"What moron uses a Suncold Talisman here…" A young man sighed, hunched over his monitor, the only light source in the room. His tired, burning eyes darted across the video he was watching, muttering to himself, until—

  —Ding!

  "A customer? Perfect timing. I needed something to calm me down… after… this shit." He clicked away from the video and switched tabs. A dark-themed forum sat open with two new requests filed recently. He skimmed them both and had the situation figured out instantly.

  A level 3 wanting to speedrun to 20? Trying to mooch off a guild? What a loser.

  The other request had come in slightly earlier, and he nearly missed it during his rant. This one was different. Prestigious, even, at least by his standards. A standard level 1 to 20 boost, but the poster had slapped the word “URGENT” in bold, and the offer sat at 200 dollars or an in-game equivalent. Everything about it pointed to one thing.

  A whale's alt account.

  He grabbed one of the soda cans scattered across his desk and tipped it. Empty. He tossed it over his shoulder without looking; the clatter behind him confirmed there were plenty more back there. He leaned into his chair and thought it over.

  Requests like this were rare, genuinely rare, like spotting an actual whale breaching off the coast. A big spender looking to skip a chunk in their progress, willing to pay whatever it took. Basically, an ideal customer. The choice was obvious: a one-time casual was never going to become a repeat client, but a whale? A whale meant bills paid and an energy drink he didn't have to feel guilty about.

  So, in the end, the choice was rather obvious. He replied to the post with a “+”, the Phantom Leveler’s sign that he’s taken up the order. The hidden part of the request buffered open with a click, revealing the whale’s alt account’s login information.

  He swapped the NR account to the one provided. Smooth, automatic as the headset was already plugged in and waiting. That headset was the only reason he had any dough coming in at all.

  Neuro-Intelligent Reality Assistant. Nira, for short. The biggest consumer invention in recent memory, accessible to practically anyone regardless of income, delivered through a full-immersion NR headset. It was a massively multiplayer RPG that had quietly built its own world from the ground up. One that was starting, slowly but surely, to bleed into the real one.

  Who cares about that?

  He unplugged it from his setup, lay back on his bed, and pulled the hefty headset down over his head. The thing covered everything from the neck up, a claustrophobic nightmare by any reasonable standard, though it was for the greater good, immersion

  “Nira… log in.” He said it with a slight smirk as it sounded cool.

  His vision cut to black. His heart didn't even quicken at the surreal switch. The sensation shifted, his sense of balance tilting from horizontal to vertical, less like standing and more like being suspended upright in warm honey.

  Nira interfaced directly with the brain's nervous system. Inside, everything was real. The reorientation period that could disorient a newcomer for a full minute passed in seconds for him. Fake gravity kicked in, pulling him down through the sludge-like transition, and then an icy wind cut across his face as the world loaded in.

  “W-What the fuck?” The wind swallowed his voice. It howled between jagged mountaintops in every direction, and his plate armor was already leeching heat from his skin, the frozen metal fusing with the cold air around him. The weirdness of it all was the location.

  A prank? That was the thought that kept circling back. Everything about the request had felt too neat, the urgency, the price, the timing.

  He scanned his surroundings. There wasn't much to see. Everything bled together into a single shade of white, snow and clouds indistinguishable from each other. The area beyond arm's reach vanished into thick cloud cover entirely. He was high up. Very high, by the look of it, though for some reason the altitude wasn't thinning his breath the way it should have.

  Before I log off and blacklist this clown, might as well poke around the inventory.

  With a thought, a blue interference box projected at his chest’s height. He scrolled seeing the items that were junk or worthless, but it was ordered by value, low to high. So he then jumped to the last page.

  “Eh?” His knees buckled. He hit the snow hard without meaning to, kneeling in the cold as his hands started shaking for a reason that had nothing to do with the temperature. Instantly he pulled up the stats page. The character's level was 177. The last person sitting at the top of the leaderboard was level 143. His heart raced as he read the class name. ? One Who Controls the Narrative ?.

  His mind couldn’t understand what was happening. The cold that had been gnawing at him moments ago felt distant now, pushed back by the heat of pure confusion. He kept reading.

  This account, including the items and every piece of gold, was in the millions, his estimate kept rising. Hundreds of millions. The biggest and worst part was that the class was a hidden. A completely unregistered one.

  Before he could process any of it, Nira cut out. The warmth that had been holding the cold at bay didn't fade with it. It bottled up instead, pressing inward, then surging outward from somewhere deep in his chest. He set the headset down carefully and pushed himself upright. The pain arrived a half-second later. A single, brutal wave that locked his lungs shut.

  Liquid covered him, thinking it was sweat, his hand glossed over his chest. The smell hit him first, as if pennies filled his mouth. His hand came back with a thick layer of red and his heart which had been hammering a moment ago, went quiet.

  His forceful gasps couldn’t pull any oxygen in. In panic, he jolted from his bed. His last-ditch attempt left him an increasingly bigger bloodbath. His vision narrowed. The blood pooled under and over him; he clutched himself and curled up, akin to a last warm hug.

  His monitor flickered on, and so did his eyes. Through the dimming light, he made out a shape in the corner of the room. A figure, standing still. Whether it was a hallucination or something worse, he didn't have enough left in him to decide.

  And that was it. His miserable NEET life had ended.

  A life spent as a parasite. A life he would have kept living further. Then everything, the pain, the headache and even the tired eyes he was so used to, weren’t there anymore.

  “What a nightmare… ay?” Han sat up. The confusion, on the other hand, was getting worse. He was alive, yet that was now in question.

  “Don’t tell me this is hell?” He was right back in the sludge zone. In all his hours logged, he had never once thought to look around during the reorientation period, the speedy process was always too fast. Now, with nothing moving him along, he had the time.

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  It’s gray. Not black yet, just a pale, featureless gray that stretched out in every direction without committing to being either ground or sky. He crouched and touched the surface beneath him; it gave like fog, coiling around his shins. Due to the ground and sky appearing the same, everything swiftly blended in the horizon. There was no wind, no humidity, and it wasn’t cold nor hot.

  Despite that, the weirdest thing was him being there. And he was there physically. Normally, he couldn’t move during that reorientational period, yet he’s walking, he has his hands, legs and his long black hair. The worn shorts and t-shirt he had been wearing were intact, and there wasn't a trace of blood anywhere on him.

  “Am I… stuck here?”

  His own heartbeat was the only sound in the gray. he fear barely had time to take root before his legs gave and he dropped to his knees. His unfocused eyes caught a red light hovering just above him.

  [POSSIBLE HOST ACQUIRED; PROCEED?]

  [Y/N]

  ?

  “Man… this dungeon’s so bleak.” A young man in light leather armor muttered to himself, dragging a finger along the carved stone wall as he walked. He had only been playing for a short while, and something about the full immersion kept making him reach out and touch things. Walls, logs, metal, basically anything he walked past.

  The dungeon walls were perfect enough to test out the textures. The slight humidity that followed every corner, the crumbled stone walls that had been losing a fight against the combination of moss and time, and the nigh endless hallways of material.

  “Ah, wait. They’re called crypts.” He corrected himself. Dungeons were near end game content, so this was the the beginner equivalent. He had gone with a decision that was as basic as it could be, a human magic rogue. It made easy work of the crypt monsters, especially against the zombies.

  Speaking of which, one was shuffling toward him now, gurgling with each labored step, mimicking the rhythm of breathing it no longer needed. He still wasn't used to it. There was a significant gap between seeing something like that on a screen and having it walk toward your actual face.

  He triggered his movement spell as usual, already reaching for his weapons. Though, before his hands could actually ready his weapons, pain. Far from pain that would cause you to scream or fall in panic, but more like a tight cramp in his side. Whatever had ambushed him was fast enough that he never saw it. And it was enough to kill his character in an instant, forcing him to the sludge orientation area. Locking him out for the whole day and reset his progress.

  While he was out of the game, his character’s body wasn’t. A zombie stood atop it. The zombie was Han. Though, mostly. Under the zombie’s top garment, specifically under its left lat, was a tiny black spot.

  That was Han.

  ?

  The movements are… weird.

  Han lurched through the corridor, fighting the zombie's body as if he was encased in honey. Every step landed a beat late, every reach arrived slightly off-target. Though, with a quick glance at his grayish green hands, he could tell that he was a zombie. They made his nonexistent heart flutter. At the end of the day, if he’s an undead beats being dead. On command, a red interference box appeared.

  I’m a… mana tick?

  He had two sets of stats side by side; his and the zombie’s. While the zombies were what you would expect f rom an early-game mob. His actual stats worse, they were all 1, and his resistances sat at -1 across the board. At least on the bright side, he needed a single EXP point to reach level 2.

  That should be easy enough.

  He spent a few minutes calibrating to the zombie's movement, he thought of it as fighting against stick drift. Once he had a rough feel for the delay, he scanned the environment properly.

  Blackwood Crypt. Then something clicked. Han was so used to playing the game he didn’t even register the fact that he had a menu, being an undead somehow didn’t, but the crypt finally brought him back.

  I’m in the game.

  He opened the menu and darted to the bottom-right corner where the logout button should have been. No settings either. It’s a good thing that he was used to the maximum pain threshold. While he controlled the zombie, he did have feeling per se. His right hand was pretty much a skeleton with a thin green fungus holding everything together, though for the same reason, his right pinky finger was useless. It still held itself together at the joints with something he couldn’t see.

  The most vivid thing is the movement and gravity itself. Every step, the zombie’s body sluggishly moves into place, a body that’s more gunk than tissue. He spent time wandering the first floor, letting the plan take shape. He didn’t need to explore everything to know the ins and outs of it, since one of the biggest EXP gains was from this crypt. After using it for hundreds of times it gave him some absurd layout knowledge. Finally, he found what he was looking for; a fellow zombie. While it was a tad weird that it took so long. Upon doing so, Han had an idea.

  Am I a player or a mob? No, rather, is my host an extent of me?

  Technically, in his mind, he’s neither, or rather a combination of the two. It wouldn’t matter if his classification was that of a player that much, as mobs can kill mobs, but he wasn’t sure if they gained experience. While he had the menu, he hoped that he was a player, as this would really make living easier in the case they couldn’t, of course.

  So, he bent down and grabbed a piece of rubble and walked closer to the zombie. By now, the zombie should have started attacking him. That crossed out one thing; that mobs don’t react to him controlling one of them. But it’s unsure whether it’s because he’s hidden or because his race is simply harmless.

  What even is a mana tick?

  A weird feeling of anxiety forced itself out. He couldn’t search the internet for answers regarding anything. After calming himself by breathing in and out figuratively, he turned to the zombie beside him. With an experiment at hand and a plausible stress reliever, he swung the rubble towards its skull.

  Without fighting back, the zombie collapsed, its skull broken in. The body shortly after began emitting blue sparkles. A body ready to be looted. However, he couldn’t interact with it, and he yielded no EXP from killing it.

  This became… far more difficult than I thought.

  If he couldn’t gain EXP, he’s done. Unsure how he even got this host, but assuming it’s through burrowing into him. Once again, it’s unclear how he did it or if he could even move without the host. At the worst, he removes himself from the host, and he returns to the “sludge zone” for all eternity.

  T-That’s not so bad. Totally…

  He sat down; soon the corpse beside him fully despawned. He began reading everything in the system menu. Luckily, it retained the actual mechanics, but the ones that would make it a game were gone. There was no online marketplace, friends, or the aforementioned settings and party buttons. Though, seeing as he’s only level 1, it could change.

  His stats were pretty much blank; he had no racial traits, passives, or anything that he could use besides being a level 1 mana tick. Although he himself was useless, the level 7 zombie had two passives he didn’t know about.

  ? Death Bite ?. A single bite delivered to any humanoid would trigger rapid deterioration, effectively instant death. This was surprising, but since practically nobody had fought them and lost, it didn’t seem that implausible that it wasn’t documented it. These zombies were very weak and one-shottable by the same level players.

  The other was quite rudimentary, ? Brain Tracker ?. It gave zombies an unusual sense to perceive brains from a decent amount of range. Given how slowly zombies moved, it had never mattered to anyone. These two were bread and butter. His exploitative mind already started wracking a plan.

  Time passed slowly, but since he didn’t need to do so much as sleep or eat, it kind of blurred. He had trouble actually doing his wicked plan. The brain tracker thing was extremely vague, deja vu was more vivid than whatever it was trying to show him. However, it did give him a rough direction to go. Since the first floor was just corridors upon hallways upon corridors, there wasn’t much stealthing to do. But he kept hiding from actual players until he finds one with the right class, conditions, and variables.

  Shouldn’t be too hard…

  It was a gamble, but Han trusted his gut, as the class he was searching for is quite popular. The first interaction wasn’t the lucky one. It was a big barbarian that swung his two axes, brute-forcing the first floor without taking any damage. While he could have attempted to bite him, it would mean risking losing a host or even his life.

  The next encounter was a honeypot. She didn’t wear armor; instead wore garments that a mage or wizard would. However, like every treasure, it was locked away. In this scenario, the mage girl had a duo, a knight of sorts. Speaking of, he couldn’t understand how many people were choosing heavily armored classes. Just in a single approximate day, he encountered five paladins and variations of them. It started to set in how weak he is currently.

  He always skipped the first four floors since the EXP gain would’ve been marginal. These beginners weren’t min-maxing maniacs and simply played the game, yet they still killed the zombies without any hassle. Until everything changed.

  “Man… this dungeon’s so bleak.” Han overheard a figure behind the corner. Han didn't check the man's class. Didn't check his gear, his level, or how alert he looked. His first instinct, before any of that, was to correct him.

  This is a crypt, dumbass.

  whole story. However it comes with a couple caveats, not every race/body can speak. And in turn, he's a tad passive(hehe) in things that don't effect him, at least very early on.