Hi Readers,
The chapter below is the original prologue for the story. I rewrote this prologue after I revisited it while editing the ebook version. In the end, I decided to make Chapter 00 - Prologue livelier and updated it. I think you might want to read it again. It gives a different feel.
I kept the original here to remind me that this is where it all started. This was the first chapter ever written for Isekaied and the chapter that started it all. It might be hard to believe, but the first idea for the story that existed was a world without Kai, Yuni, The Game and the Modus. It was just the prologue below and thoughts around playing AHBR. However, the story that you are familiar with came to life once I asked myself "What is the game?" and "Why is it so important?"
Wawanaoki
The original Prologue
In the summer of 2026 ZeeEye Gamers’ Guild launched Arcane Hunters Battle Royale (AHBR), a highly immersive and competitive video game that unleashed the true potential of the video gaming experience and redefined professional sports forever. Key to Arcane Hunters Battle Royale’s success was the revolutionary True Essence Sensory System (TESS) gaming platform that fully immersed players and spectators alike into the game world by stimulating their senses with game data. TESS projected the game world into the users’ minds by stimulating synaptic connections to breach the neuromorphic hardware wall that separated the virtual game world from reality. When users experienced TESS they saw, heard, felt, tasted, and smelled the game world. TESS perfectly emulated the real world.
Arcane Hunters Battle Royale was a competitive video game in the Battle Royale style, a genre that gained popularity in the 2010’s where the goal of the game was for players to eliminate all opponents until one player or team remained during a match. However, unlike the traditional Battle Royal games, AHBR players could hunt monsters for power ups, trade equipment with players, interact with social media during the course of the match and play matches that lasted for weeks. AHBR became the first game in history to breach one billion simultaneous active users. With its unique immersive nature and sudden rise in popularity, it changed the perception of esports with the majority of brands, advertisers and business model think tanks. The prejudice against considering competitive video gaming as true sport disappeared, unleashing a torrent of corporate sponsorships and investments, multi-billion dollar professional leagues, dedicated media programs and next generation streaming personalities that played, watched and proselytized the game.
AHBR’s rapid rate of adoption by the masses and impact to the leading economic sectors stunned the world. Researchers, technologists and government agencies alike were late to understand the far reaching impact of Sensory Systems like TESS. The medical and scientific communities became wary of the technology since TESS unnaturally excited the nerve cells in the body in an unknown way. Health safety agencies across the globe implored governments to slow adoption, but failed due to the virality of the TESS experience. Users could not get enough of it. The skeptics gathered, lobbied with their political might and placed one last hope in the United States Food and Drug Administration. That hope disappeared in a flash when the FDA and FCC both certified the TESS sensory system for use by the general public in record breaking time.
Conspiracy theorists began to speculate that the normal evaluation process was bypassed since the government did not want ZeeEye Gamers’ Guild to reveal any information regarding the top secret DARPA technology integrated into TESS. ZeeEye Gamers’ Guild was a U.S. based company from Silicon Valley that created a borderless means to affect the philosophy of the masses, a tool that wielded unregulated control over a regional economy. The new power shook the authoritarians of the world’s government to their core.
The governments of China, Taiwan, Russia and Korea clamored to clone and reproduce the TESS technology. They targeted the core Horizon-1192 neural processing module. However, all state of the art investigatory processes used, such as X-ray scopes, ultrasound scanners and atomic level microscopy, destroyed the module. With the core technology shielded in secrecy, TESS’s secrets remained a mystery. They then called upon their spies, agents and hackers of the dark net, only to discover that the sole facility that produced the Horizon-1192 was secretly protected by the U.S. military and a new agency with capabilities similar to the NSA.
To increase its virality, ZeeEye Gamers’ Guild priced TESS affordably and made it accessible to everyone. And once TESS fully integrated a universal translator module into the system that allowed any language to be translated in real time, the adoption rate skyrocketed beyond gamers and enthusiasts and reached all demographics of the world. By the end of 2028, the vast majority of households worldwide owned multiple TESS systems.
Arcane Hunters Battle Royale made professional video gaming the ultimate spectator sport and in combination with TESS had changed the world.
ZeeEye Gamers’ Guild CEO Zax Solari touted, “TESS has brought us to the dawn of a new era that will change mankind forever.”
