The room disappeared. The weight of Silas' body disappeared with it.
Dizziness hit him hard, the kind that made the inside of the skull feel like it was spinning loose from the outside. He had forgotten how bad the transition felt the first time. He closed his eyes, clenched his jaw, and let the black void pull him in.
The spinning stopped. New panels floated in the darkness, bright and patient.
[Welcome to Godfall!]
[Scanning identity… Silas Mortaine!]
[Identity confirmed. Please enter an ID!]
He did not think long.
[ID: TheAnomaly]
The name would remind him every single day of his fate in this lifetime. He wasn't looking for comfort or revenge alone, but to break every chain the universe thought it had already locked around humanity's neck.
[Do you want to check the rules?]
He nodded.
The rules loaded one by one in clean white text.
Time ratio 2:1 inside the game versus outside. Items could be carried back into reality after the first stage. Twelve real-world hours per day maximum inside. Currency connected to the Prime Vault; the same institution that would eventually control entire economies in the years ahead. Monsters would begin crossing into the real world once the first stage completed, then the real world will merge into the game world.
Silas read every line even though he could have recited them in his sleep. He was looking for differences. Any word that had changed, any rule that had been added or removed. If the system had changed even slightly, his entire plan would need adjusting.
It matched what he remembered. "Good."
[Scanning attributes… Awakening talent!]
The energy moved through him again, different this time. It was probing and searching, like something unseen had put its hands around him and was taking his measure.
In his first life, the scan had ended with a notification that made him wince even now thinking about it. "C-Level Talent: Enhanced Melee Damage." A garbage talent. Decent for a street brawler, useless for anything on the level of a B-rank dungeon. He had spent years trying to work around it.
[Scan complete!]
[Awakening unique SSS-Level talent: God-Tier Extraction!]
Silas exhaled slowly through his nose. There it was.
[Talent Effect #1: Upon defeating a monster, you can see a list of items, talents, skills, and attributes extractable from that monster, and specify what you wish to take. Currently only ONE thing per monster is allowed.]
[Talent Effect #2: Defeating monsters will grant you "Extraction Points," which can be used to enhance your talent or purchase items from the Extraction Store.]
One thing per kill. That was the early limitation. It would grow as he grew stronger, but for now it meant he had to be selective. Every monster was a choice. Take the skill, or take the stat, or take the item. He could not be greedy. Not yet.
He already knew what the first few choices would be.
[Please choose your occupation.]
Six options appeared side by side: Warrior, Mage, Archer, Priest, Assassin, Summoner.
In his past life he had chosen Warrior without thinking. It had seemed obvious at the time as it meant having a strong body and simple mechanics, a class any idiot could pick up and run with. He had been right about the simplicity and wrong about everything else. A Warrior's toolkit was narrow. It did not play well with a talent built around stealing abilities from enemies.
Mages were different though. A Mage's power came from what they knew, from the spells they carried and the way they combined them. The more unusual and varied the skills, the more a Mage benefited. And with God-Tier Extraction feeding him a constantly growing library of abilities pulled from every monster he ever killed, the synergy was almost absurd.
"Mage."
Ding!
[You have become a Mage!]
[Profession and talent have been given. Entering the world of Godfall!]
The void broke apart like paper tearing from the center outward. Light flooded in from every direction.
[Player 'TheAnomaly' has entered the "Novice Region"!]
---
Silas landed on soft grass.
He stood still for a moment and let his senses catch up. The air hit first, clean and cool, smelling of pine trees and turned soil, nothing like the apartment or the city outside it. The sky above was a sharp clear blue with no clouds. Trees ran in every direction, tall and thick, the kind of trees that looked like they had been standing for a hundred years.
A small village sat on a hill a short walk ahead, a cluster of simple stone buildings with smoke rising from a few chimneys. Even from here he could hear voices raised in panic, people calling out for each other, the distant crash of something knocked over inside one of the buildings.
New players figuring out where they were.
He remembered being one of them.
Silas flexed his fingers once. He checked his inventory with a thought; the Soul-Severing Sword rested there, a long blade with a dark edge that seemed to swallow the light around it rather than reflect it. He left it in place for now.
System Parasite was already running quietly in the background, the way a second heartbeat runs under the first one.
A low growl came from behind him.
Silas did not panic. He turned steady, the way a man turns when he already knows what he is going to see.
A goblin stood at the edge of the tree line about eight meters back, half-hidden by a bush it had clearly just pushed through. It was small and hunched, with mottled green skin and a crude wooden club gripped in both hands. Its yellow eyes were fixed on him with the simple, direct hunger that low-level monsters always carried. No thought behind it. Just need.
The level tag floated above its head.
[Goblin Scout — Level 3]
Level 3. In his first life, a level 3 goblin had nearly killed him because he had been too panicked to think straight. He had swung and missed and taken a club to the ribs and run limping into the village while the thing laughed at his back.
He thought about that for a brief second. Then he stepped forward.
The goblin's eyes tracked the movement. It shifted its grip on the club and let the growl build louder, puffing itself up, trying to look bigger than it was. It was a warning sign, the way animals warned. "Stay back. I am dangerous. This is your last chance."
Silas kept walking. The goblin grew impatient and charged.
It came fast for something its size, legs churning, club raised above its head in both hands, sharp yellowed teeth bared. It covered the distance in three seconds, the club coming down in a wide overhead arc aimed at his skull.
Silas sidestepped left. A single, calm step to the left, just far enough that the club cut through empty air and buried itself in the grass where he had been standing. The goblin stumbled forward with the weight of the missed swing, caught itself on one hand, and looked up with surprise blinking in its yellow eyes.
Silas was already moving.
He grabbed the back of the goblin's collar; it wore a rough strip of leather across its shoulders, barely qualifiable as clothing, and used its own forward momentum to spin it sideways.
THUD.
The creature hit the ground on its shoulder with a dull thud and lay there for a half second, winded.
Half a second was enough.
Silas pressed one hand flat against the goblin's chest, not gripping, just placing it there with firm pressure so it could not roll away. The creature thrashed and snapped its teeth and swatted at his arm with its free hand. The scratches did not break skin.
He reached inward toward the talent.
God-Tier Extraction answered immediately, like a door swinging open on well-oiled hinges.
He could feel the goblin now. Not its heartbeat or its warmth but a web of threads, each one attached to something the creature owned. A skill. A stat. Something small, something he would have laughed at taking in the mid-game, but something that had a specific use right now, in the first hour of everything.
The list appeared.
[Extractable Items Detected:]
[1. Club of the Goblin — Common Weapon (ATK +4)]
[2. Goblin Agility — Attribute (+12 AGI)]
[3. Scurry — F-Rank Skill (Increases movement speed by 8% for 3 seconds)]
Silas read all three without hesitation.
The club was useless. He had the Soul-Severing Sword sitting in his inventory and twelve points of agility from a goblin was a rounding error at his current strength level.
But Scurry.
A movement speed skill. F-rank, yes. Tiny bonus, yes. But in the early hours of the game, when every other player was still stumbling around trying to understand the interface, a movement speed skill was mobility. Mobility was options. Options meant he would never be in a position where he needed to take a hit he did not plan to take.
He selected it.
Silas didn't forget that he only had an extraction rate of 20% at this early stage, so there was a possibility of failure and losing the item when extracting. He put it in the back of his mind and hoped for the best.
[Extracting: Scurry (F-Rank Skill)...]
A thin thread of pale light pulled free from somewhere inside the goblin and ran up Silas's arm, warm and quick, dissolving into his skin before it reached his elbow.
[Extraction successful!]
[Scurry (F-Rank Skill) has been added to your skill list.]
[+15 Extraction Points awarded.]
The goblin stopped struggling.
It went limp under his hand, not dead though, just emptied, the way a balloon looks after the air leaves. Its yellow eyes stared up at the sky, unfocused. Silas lifted his hand away and stood.
A goblin losing one F-rank skill should not have reduced it to that state. Which meant the extraction had taken something fundamental, not just the ability itself but the capacity that had generated it. He filed that observation away. It would matter later, when the things he was extracting were not goblins.
Silas equiped the knife then killed it. The creature twitched once and lay still.
Ding!
[You have advanced to Level 1]
Silas looked at the village on the hill. More sounds were coming from inside now. Another group of players running in blind with no plan, knowledge, and idea of what the next ten years would cost them if they made the wrong choices today.
He knew every name worth knowing in that village. He knew which ones would become allies and which would become enemies and which would simply disappear quietly in the weeks ahead, consumed by things no one had thought to warn them about.
He started walking toward the hill.