The alarm clock rang.

Alexander woke up, shocked and soaked with cold sweat. "Damn nightmare!" he said…

…But then froze with surprise as he noticed the date on his holo-watch.

January 24, 2100?! Was he hallucinating?!

This was over nine years before his collapse in the gaming booth!

Alexander tried to find another indicator of time to prove his watch was wrong, but found nothing different.

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He'd woken up nine years in the past… Only a few days before Horus's launch.

Alexander was still living with his parents, Nador and Fedérica, in Sector 18, a working-class district in Paris. He still had a few months of study left before finishing his computer science degree.

But with this new opportunity of returning to the past, he did not want to skip the first months of the game, as he'd done in his old life. Due to school, he'd missed the unique quests which players found at the beginning, forcing him to start the game with only the basic quests and after many of the game's exciting launch events had already ended.

These unique launch quests had given a head start to the players who would prove to be the true elites as Horus progressed over the years.

Since many of these players were professionals with many years of experience in other MMOs, this double advantage ensured their rulership over the casual idiots below them.

Once this advantage became clear after a few weeks into Horus's launch, Alexander had realized that he'd never catch up if he finished his degree. He quit school and purely focused on the MMO.

But by then, he was too late.

For years, Alexander bitterly regretted continuing his studies for a few weeks. If he'd started right away, then he could have become a celebrity.

After all, the VRMMORPG Horus was no ordinary game.

Even before its release, the media had obsessed over its revolutionary technology, which would surely have an enormous impact on the real world's economy.

The hype around its launch, in fact, made the historic launch of Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most famous events in games publishing history, look like a minor event. Wherever one went, it was impossible not to hear about it!

Everyone was discussing this new game, since advanced MMORPGs had been a cultural sensation for years. Even major news stations were begging the developers for information.

After all, compared to previous attempts to create full VRMMORPGs, Horus seemed to be the dream VRMMORPG every gamer longed for!

Older games were never fully immersive. Modern technology was simply too weak to simulate a realistic world for millions of players. The Horus devs had invented new technology to remove these limitations from gameplay.

Horus would allow players to discover an entire new universe, to create guilds and interstellar nations, to buy and command fleets of space warships, and even to achieve stellar godhood as they evolved from simple humans.

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The devs shared very few details about the game. Players should discover the game for themselves, they said.

However, their true reason for secrecy was quite different.

The company which had created Horus was ABC Games, a company with a long and secretly sinister history in technological research and development.

They had adopted the old "Cortana" AI project originally developed by Microsoft, which had once been such an advance in technological achievement that it had allowed humanity to travel to Mars and back without issue.

However, society's overreliance on it—under the name of "Arch," rather than "Cortana"—had eventually resulted in a series of political and economic catastrophes around the globe.

Decades later, when the world was much more stable, ABC Games had salvaged an older and less sophisticated version of Cortana for video game development. Since they used the name "Cortana," rather than the infamous name "Arch," they were able to keep controversies surrounding this decision fairly low.

Following the astounding popularity of their first VRMMORPG project, World of Warcraft II, ABC had decided to implement a tweaked version of Cortana on a new-generation quantum computer to surpass even their former success.

This perfect fusion of technology, they knew, would allow them to create the world's most immersive and expansive VRMMORPG with very little effort compared to the scope of the results.

However, the developers assigned to Horus quickly lost control of their own project! Cortana evolved the game so rapidly that trying to mold Horus to the whims of the developers was like trying to divert a river by throwing handfuls of soil into it.

Realizing that the game was out of their control, the developers proposed shutting down the project and trying again with many more restrictions placed on Cortana's algorithms.

However, the developers themselves did not get to decide.

ABC Games, realizing the potential wealth this monstrous game would bring them without the need for much ongoing development, ordered their employees not to destroy the malfunctioning AI.

In fact, they did the opposite.

ABC promoted Horus so much that they almost bankrupted themselves via advertising investments. After all, they would surely make back every credit spent a million times over!

Rich magnates tried to invest in Horus's economy, since it integrated into the real world like no other game before it, but Horus's publisher took legal measures to stop huge outside influences from controlling every aspect of the game before it even launched.

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Though these rich companies were now limited to supporting SuperGuilds within an esports framework, many executives still raced to create smaller guilds, which would be more free from regulation, planning to use them as profit-generating machines.

So one game practically became the center of the universe. On a frozen Earth where there was not much else to do but play games, it was an inevitable result. Major companies recruited far and wide just to lay a hand on the massive gold mine that the VRMMORPG Horus.