Volume 1 – The VR World
Chapter 9 – The Forbidden Dive
No one said it out loud, but we knew.
This wasn't a test. Not another calibration, not another simulation. It wasn't the start of something new.
It was the end of everything we understood.
The dive room had been redesigned years ago for comfort—soft lighting, ergonomic recliners, privacy sound fields. We stripped all of it out the night before. No distractions. Just metal frames and exposed interface nodes. Cables like veins. Hum like a distant heartbeat.
Ezra adjusted his sync band twice before lying back. He didn't ask about risks. If anything, he looked bored.
Soren moved slower, hands steady as he aligned the cranial pads. He muttered something about cost analysis under his breath—reflex. His way of making peace.
Naomi brought no gear. Just herself, barefoot, hair unbraided. She leaned her head back like she was laying down at the ocean's edge.
Darius didn't sit. He lay down like it was a battlefield, eyes open, expression fixed. The last thing he said was, "If I flatline, tell my sister I was right."
I strapped in last.
The moment the band touched the base of my skull, the sync pulse kicked—shallow, then deep, then gone. Like a hand tightening at the back of my mind.
I exhaled slow.
"Initiating."
The room blurred. Not like light fading. More like gravity folding.
The sync dive wasn't instantaneous—never had been. Your brain tried to hold on. You could feel it. A dragging sensation behind your eyes, like something pulling the world away from you in pieces.
Naomi's voice cut through the void. Not through the rig—inside it.
"Caelan."
A pause.
"You feel that?"
Yes.
I couldn't answer, but I felt it. The pressure. The shift. Not in the system, but beneath it. A second heartbeat layered under the sync pulse. Something old.
Then silence.
No loading screen.
No server transition.
The sync pulse hit like usual—shallow, steady, clinical.
Then it didn't.
I blinked into white.
No interface. No loading pattern. No return message. Just white so bright it stung.
Then cold.
Real cold.
I gasped, choking on smoke and salt. The air clawed down my throat like ash, biting deep into my lungs. My ribs locked. I rolled to one side—stone beneath me. Not tile. Not steel. Not simulated. Stone. Cracked and dirty. Sharp against my skin.
A groan caught in my throat. Everything ached.
The kind of ache I'd only felt after long nights at the gym in college, or waking up on a dorm floor after a week without sleep.
My body was wrong.
Longer. Leaner. My legs responded out of rhythm. My center of balance had shifted. I tried to sit and barely managed a crouch.
My hands—
Calloused. Scarred across the knuckles. Lines I didn't earn.
I stared at them, turning them over slowly.
Then I touched my face.
The cheekbones were sharper. The stubble was unfamiliar. My beard had silver in it. My mouth went dry.
I scrambled to my feet and stumbled back into a crumbling stone wall behind me. Ivy tangled against broken mortar. I could feel it. The texture. The bite of weathered root.
A bird called somewhere high above—guttural and wrong.
No ambient track. No digital weather scripts. No HUD.
I ran a sync diagnostic by instinct. Nothing responded.
No neural return.
No interface.
No way out.
A ruined courtyard stretched around me—worn stone archways, rusted lanterns, the skeletal remains of some ancient keep. Mountains loomed on the horizon, black against a gray sky that threatened snow without fully committing.
I pressed a hand to my chest.
Heartbeat, steady. Breathing sharp.
Alive.
Too alive.
My name surfaced slowly. Not spoken. Not remembered.
Just known.
Caelan Arion.
Not Ward. Arion.
High Magus of Hollowreach.
The memory hit like static. Faces I didn't know. A voice calling me "my lord." A battlefield rimmed in frost. A tower of bone. Magic so raw it split the sky open.
None of it real.
But it felt like mine.
Hours passed.
I waited for a sign. A message. A voice. Anything.
Nothing came.
Not from the system. Not from the others.
They weren't here.
Or worse… they were, and I couldn't reach them.
Near nightfall, I found a ring embedded in the stone floor. Old, iron, the size of a grip point on a teleportation pad—but not tech. Runes etched in a language that came to me without translation.
Mana.
The word slid through my mind like it belonged there.
My fingers trembled as I hovered them over the ring.
It glowed.
Not with electricity. Not with code.
With will.
And for the first time, I realized: this wasn't the dive.
This was something else.
Something real.