Chapter 1: System Detected

The alarm howled like a banshee.

Alex Chen grumbled and slapped his hand onto the nightstand, wildly waving until at last the ear-piercing noise stopped. His fingers struck the broken face of his phone—a held-together device supported by tape and good wishes.

6:42 a.m.

He was already behind schedule.

"Shit."

He emerged from bed, the chill of the morning air biting at his flesh. His grimy apartment did not have central heat, and the broken window he had been meaning to block up last winter still sent cold air whistling into the room.

Still dressed in yesterday's jeans and hoodie, Alex splashed water on his face and glared at his reflection in the mirror. Thin pale face, tangled black hair, and the dark circles under his eyes could have delivered groceries.

You look like you coded through a war zone.

Which wasn't too far from the truth.

After four hours of debugging another person's spaghetti code for a VR pet simulator, he'd finally crashed at 2 a.m. Freelance work paid trash, but it was all he had since getting screwed at his previous job for "team culture mismatch."

Translation: he informed his boss their blockchain-based toothbrush concept was dumb.

Grabbing his backpack and half a protein bar, he was gone in minutes. Working at SynTech, one of the biggest tech firms in Neo-San Francisco, wasn't glamorous. He wasn't a lead dev, or a senior even. Just another code monkey banging away lines into a black box and praying it compiled.

At least it paid the rent. Barely.

By the time he reached the company lobby, he was already sweating despite the chill.

"You're late," growled Jenna from HR as she passed by, not even bothering to look up from her tablet.

"Good morning to you too," Alex growled, placing his palm on the security scanner.

The door beeped red.

Access Denied.

He frowned. "What the hell…"

He tried again.

Access Granted.

The door hissed open like nothing had happened.

Weird.

Alex elbowed into his cubicle, dropped his bag, and powered up his workstation. The normal boot cycle started—except that this time, the screen did not transition to the company OS.

The monitor flickered.

Lines of code flashed in green letters against a black screen, rapid-fast.

"Is someone joking around?"

He typed keys. Nothing was registered.

Then, a beep.

[SYSTEM DETECTED]

User ID: Alex Chen

Status: Incomplete

Initialize system? (Y/N)

He froze.

Not because it was some wayward script or debug console—but because the words weren't on the screen.

They were hovering in his line of vision.

".what?"

He rubbed his eyes, blinked.

Still there.

He stood up. Looked around. No one else seemed to notice. His screen was back to normal. But the prompt… it followed after his eye.

Initialize system? (Y/N)

"Alright, I guess I'm going crazy. Maybe I didn't sleep. Maybe the mold in my bathroom is sentient."

Still, his hand cramped.

He grumbled under his breath. "Y."

The text vanished.

A shock coursed through his skull—dagger-sharp, like a migraine shoveled through a laser. He braced himself against the desk, gasping. For a moment, the world tilted at a crooked angle.

Then stabilized.

And a new message appeared on the screen.

[SYSTEM BOOT COMPLETE]

Welcome, Alex Chen.

Primary Attributes unlocked.

Daily System Check: 0/1

Quest Available: Survive Today. Reward: +1 Upgrade Point.

Upgrade point?

He scrolled down—somehow in his head—and found a tab marked Status.

[Alex Chen]

Level: 1

Mental Capacity: 12

Reaction Time: 9

Memory Index: 10

Physical Strength: 8

Focus Duration: 6

Points Upgradable Today: 1

He clicked—no, willed—the point into Focus Duration.

Heat burst at the back of his eyes. The clarity returned in his head. The fatigue, the weight of yet another lousy morning—it abated some.

"What the hell is this?" he huffed.

The remainder of the morning was background hum. Words were spoken, screens blinked, Slack alerts tinged. Alex barely took in any of them.

He couldn't help but gawk at the system.

It wasn't an application. It wasn't augmented reality. It was baked into his worldview, like a HUD only he could see.

By lunchtime, he was gaping at a bug in another programmer's code—a logic loop causing a memory overflow—and without even trying, his mind just. solved it.

Lines of possibilities flashed through his mind. Like his own thoughts were being printed out in high-definition.

He had it done in five minutes.

His supervisor, Raj, peered over the cubicle wall. "Hey, that hotfix you pushed? That was. swift. You're okay?"

Alex grinned tightly. "Caffeine miracle."

Raj raised an eyebrow but nodded. "Good, keep it up. We've got eyes on this sprint."

Alex nodded. But on the inside, he was shaking.

Because for the first time in years… he felt powerful.

He went out for a walk during lunch, cutting through the back alley behind SynTech. The chill air was a blessing. He paced, watching the system flash new information in his line of sight.

A message coalesced.

New Passive Detected: Micro-Focus (Lv. 1)

Concentration time is 2x longer without mental fatigue.

He laughed—half crazed, half terrified.

He was leveling up. Upgrading. Like some sci-fi RPG… except it was real.

The system adjusted to use. Rewarded advancement. Encouraged learning, growth, survival.

A game embedded in life.

But something was bothering him.

Why him?

That night, cozied up in his apartment, he took out his old dev environment and started digging.

If this was programming, there had to be a source.

He wrote a diagnostic program to track neurological signals—EEG spikes, change in perception, eye movement. Nothing came back abnormal.

Until he noticed a new file.

root.system_Override64.exe

Hidden behind a line in his brain-computer interface simulator—lines he hadn't changed in weeks.

He opened it.

A single line of script:

"You were selected, Alex Chen. Welcome to the next step."

And it automatically erased itself.

The system upgraded the next morning.

Quest Complete: Survive Day 1

+1 Upgrade Point

New Quest: Investigate Origin. Reward: System Ability – DeepScan.

Alex woke up in bed, his heart pounding.

He'd entered into something much greater than he could understand.

And if anybody picked him. that meant someone was looking.

The upgrade began.

And there was no returning.