[Tier EX - Akashic Terminal]
Alphonse's golden eyes shone blindingly bright. In an instant, his consciousness was transported to a realm that transcended human logic.
In this place, there was no sky and no ground. He stood in the center of an infinite space of light. The floor beneath his feet was as clear as still water.
Beneath its transparent surface lay a breathtaking cosmic landscape—clusters of glowing stars and slowly spinning galaxies. Every time Alphonse took a step, the floor rippled gently.
The water ripples emitted a golden glow that spread outward, dancing across the solar system canvas below.
Giant pillars of light towered around him, supporting the void. Between these pillars, countless books made of pure sheets of light floated freely.
The books moved to their own rhythm, crossing the space like swimming fish. On the cover of each luminous book, a name was clearly inscribed.
One book drifted low, passing right through Alphonse's shoulder like an illusory projection.
Simultaneously, the fleeting sound of a child's joyful laughter echoed in his ears. Alphonse glanced at the title on the cover of the book that had just passed him: Theodore Harrison.
It was a record of a soul. The historical footprint of a person's existence.
Alphonse continued walking toward the center of the room. He looked down at his right hand. A glowing book had materialized in his grasp.
Written on its cover was the name: Alexander Fonseca.
When Alphonse opened the pages of the book, the light projected a three-dimensional visual of himself—a man in a black cloak with a monocle, standing beneath a giant oak tree with glowing golden eyes.
He flipped to the previous page. Instead of a magical projection, the page displayed a man in an expensive suit, standing behind a mahogany desk in a luxurious penthouse overlooking a metropolis.
On another page, the man was seen sitting at the head of a conference table, surrounded by multinational corporate executives who looked at him with a mix of deep respect and sheer greed.
On Earth, Alexander Fonseca was no ordinary man. As the mastermind behind the success of the Pioneer Guild, his virtual empire in Orion Online had turned him into a billionaire at a young age.
Through the Real Money Trading system, he controlled digital assets worth trillions.
Real-world politicians and tycoons invited him to exclusive banquets, begging for distribution monopolies or protection for their corporate caravans inside the game. He was a king in two worlds.
But as Alphonse stared at those pages, he realized one crucial fact. Alexander Fonseca's power on Earth was bound by server cables, civil laws, and stacks of paper contracts.
The man in the expensive suit was nothing more than an administrative facade for the true player entity.
Now, those servers had been permanently disconnected. Billions of dollars in stocks and contracts on Earth had turned to meaningless dust. In this new world, wealth couldn't block the slash of a sword, and political connections couldn't control the flow of magic.
The only thing relevant for his survival and eventual domination was his identity as a player and the guild master of Pioneer. The avatar had now become his true entity.
Alphonse snapped the glowing book shut with one firm motion. The look in his eyes turned sharp, devoid of any hesitation or regret for the earthly wealth he had left behind.
"Alexander Fonseca is dead," he said softly, yet firmly. "The one living and breathing right now is Alphonse."
As if responding to his declaration, the book in his hand glowed brightly. The letters on its cover melted, rearranged, and locked in his new identity: Alphonse.
He resumed walking and finally reached the core of the mental space.
Floating before him was a massive geometric structure composed of overlapping rings of light, spinning on different axes, resembling a miniature center of the universe.
"The Cosmic Mandala," Alphonse muttered.
He looked at the majestic structure with a sense of familiarity. This room wasn't much different from the interface space back when he was in the game, where he often spent his time wringing the secrets of the universe from the Akashic Records.
However, the atmosphere here felt much more mysterious, heavier, and far too real.
Akashic Terminal. This was the pinnacle skill of his unique job awakening: Akashic.
This was the core reason why Alphonse—who in the real world was just Alexander, a nobody before the game—was able to build a guild of twenty-three members who all possessed unique job awakenings, including himself.
Unlike normal job awakenings, a unique job only existed once in the game; no other player could have the same job.
Knowledge was power, and Alphonse held the key to the universal library that recorded all the world's secrets.
But the truth was never given for free.
From the very first second his consciousness was pulled into this room, Alphonse could feel his mana reserves slowly being drained, sapped purely just to maintain his presence in this space.
In the game, every piece of information demanded a mana toll. Asking about the location of the nearest water spring might only cost a sliver of mana.
But asking for the coordinates of a phantasmal artifact could drain his entire mana capacity in an instant. The cost was determined by how much the information would impact the balance of the world.
Alphonse calmed his mind. He looked at the Cosmic Mandala in front of him and asked his first question.
"Identify the world my body is currently in, and explain how my body shares the exact appearance of my game character."
The Cosmic Mandala responded. Its rings of light spun rapidly, emitting a high-pitched hum.
In the empty air, projections of past memories formed. Alphonse saw a visual of his real body on Earth, lying stiffly inside a Gaming Pod capsule.
Suddenly, the heart rate monitor beside the capsule flatlined.
The numbers flashed to zero. A shrill medical siren pierced through the room.
The image shifted rapidly. It now showed the final seconds in the Starlight Castle meeting room. As the server shutdown was announced, his game character and the entire building faded away, shattering into pixels of light.
The image changed again. A vast expanse of space unfurled. Colorful stars fell like a meteor shower, diving toward an unknown landmass.
When the meteors struck the earth, there were no explosions; the light faded, weaving flesh, bone, and clothing, leaving behind the visual of Alphonse opening his eyes in the Eastern Forest.
As soon as the projection ended, the information pierced his brain like a lightbulb violently switched on inside his skull.
[Your soul has transmigrated to another world named Orion. The laws of reality in Orion detected the resonance of your soul and wove a physical vessel adopting the form of the last game character you played.]
Alphonse gasped. He drew a sharp, cold breath, his chest heaving violently as he felt exactly half of his total mana reserves sucked out instantly.
His legs trembled slightly under the weight of the sudden energy void.
"One single question just cost me half my mana," he hissed, fighting off a wave of dizziness. "But at least I know the exact nature of my situation."
According to his deduction, since he was last in the meeting room with all the core members of Pioneer who experienced the same forced log-out, he shouldn't have been thrown into this world alone.
Without wasting time, Alphonse asked his second question. "How many players transmigrated to this world of Orion?"
The Mandala spun again. The room filled with numerous visual windows flashing rapidly like CCTV footage.
Alphonse saw players falling from the sky with varying fates. Some landed in the middle of barren deserts, plummeted into freezing snowfields, splashed into stormy open oceans, landed right inside beast nests, or dropped into the narrow alleys of human cities.
[There are 10,000 players who transmigrated in the initial arrival wave.]
Alphonse felt another chunk of his mana plummet.
He muttered quietly in his mind, "Ten thousand... Did the server filter by level? By wealth? Or... are these ten thousand the ones who were logged in at the exact moment the server updated?"
But his focus immediately latched onto the Cosmic Mandala's choice of words.
"Wait... what does 'initial arrival wave' mean? Does this imply there will be a second, third, and subsequent waves?"
Reflexively, Alphonse opened his mouth wide, fully intending to hurl that exact question at the Akashic system.
But the very next second, his eyes widened in sheer horror. His hand shot up with lightning speed, clamping down hard over his own mouth, forcibly silencing his voice.
"Damn it," he cursed internally, cold sweat drenching his mental projection's forehead. "Good thing I caught myself in time."
Although theoretically, the Akashic Terminal could answer any question, the law of equivalent exchange was incredibly cruel.
Questions that tried to pierce the veil of future destiny, or tried to read someone's unspoken inner thoughts, demanded an absurd, astronomical mana cost.
Back in the game, Alphonse had learned a bitter lesson from his own arrogance. When he first acquired this job, he haughtily asked for the precise location of a Diamond Treasure Chest for a server event that was scheduled two days in the future.
The result? His mana wasn't enough to pay for future information.
The system immediately absorbed his entire HP (Hit Points) bar as compensation, resulting in a pathetic death where he dropped dead in the middle of a plaza without even getting an answer.
Even for trivial questions like: "Will I hit the jackpot on my first gacha pull?", the system nearly drained him dry before answering:
[No, you will not hit the jackpot].
A painful answer that immediately canceled his intention to do a hundred-pull spin.
In the game, dying a stupid death like that was just a laughing matter because the respawn system would just revive him at the nearest temple.
But in this real world of Orion? All interface systems were gone.
"If the entire game system disappeared, then the respawn system shouldn't exist either," Alphonse thought grimly.
He had absolutely zero intention of verifying whether he could come back to life after dying. He only had one life now.
Considering there were only ten thousand players out of the millions in Orion Online's player base who made it in right now, he had to confirm the fate of his comrades.
"Search for the coordinate locations of the Pioneer Guild core members who landed in this world," Alphonse requested.
The Mandala spun slowly, weighing the cost of his question. Two visual windows materialized in the air.
The first visual showed a man in a maroon suit with messy blonde hair. He was standing on a rock in the middle of a toxic green swamp, laughing maniacally with his golden glowing bow as he shot at a pack of swamp lizards with theatrical flair.
The second visual displayed a silver-haired Elf woman with turquoise tips. She wore her asymmetrical combat suit, walking with efficient strides through a blizzard in a freezing ice field. Her face was deadpan and emotionless, a fragmental sword floating by her side.
[Arcus - Coordinates: (421, 183, 2). Vrischil - Coordinates: (2850, 4120, 24)]
Alphonse gasped for air. His head throbbed violently. He could feel his mana pool nearly running on empty.
"Only Arcus and Vrischil," he whispered quietly. His twenty other members didn't make it into this initial wave.
However, the sense of loss was somewhat cured by rational relief. Given that those two were elite combat units holding unique job awakenings from the Zodiac series—Arcus the Sagittarius and Vrischil the Scorpio—they were far from weak.
"At the very least, with their survival skills and combat dominance, their lives won't be easily threatened even if they have to face other elite players head-on in this world."
But his paranoid instincts as a Guild Master still weren't satisfied. He had to know the true scale of the threat.
He steadied himself, took an incredibly deep breath, and stared at the glowing geometric structure one last time.
"One final question," Alphonse hissed hoarsely. "How many players out of those ten thousand... are still alive as of this exact second?"
The Cosmic Mandala spun violently. The room shook.
Various visuals of player corpses who had died from falling into hazardous areas, being torn apart by monsters, or drowning in the deep ocean flashed rapidly before Alphonse's eyes.
Golden numbers floated up in front of him.
[9,873]
One hundred and twenty-seven lives of game gods had been snuffed out, erased from existence within mere minutes of stepping foot in this world. Death here was real and permanent.
The next second, the Mandala's structure dimmed. The luminous mental space cracked like a mirror smashed by a hammer, then shattered into millions of pieces.
Alphonse's consciousness was slammed back into his physical body.
Beneath the roots of the oak tree in the Eastern Forest, Alphonse collapsed forward. Both of his hands slammed into the mossy ground, supporting a body that suddenly felt as heavy as lead.
Cold sweat poured from his temples and neck, soaking the collar of his shirt. He panted heavily, gasping for oxygen like a man who had just nearly drowned.
As he lifted his face, the golden eyes behind his monocle—which usually radiated calm calculation—now reflected an emotion he had long forgotten.
The fear of death.