"A pity..."

Two words echo through my mind, carrying a wealth of disappointment and sadness. A strange thing to say for someone who wiped out all life on Merrow, hiding secrets to which I am, rather ironically, ignorant.

A full-body ache rouses me to consciousness within seconds. But instead of the hatch of my VR capsule, I see a familiar, yet unfamiliar ceiling. Racking my memory, I identify the ghastly floral pattern as being the same one as my dinky little apartment in a village near Versailles from my University days.

Startled, I sit up with speed. Glancing around, my confusion surpasses my physical discomfort. It really is this old shithole. What am I doing back here? I moved to a small house in east London four years ago now with the money I saved up selling Bronze Tier armour to noobs.

I sit in bed in silence for a few minutes, trying to process the strange turn of events. A chance look at the window across from my bed shows me a hazy reflection of myself and the room in the light of the rising sun.

Looking down at myself in horror, I tear off the bedsheets and stand up. Where the hell have my muscles gone?! My chest hair? My fucking tattoos!

Rummaging through the small chest of drawers next to my bed on instinct, I pull out a shaving mirror and look at my reflection. Looking back is a much, much younger me than should be possible. I'm forty-fucking-nine, yet I don't look a day older than twenty in the mirror.

Feeling a little light-headed, I practically crumple as I sit on the edge of the smelly old mattress. Digging a slightly uneven fingernail into my thigh, I wince at the sharp sensation of pain.

It feels real enough. Did something get messed up when the servers shut down? No. That doesn't feel like the right answer.

Squinting a few times, I try to remember where my Apple Pane is. If this is really back in my uni days...It should be under my pillow, right?

My left arm shoots out to the underside of the pillow, meeting with a warm plastic something or other. Pulling it out, I tap the transparent sheet.

January 12th, 2108.

One day before Astral Reckoning launches.

Son of a bitch.

It takes a while to mentally adjust to my present situation. Pun not intended.

Well, I say that, but really I just mean that I decided to stop trying to wrap my head around how this is even possible. It's not something I can answer, so why bother worrying about it?

Not to say I've completely given up on finding answers, but I'll be treating that as a very, very long-term goal.

For the time being, however, I've got to figure out what I should do in the short-term. Besides getting reacquainted with my old life as a student, that is.

Thinking it through, though, I'm not sure there's any real point to continuing my degree. Why? Two reasons.

The first is that technically speaking, I already earned my diploma. There'd be little point in going through the course again when I already learned everything I care to know about the Neoclassical movement and sculpture. Back then, I was planning on either moving onto become an art historian or an independent sculptor with a little atelier in Paris to call my own.

It never panned out. The artworld is hard to break into, and I'm only able to afford to study here thanks to a generous scholarship and the life insurance from the accident that claimed my parents' lives, scarred my face and my little sister's mind.

I should probably have a few thousand euros left in the account. Something to come back to later.

The second, and more important thing, is that Astral Reckoning launches tomorrow.

While at first, AR was a subpar VRMMORPG with terrible controls and a world with the approximate depth of a pint glass, that all changes about a month and a half from now, when the dev team - desperate and half-crazed after a poor launch leaves it with a fraction of the expected player numbers - releases the first major update: The Rise of the Adventurers.

When they did, the control issues ceased to be a problem. Players were allowed to do almost anything they put their minds to with an unprecedented level of freedom. The NPCs which, for the most part, were stiff and uncanny, were now upgraded with much more sophisticated AI - enough to pass for a real person. Crafting, once a one-button task with fixed outcomes, opened up significantly and demanded players possess actual skill. And so on.

Once the players started to realise how much deeper the game had gotten, it got people talking positively about AR. With the positive vibes spreading the word, people started giving it a chance and those who gave up on it - like I did - came crawling back to see what the fuss was about.

From there, the passion project of Hectic Works Ideaware exploded in popularity, until eventually, after a couple more patches, Astral Reckoning's Merrow became, for all intents and purposes, a second, completely self-sufficient reality. No longer needing developer input, capable of evolving, reacting and expanding on it's own with the help of state-of-the-art, fully sentient artificial intelligences.

Everybody not involved in keeping the world ticking over played it once they were old enough. Land and businesses in the game was just as, if not more valuable to investors and corporate entities in reality.

I could honestly talk for hours about the history involved, but let's not get carried away.

The point is, that in a couple of months, my degree will be redundant. Moreso than art degrees are usually seen, anyway.

What I have here, is an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the biggest investment opportunity of the century. Five billion people were playing in 2138. A third of the global population.

Which brings me to the biggest problem. The 20th Astral Eclipse. An event that occurs approximately every 1500 in-game years, thirty real years from now.

For reasons that are poorly explained thanks to the amount of time that has passed since the first known Eclipse, an entity known as The Harbinger of The Truth of Stars will descend upon Merrow, heralded by a blanket of darkness that blots out all starlight. Thereupon, they will issue a challenge to The Ignorant - mortals, basically. Should they pass the trial The Harbinger sets, then congratulations, Merrow gets to continue existing for another millennium or so. Failure means rather the opposite.

While according to what lore the player base did manage to dig up, the trials were punishingly difficult and required great wit, strength and will, heroes who stood at the apex of civilisation would always rise to the occasion and just barely eke out a victory, forestalling oblivion. This time around, as if to commemorate the 20th almost annihilation of Merrow, The Harbinger descended and found that, quite unlike previous Astral Eclipses, the people of Merrow had flourished. Growing far greater than any time previously recorded in numbers and aggregate strength. Which is to say, us players arrived.

In response, whatever trial the creature had prepared was abandoned. Instead, it offered one final challenge:

"Kill me, and be cleansed of Ignorance at last."

I shudder, the memory of our failure all too clear.

While it might not sound like all that big of a deal, seeing as Astral Reckoning is, at the end of the day, still a video game, one has to consider that throughout its thirty-year lifetime, the fortunes of five billion people were inextricably tied to the game's continued existence and prosperity. Hectic Works allowing the game to basically self-destruct would mean global chaos as we all get thrown into a financial crisis worse than the one that we are currently recovering from.

Not that I know that for certain, given the circumstances. But knowing how woefully unprepared we're going to be for the coming threat leaves me the unenviable responsibility of doing something about it. That's how I see it.

Still, I'm under no illusion that I can accomplish such a feat by myself. Seeing as how The Harbinger casually wiped out the top 1% of players...I, as barely a top 20% player stand absolutely no chance even if I exploit every scrap of incomplete knowledge I possess in these inherited memories. There's a lot I don't know and a lot of things I never got the chance to do, but if thousands of people who did get everything to go their way couldn't put a dent in the cosmic bathrobe, I don't stand a fucking chance, short of a true miracle.

What I can do, however, is lay a strong foundation for myself while the game is still being ignored by the big players and companies. Then, once established as someone of both means and good standing in the community, slowly try to raise an army capable of standing up the bastard.

The sheer scale of what I have to do daunts me, but I have confidence that, if nothing else, I'll be able to do more than a single point of damage at the very last second this time around. I have another thirty years to work with after all - sixty-ish if you convert to game time. That's pretty generous, all things considered.

All that being said, I ought to outline a gameplan. A bit of fiddling with my Pane brings up a blank notebook document, and I write down a simplified to-do list for the next month and a half.

1. Start playing Astral Reckoning. Thankfully, I recall having pre-ordered access to the game a few weeks before launch. All I need to do is show up at the internet cafe near the university campus and I can use one of their capsules for free with my student id card. For about 2 Real hours a day, anyway, or 4 hours in-game time. After that, I'll be charged by the hour if I don't have a membership with the cafe which I think runs about two thousand euros a month for the full VR package. Admittedly, a lot more money than I can afford to spend long-term, but it'll still be cheaper in the short-run.
2. Check on my financial situation and work out how best to invest it. I can support myself for the time being with my weekend shifts downstairs if I keep spending to the bare essentials, but I need far more than that. There are a few moneymaking methods I can take advantage of at the start of the game, but investing money in the real world player auctions could amplify potential profit if I play my cards right.
3. Gain as much in-game currency, resources and reputation as I can, as well as a good relationship with some important NPCs and NPC organisations. At launch, these connections don't really do much of anything except meet requirements for follow-up quests and so on. However, when they gain a proper degree of sentience in the RotA Update and the associate systems get overhauled, all the work I've done up to that point will retroactively appreciate in value by leaps and bounds, which in turn will allow me to re-invest my gains for massive profit separate from any other schemes I hatch, especially with the follow-up patch a few months later which I'll ignore for now. Players won't start to properly understand how important NPC relationships are until about three or four Real months into the game's life, since it doesn't really come into play until you hit the first progression milestone, and the lingering impression left by the first month finally fades away.
4. Start networking with other players, with an emphasis on those with skills and connections. The sooner I get started on this whole army business the better. I'll still need to spend some time solo before I'm ready to start recruiting people, but I can keep an eye out for those with potential.
5. Exploit the ever-loving shit out of my game knowledge to amass as many advantages as I can. Self-explanatory.
6. Restart my journey of physical training. I'm far too skinny and awkward. I may be younger, but compared to my physical prime, I've got a lot of work to catch back up on, and the sooner I get started, the sooner I can get back to my old sword drills.

Staring at the list, I tap my finger on my chin, as I hunch over the device. 

Nodding in satisfaction, the Pane is left behind on my mattress so I can dig through my wardrobe for some clothes. It's still early, but I may as well pay a visit to the bank and get reacquainted with the area. I'll also need to stop by the internet cafe to set up my membership and book myself in for some long sessions for the next month or so.

Properly clothed, I leave the apartment, locking it behind me.

My thirty-year-long journey starts now.