't flinch. The liquid splashed against my chest. It was boiling, nearly 100 degrees Celsius. To me, it felt like a splash of liquid nitrogen. My skin was so dense, my thermal regulation so absolute, that boiling water felt freezing.
I looked down at the puddle of coffee spreading across the metal floor, mixing with the twisted scrap of titanium that used to be a mug.
"That was my favorite cup," I said, my voice devoid of inflection.
I didn't clean it up. I couldn't. If I tried to wipe the floor with a rag, I would grind the fabric into the metal at the molecular level, creating a friction weld.
I turned away from the mess. No coffee today. Again.
I needed to get out of the living quarters. I needed to go deeper.
The facility extended three miles down into the crust of the Earth. I walked to the elevator—a massive freight lift designed for transporting tanks. I stepped in, and the cables screamed in protest, stretching under the artificial mass of my gravity seals.
I descended into the dark.
***
The Testing Chamber was a sphere, five hundred meters in diameter, hollowed out near the mantle. The walls were lined with layers of shock-absorbing gel, lead, and ablative ceramic plating. This was the only place on the planet where I could stretch.
Or at least, it used to be.
I stepped out into the vast, dimly lit space. The air here was recycled, smelling of ozone and stale dust.
I walked to the center of the arena. I needed to check the numbers. The spreadsheet in my head was no longer sufficient; I needed empirical data. The System told me I was 10% stronger, but what did that mean when "100%" was already enough to bench-press a continent?
"System," I commanded. "Disengage Gravity Seals."
**[Warning: Disengaging seals will expose local environment to Unchecked Kinetic Potential. Confirm?]**
"Confirm."
The heavy hum of the Sarcophagus died. The weight vanished.
The relief was instant, followed immediately by a rush of terror. Without the weight pressing me down, I felt like a balloon made of helium, untethered in a hurricane. My proprioception went haywire. I felt... empty. Ghostly.
I looked at my hand. It didn't look like a monster's hand. It looked like the hand of a twenty-nine-year-old ex-office worker who needed a haircut.
"Target practice," I said.
From the ceiling, a massive block of tungsten, the size of a small house, was released. It fell toward me, accelerating under gravity. Ten tons of metal.
I watched it fall. It moved in slow motion. Everything moved in slow motion. The dust motes dancing in the spotlight seemed frozen in time.
I waited until the block was an inch from my nose.
Then, I flicked it.
Not a punch. Not a palm strike. A flick. Middle finger off the thumb. A motion used to get a piece of lint off a jacket.
*THWACK.*
The sound was wrong. It wasn't the ring of metal on metal. It was the wet *crack* of physics giving up.
The tungsten block didn't fly backward. It ceased to exist as a solid object. The point of impact—my fingernail—transferred so much kinetic energy into the lattice of the metal that it flash-vaporized. The ten-ton block exploded into a cloud of superheated plasma and metallic dust.
The shockwave hit the walls of the chamber. The dampeners groaned, absorbing the force that would have otherwise leveled a city block.
I stood in the shower of sparkling tungsten dust, watching it drift down like glittering snow.
"Weak," I judged. "That was a low-effort flick."
I looked at the readout on the wall—a high-speed sensor array designed to measure impact force.
**[ERROR. SENSOR OVERLOAD. READING EXCEEDS MAX VALUE.]**
I sighed, and the breath blew a hole through the falling dust cloud.
"I need to know the ceiling," I said to myself. "I keep testing the floor. I need to test the ceiling."
I looked down at the ground.
The floor of the chamber was reinforced with three meters of steel, followed by the bedrock of the Andean mountain range.
"Just one stomp," I reasoned. "One stomp at... let's say, 0.05% capacity. I need to see if I can control the shockwave."
I closed my eyes. I visualized the muscles in my right leg. I visualized the fibers, the cells, the mitochondria that were currently churning out enough ATP to power a starship. I dialed it down. Down, down, down. Restricting the flow. Boxing in the infinity.
*Zero point zero five percent.*
I lifted my leg.
I brought my heel down.
*BOOM.*
It wasn't a sound; it was a physical assault on reality.
The steel floor didn't bend. It liquefied. My foot passed through it like a stone dropping into a pond. The impact traveled downward, ignoring the steel, ignoring the rock, seeking the density of the planet's core.
The entire chamber lurched. The lights exploded. The walls cracked, fissures racing up the ceramic plating like lightning bolts.
I hovered there, my foot buried knee-deep in molten bedrock.
Silence returned, ringing in my ears.
I pulled my leg out. The molten rock dripped off my pant leg (custom-woven graphene fabric, thankfully heat resistant) and hissed on the floor.
"That... felt like more than 0.05%," I whispered.
Suddenly, the red emergency lights flared to life. A siren began to wail, a mournful, dying sound in the damaged chamber.
A holographic screen flickered into existence near the ceiling, projected by the facility's AI.
**[SEISMIC ALERT.]**
**[Magnitude 8.2 Earthquake Detected.]**
**[Epicenter: Local.]**
**[Secondary Tremors Detected: Santiago, Lima, La Paz.]**
**[Tsunami Warning Issued for Pacific Coast.]**
I stared at the screen. The blood drained from my face.
"No," I breathed.
I pulled up the global news feed on the projection.
*BREAKING NEWS: Massive quake strikes Chile. Origins unknown. Geological anomaly detected—seismologists baffled by 'vertical impact' signature.*
I saw footage from a news helicopter in Santiago. Buildings were swaying. Dust choked the streets. People were screaming, running.
I fell to my knees.
The impact of my knees hitting the floor caused another tremor, a small aftershock that rattled the facility. I froze, terrified to move.
I had tried to be gentle. I had tried to use a fraction of a fraction of a percent. And I had nearly cracked the tectonic plate.
I was too big.
I wasn't just a strong man anymore. I was an event horizon. I was a cancer of physics growing on a fragile, blue marble.
"System," I choked out. "Re-engage Gravity Seals. Maximum output. Override safety protocols. Crush me."
**[Acknowledged. Engaging Level 15.]**
The Sarcophagus slammed onto me with the weight of a mountain. The floor groaned under the new mass. The pressure was immense, agonizing. It felt like my bones were being ground to dust, but I knew they weren't. My bones were harder than the gravity.
I curled into a ball on the floor of the ruined chamber, the weight pinning me down.
"I can't stay here," I whispered into the dark. "I can't move. I can't live."
If I walked, I caused earthquakes. If I sneezed, I caused hurricanes. If I had a nightmare and thrashed in my sleep, I could knock the Earth out of its orbit.
The realization hit me with more force than the gravity seals: *I am the villain.*
Not by choice, but by existence. My mere presence was an existential threat to humanity. The most moral thing I could do, the most heroic act I could perform, would be to leave. To fly into the vacuum of space and drift until I starved—except I wouldn't starve. The System would just sustain me. I would float in the void forever, an indestructible statue of boredom.
"No," I said. The word was heavy.
Space was empty. Space was boring. I had looked through the telescopes. It was just rocks and gas and silence for light-years. I would go insane in a week.
I needed people. I needed noise. I needed... connection.
But I couldn't touch them. I couldn't be with them.
I lay there for an hour, the alarms blaring, the news feeds scrolling through the devastation I had caused with a single step.
Then, a thought sparked.
A memory of the spreadsheet. The math.
*Input > Output.*
My output was broken. It was too high. But what if I changed the input of the world?
I sat up, fighting the immense gravity. The servos in my suit whined like dying jet engines.
"System," I said. My voice was steady now. The despair was hardening into something else. Resolve. Or perhaps, madness.
**[Listening.]**
"Open the project files. The 'Order of Truth' directory."
**[Accessing.]**
Blue schematics filled the air, displacing the red emergency lights. Designs for nerve-gear headsets. Algorithms for bio-feedback loops. A massive, distributed server network I had built using spare processing power from my own brain, interfaced through the suit.
The world was made of tissue paper. I couldn't change myself. I couldn't stop the 10% growth. Tomorrow, I would be even heavier. Tomorrow, the seals might not be enough.
So, I had to reinforce the tissue paper.
I had to coat the world in steel.
"If I cannot be weak," I murmured, staring at the rotating globe on the display, "then you must all become strong."
I swiped my hand, dismissing the seismic damage reports. I didn't care about the broken windows anymore. I cared about the foundation.
"Initiate the launch sequence," I commanded. "Global release. Bypass all firewalls. Every screen, every phone, every VR headset."
**[Project 'Ascension' is ready. Estimated user base: 4.5 Billion.]**
**[Warning: Granting System-derived abilities to non-compatible biologicals carries a 99% risk of societal collapse.]**
I smiled. It was a terrifying expression, illuminated by the blue light of the interface.
"Societal collapse is just another word for a level reset," I said.
I stood up, the gravity seals crunching the floor beneath me. I looked at my hands—the hands that had just shaken a continent.
"I'm lonely, System. And I'm bored."
I reached out and pressed the virtual prompt hanging in the air.
**[EXECUTE.]**
"Let's see if they can survive the tutorial."
The screen flashed white.
Somewhere above me, on the surface, billions of phones buzzed simultaneously.
My isolation was over. The fragility of the world ended today. I was about to share my curse, and in doing so, maybe, just maybe, I would find someone who could finally shake my hand without dying.
**[Day 1,096 ends. Preparing for Day 1,097.]**
I laughed, a low rumble that shook the dust from the ceiling. Let it come. Let the power increase.
I wasn't alone anymore. I was the Game Master.