The game loaded for the first time at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday, and Junho did not sleep again until Friday — at which point the sleep was permanent.
But let us not get ahead of ourselves. The game first.
Verdant Conquest was, as advertised, extraordinarily detailed.
The player selected a faction at the start: the seven Human Kingdoms, the Elven Forests, the Dwarven Holds, the Beastkin Tribes, the Sea Folk, or — presented at the bottom of the list with foreboding music and a skull icon — the Demon Territories.
Junho, having spent three years doing everyone else's work and being called a treasure, selected the Human Kingdoms out of simple exhausted pragmatism. He named his character Ha-eun, chose the farming-focused growth path (of course he did), and started building.
The game was extraordinary. The soil simulation alone was more sophisticated than three of the university's agricultural modeling programs. Junho found himself genuinely riveted, leaning toward the screen, talking aloud as he experimented with irrigation placement and crop rotation schedules. "No, no, if you put the drainage channel there you'll lose the topsoil gradient — yes, there, that's right—"
By 3:00 AM he had completely lost track of time. By 6:00 AM he had developed a regional water management system that the game acknowledged as "unprecedented in this era" and he had the satisfied glow of someone doing exactly what they were good at with no one asking them to also do twelve other things simultaneously.
He didn't notice the sunrise. He didn't go to bed. He ate half a bag of chips at some point and drank three cans of coffee from the convenience store downstairs and didn't stop.
The thing about Verdant Conquest that made it remarkable — truly remarkable, something Junho began to grasp around the eighteen-hour mark — was the story.
Most games with this much simulation depth skimped on narrative. Not this one. The world had history that stretched back thousands of in-game years. The characters had motivations that shifted based on your choices. And running underneath everything was a grand narrative engine that was slowly, inevitably, advancing toward a final confrontation.
The Demon King.
He was called Veltharion the Unyielding, and he was the final boss of the game's central storyline, a figure of tremendous power who ruled the Demon Territories from his fortress at the edge of the known world. The game's tutorial mentioned him early: he was the reason the world was in conflict. His demons raided the borders. His dark influence corrupted the land. The hero path — regardless of which faction you chose — eventually led to a coalition force that marched on the Demon Territories and defeated him.
Junho, being Junho, got deeply interested in the Demon King's territory as an agricultural problem.
"Look at this," he muttered around hour twenty-two, having navigated to the lore section of the in-game encyclopedia. "The Demon Territories — volcanic plateau geology, high mineral content but almost zero organic matter. The soil temperature variance is insane. Rain almost never reaches here because of the mountain range blocking the weather systems from the west. But look at the subsurface data — there's got to be groundwater at depth. If someone sank wells and used—"
He caught himself planning the agricultural rehabilitation of a villain's territory at 3:00 AM on a Thursday while subsisting on caffeine and chip dust, and felt, briefly, that he might have a problem.
Then he went back to the game.
By the sixty-hour mark, Junho had completed the main story campaign. His human kingdom had flourished into a prosperous agricultural empire. The coalition had marched. The hero had given a rousing speech. The Demon King Veltharion had fallen in a dramatic battle, his power shattered, his fortress crumbling.
Junho watched the ending cutscene with the hollow focus of someone who had not slept in two and a half days and was running purely on the kind of exhausted momentum that makes you keep walking long past the point when your legs have technically given up.
The credits rolled. The game offered to start a New Game Plus.
Junho's eyes had been open for approximately sixty-eight consecutive hours.
He put his head down on the desk, intending to rest for a moment before starting the new playthrough.
He did not wake up.
The coroner's report, when it was eventually filed, listed the cause of death as acute cardiac failure resulting from severe sleep deprivation combined with dehydration and caffeine toxicity. He was twenty-three years old. His GPA was 4.3. There were fourteen unread work-related emails in his inbox. A frog in the university's experimental paddy waited three days for him to come back and measure the pH levels, then gave up and moved on with its life.
Professor Kim found a new student to exploit within two weeks.
None of this is funny. And yet.
And yet.
Consciousness, when it returned to Park Junho, felt wrong in every possible way.
He was, first of all, not at his desk.
He was lying on something that was not a desk chair, and which was, in fact, an enormous throne made of what appeared to be black volcanic rock carved into shapes that suggested — not subtly — the crushing of enemies underfoot. The throne was in a vast, high-ceilinged hall lit by torches burning with dark purple flame. The ceiling was so high it disappeared into shadow. The walls were carved stone hung with banners depicting a symbol he didn't recognize — a crowned figure with great wings, standing over a landscape of ash.
Junho sat up.
This was a mistake, because the body he sat up in was enormous. He overshot and nearly toppled sideways off the throne, catching himself on the armrest and discovering, in rapid sequence: that his hands were large, pale, and had extremely long black-painted fingernails; that he appeared to be wearing armor; that he had, based on feel, significantly more muscle mass than he'd had twenty seconds ago; and that something was sitting on his head.
He reached up and felt it.
It was a crown.
A large, heavy, spiky crown.
"...Okay," Junho said.
His voice came out deep and resonant and very much not his own.
"Okay," he said again, slightly higher, and then caught himself because that was somehow worse.
He looked down at himself. Black armor with dark red accents, inlaid with runes that glowed faintly. A long crimson cape. Gauntlets. Boots that, unlike his university waterproof boots, appeared to be genuinely, aggressively waterproof. He was, based on the length of his legs, approximately six foot two, which was nearly eight inches more than he'd been in his previous life.
He looked around the hall.
The hall was empty, but the emptiness had a recent quality to it — like something had just been here and left in a hurry.
A window. There was a window in the far wall, and through it, weak reddish light that might have been a sunset or a very polluted sunrise.
Junho got off the throne with extreme caution — it was higher than it looked — and walked to the window on legs that were cooperating more than he'd expected, which suggested that the body he was in had good spatial memory.
He looked out.
The Demon Territories.
He recognized them. Not because he'd ever seen them in person, obviously, but because he had spent approximately four hours reading their encyclopedia entry in Verdant Conquest while caffeinated and theoretically still a living person. The vast volcanic plateau, the ash-grey landscape stretching to the horizon, the distant mountain range cutting off the sky to the west. The black fortress walls below. The cracked, dead earth.
"Huh," said Park Junho, who had died of gaming exhaustion and woken up inside the game, in the body of the final boss.
He was quiet for a moment.
Then, because he was who he was: "The subsurface water table should be right about... there." He pointed at a spot in the middle distance without really meaning to. "If you sank a well to about forty meters and used a—"
He stopped. Stared at his pointing hand.
"I'm losing it," he said. "I died and went insane. Okay. That tracks."
A voice behind him said: "YOUR EMINENCE."
Junho turned around so fast he knocked his crown sideways.