The ground began to settle and the sky found a fixed hue, less blue then most were used to but not the shades of violet they had grown to fear. Neither fire nor ice fell from the sky, except for in the areas where they were reasonably meant to. The trees were made of wood and didn’t secrete acid or poison, or worse things still. It was finally calm. After decades of troubles, it was finally calm. What felt like a millennium, but was less than a century, of shifting, panic, chaos and death, as the worlds collapsed, was finally over.

In the beginning there were twelve worlds; planets separated by an endless void. By touching the hearts of each world, the spirits that preserved and powered those planets, those who lived on the worlds were able to venture between worlds. With great pride, the best workers shaped a city in the void, a prosperous trade city at the centre of twelve worlds; the glorious city of Zen. For hundreds of years that city grew, with wealth, power and governance centralising itself there. For hundreds of years, energy was taken away from the hearts of the worlds without being returned to the cycle.

When the worlds became too exhausted to go on, they made one final attempt to survive, even at the cost of their creations. They moved themselves to the city in the void, letting themselves collapse into energy and form themselves into one world.  The process was not a subtle one and the resulting world was unstable, falling apart and rebuilding each section of the surface on a near daily basis, like a puzzle where the pieces changed shape and had no fixed image to work from. The new world’s heart was also different; wiser and more bitter, with the shattered memories of the hearts that formed it. The power wielders of old, who could shape worlds and bring life to a void, could no longer hear the voice of the planet, no long feel the heart's energy flow through them.

 Countries were lost. Cities were lost. People were lost.

But despite the loss, life went on. In the middle of a canyon, that had once been a mountain that inverted itself one night, a small camp, the start of a village, had been set up. There were young ones, born after the birth of the one world, who lived every day only vaguely aware that it was possible to have a sunrise in a consistent direction. From their perspective, that the ground had stopped shaking was something to fear; a sign of something new and unknown. They had grown up in a world of constant change and turbulence, and stillness to them felt like something being taken away.

But the danger was only just beginning, and the peril that they had lived their lives with swiftly returned. With the environment finally stabilised, beasts and monsters and other twisted things could once again repopulate. Within a month, the camp’s population had been halved. The only way they had lasted as long as they did, through the world's formation and the new beasts, was because some researchers, former power wielders, found new ways to reach the heart of the world. They knew the new heart was different. It was far more powerful than the old ones and had a heat for them rooted deeply within it. The old hearts would attempt to communicate, they would give their power freely and would guess and empathise to try and reach the wielder's desired result. The new heart, the One Heart, however, did none of those things. It ignored communication, was apathetic and would only grant power, if requests somehow reached it, in the exact wording; like a genie seeking to torment through perverting wishes. To make matters worse, it seemed to favour the beasts and monsters. Beasts that appeared on the twelve worlds grew much faster than they previously did, faster than could naturally be explained, and would often carry the ability to project power is some form, wielding the heart's power without the need for conscious effort. Monsters were far worse, however; they seemed to be able to wield power as freely as the races could on the twelve world of old.

As the camp was on the brink of collapse, one researcher finished his experiment. It was a vein hope; something that could be described as escapism. He gathered all the energy, all the power, from the crystals, bones, scrolls, books, potions, artefacts, coins and staffs. Naturally, that was done without permission and all of those things could have helped save lives in the fight against the beasts; but he didn’t care. His hope, his dream, was to use a gate spell, to escape the forest, to return the city in the void; return to Zen and his family that lived there. He reasoned with others, telling his sympathisers that the city would still be filled with its vaults and shops and power stores; that all of its treasures could be used to save their camp. They trusted him and helped him steal and barter for every scrap of energy they could find. Despite that, the spell failed. He tried again; the spell failed. He tried again; the spell failed.

He could hear the sounds of people dying getting ever closer, beast roars and screeches physically impacting his body. The battle was being lost and they were being pushed back. He had enough energy for one more attempt, though not from the treasure hoard that had turned dull around him. Instead he picked up a severed arm, that had flown loose for some unknown defender, and he cupped the still dripping blood, using it as a magnet to pull the blood and souls of the fallen into his ritual; burning the dead as fuel for his desperation. He had failed three times. But something wasn’t right. The spell should work. In a panic he thought to himself, what could he do to make it work?

He had an idea.

It was a crazy idea; even for a blood coated man in the midst of a battlefield.

He restarted the spell, this time without a destination.

The spell would open a gate between that world and the nearest other world. He knew that the spell would most likely fail; after all, the thirteenth world was the only world left. Would the destination-less spell target the city? Would it simply break? Would it open into a rift that would devour the valley? He had no way of knowing.

The gate opened. The gate opened but what he saw wasn’t the city he had grown up in. A pulse of white light spread out of the gate and encompassed the horizon. When he regained his sight, he could see strange green, yellow and blue bars floating above everyone, himself included. Furthermore their names were displayed, as were numbers. Similar bars could be seen over the heads of the nearby beasts.

By then end of the day that camp was destroyed.

It was an odd occurrence. In the games library of all virtual reality capsules was a game that no-one purchased. No company was listed and no one credible was taking claim to it, though many unlikely groups eventually did and others were unilaterally blamed. No one downloaded it, yet it existed fully downloaded, even on consoles that had been stored without a data connection. At first, it was believed to be a hacking incident, or a failed marketing stunt, as it couldn’t be uninstalled and was still on the drive after a factory reset. After a short while it was found to be even stranger than that. After replacing the hard-drive on an unused device, and running it in off-line mode, the game still appeared in the library. It was like an urban legend or a ghost story, but everyone had it there to prove it wasn't. To make matters stranger, when starting it up, no internet data was metered. It was a game that didn’t exist, but did everywhere, that was played online, but didn’t use any data.

The publicity over the strange event led to a sharp increase to the number of capsules sold, which in turn led in turn to the event being called a publicity stunt, with the implication being that the capsule makers had embedded the software into the devices and signed a deal with internet service providers. What made that idea less likely was that it didn’t just appear on one type of capsule. Any capsule capable of complete immersion, completely interfacing with the game's world with the mind, even DIY ones, had the game in the library. The game itself also made the idea that it was a publicity stunt less likely. There were laws in most countries about the level of realism a game could have; especially around the amount of pain the user could feel before pain was disconnected or numbed. The game followed none of those laws and would see the makers imprisoned and sued for psychological harm if they were discovered.

Players would get hungry, thirsty, hot, cold and tired. They’d get sick and diseased, and feel the weakness and wasting those things entailed. It also had a nonsensical level of difficulty that provided very little rewards for any efforts made. What it did have, that other virtual games didn’t, was a detailed character customisation menu. As laws were put in place to protect user from mental illnesses associated with inhabiting bodies radically different to the natural body, the customisation options of most games were limited. That game, however, didn’t follow those laws any more than it did pain reduction. There were many calls to ban the game, but since it existed without anyone doing anything, and its use wasn't traceable given it seemed to function without being metered, there was little that could be done about it short of manually monitoring everyone that owned a capsule. With the number of businesses that conducted meetings within private and secured virtual spaces, without the tedium of travel but still with the personal touch of a face to face meet up, imposing any such restriction would have caused political and economic harm that no career politician would be willing to touch.

The game was called Saviours of the Wild; it was a massively multiplayer online role playing game (mmorpg) with a strong emphasis on survival. Many years prior, the multiplayer survival game had gone through a period of popularity, where companies pumped out cheaply thrown together games that caused the genre to crash, and at first glance a lot of the issues that caused that collapse seemed present in Saviours. There was no real theme or common environment, and often gave the impression that it was several different places, with different cultures, rather than one, all thrown together without thought or reason. Like the makers had purchased game assets online and randomly threw them together. Likewise there was the available classes; the staple of a classic role playing game. While the game seemed to focus heavily on a serious and sombre atmosphere, the playable classes seemed to disregard that entirely. While there were normal classes, like swordsman, rogue, wizard and archer, there were strange classes like fisherman, tattoo artist, meteorologist and gambler. Many others seemed entirely there as a joke, like the duellist, which was based around a pseudo-trading card game mechanics, instead of the expected dexterous sword fighter. To further confuse players, the rouge was at the top of the non-alphabetised list while the rogue was towards the end, leading to a number of players accidentally playing as what was apparently a magic using class. To make matters worse, people who chose to be wizards couldn’t use magic. They had a spell list and the system included the gestures and phrases they needed to do and say, but no matter what anyone tried, they couldn’t get a spell to cast. There was also a few strange double ups, with there being a bard class and a bard of the wild class. A normal bard had the same problem as the wizard; it had a spell list that no-one could use. It really didn’t take long for them to be labelled broken classes or scrap data from development that was never removed.

The classes that were able to use magic, however, required strange methods for casting, and different methods between each class. A geomancer collected energy from creatures and stones, storing it in crystals, and then used those crystals as the fuel for spells later. The summoner, on the other hand, worked through a strange process of drawing energy from spiritual animals. They had four major spiritual animals, from cardinal directions, and could cast spells associated with those animals while facing the correct compass direction while standing in a carefully drawn spell circle. It was noticed fairly quickly, by those who chose that class, that the sun didn’t rise in a constraint direction, however the direction they drew power from stayed the same. There were also classes like the witch doctor, which gained magic, as well as class abilities, by harvesting the souls of the dead. They were quickly considered to be unpleasant to be around, as they had a tendency to kill other players for extra spell resources.

When Laura first started playing, she saw a class that appealed to here almost instantly. The apothecary; amongst the classes that could heal it was by far the most criticized. It had a bad health attribute growth rate, it could only equip three types of weapons, and its healing method was non-magical and was slow when compared to other healers. The worst part was that at low levels, they could only provide healing in certain environments. Despite knowing all that, Laura still wanted to be one. She had dreamed about being a wise, all knowing doctor, at-peace with nature with a small shop that was soaked with the smells of herbs. The kind of small cottage that could be romanticised, though probably never existed.

To fulfil that dream she entered her capsule and booted the game. When prompted to make a user-name she entered “Lotus Crane” and was taken to the character creation menu.