Mirror Cage

PATH OF THE IMMORTAL—NOVEMBER 11, 2062

MONASTERY OF THE MIRROR CAGE—NATION OF THIJYA

"Hurry, Brother Ignatius! Brightlord Temporix has broken free!"

The speaker, an elderly male NPC, gestured for Alexei to follow. He wore a high-ranking monk's robes and stared with lifelike desperation into Alexei's face.

The dining chamber shook. The dozens of other NPCs—the monastery's inhabitants, as well as some travelers—gasped as candlelit chandeliers swung, brick walls cracked, and plates and cutlery rattled.

But the player only blinked.

"My name's Alexei, not Ignatius," he said vaguely. He could hardly conjure a single thought from his mind. It was as though his brain had been turned to gelatin.

All he could remember was his name.

Alexei.

Yet, as the moments passed, more thoughts and recognitions came to the surface like half-dead animals gasping for air at the surface of a rushing river.

Alexei finally realized that he recognized his surroundings. This was the original version of the Monk class's opening tutorial in Path of the Immortal, the VR-based MMORPG he'd spent more than a decade of his life playing.

"Wait… a decade?" he asked aloud. Where had 'that' thought come from? "I've not even been playing for even a single year. I only just made my account."

"Hurry, Brother Ignatius!" the NPC sage repeated, ignoring Alexei's words. "Follow me at once to safety!" He swayed in place, waiting for the player to rise from the dining table.

After a moment, Alexei stood. Rather than following the NPC, he pushed past the sage and walked toward the monastery's front door. The NPC ran quickly after him.

"Follow me!" the sage commanded again in a heroic tone, despite Alexei being in the lead. His 3D model impressively pushed aside the swirling, real-smelling smoke that filled the hall as people panicked and burning chandeliers fell to the ground below.

Alexei walked almost without thinking. He barely noticed the revolutionary, immersive technology surrounding him that was like no other game before it, the flagship of Polyphemeral Industries' NeuroVR headset.

He'd experienced this exact scene several times on new characters before the devs updated the tutorial to something a little simpler a year down the line. It was really nothing special to him by now.

"But how could that be? I've only been playing for a few moments."

A powerful sensation of urgency surged in the back of Alexei's mind. More of the mental haziness vanished.

There was something very important Alexei needed to do. He'd been sent here to…

To do what?

Alexei stepped outside and squinted at the bright sunlight above.

No. Not sunlight.

It was, in fact, the middle of the night.

The brilliant light which illuminated the steppe monastery shone down from none other than Brightlord Temporix, the main antagonist of Path of the Immortal.

This figure was an enormous six-winged dragon—or rather, the skeleton of a dragon with bones of shining crystal. A crown of black metal sat on the radiant skeleton's head, and red light burned in its eye sockets.

Brightlord Temporix roared in rage, spewing radiation breath into the sky. The breath quickly condensed into sparking dust that rained down on the monks and travelers lurking below.

"Don't let the deathstuff touch you!" the NPC sage warned. "Stand close to me. Our ancient magic may have failed to keep Brightlord Temporix sealed away, but it will still offer us some protection!"

The sage raised a staff to the heavens, and a dome of energy appeared around the two of them. Bright dust landed upon it, creating a loud screaming noise as it was nullified by the shield.

All around them, NPCs wailed in agony as the radiation-packed debris melted holes right through their bodies.

And yet Alexei couldn't care less.

This was just the tutorial.

Nothing here mattered.

Not now, not in the dozen times he'd played through it before. The experiences of any surviving NPCs in this tutorial would influence nothing about their "canonical" versions in the open world.

"In a moment, the undead will rise up," Alexei muttered, walking through the shield at the moment the scripted tutorial allowed him to do so.

The NPC sage was saying some dramatic dialogue behind him, but Alexei ignored it.

He knew from experience that the man was begging Alexei to bring news of Brightlord Temporix's return to the capital city. Once he was done with his speech, the man was programmed to die of exhaustion.

Alexei's current goal was to reach the end of the monastery's graveyard, a field of neatly trimmed grass broken by twisting, sharp-edged gravestones which had been taken from the ravines of the nearby mountain range, as was the monks' tradition.

The once-peaceful area was programmed so that its walls would crumble just after Alexei passed them, and so that its grass would catch fire at just the right moments—and then fight three skeletons in the monastery's graveyard, raised by Brightlord Temporix's death magic.

Alexei reached the monastery's back gate at the far end of the smoke-filled graveyard. "Yep, right on schedule," he said as the ground began to tremble. He raised a fist, preparing to kill them with his starting skill.

A trio of skeletons dramatically hauled themselves from the crumbling ground, their decayed eye sockets burning with new red light. "I'll eat your heart!" they groaned in a way that wasn't as intimidating as the developers had probably intended.

But even still, Alexei froze.

It wasn't the skeletal appearance that had horrified him, nor the cheesy dialogue…

No, it was the six glowing red eyes pointed directly at him.

And with an explosion of electro-chemical connections activating at once, stabbing sharply and deeply into his brain, Alexei remembered everything.

Millions of images and the distorted memories of conversations flooded Alexei's mind. He fell to the ground, mouth watering as though he were about to vomit—though vomiting was an action which Path of the Immortal wouldn't actually allow to happen.

Alexei's body shook as the memories of two different selves, the old and the new, wrestled for control of his brain meat.

And all the while, the undead simply circled him on the ground. This was the tutorial. They wouldn't attack until Alexei engaged them.

Finally, Alexei reached out with shaking fingers and grabbed the edge of a nearby gravestone. He sliced his finger, but the simulated pain was deliberately dull. Alexei ignored the wound as he rose to his feet again.

"I…" he muttered, and a tear trickled down his cheek. Had any other player been near him, they would have been awed at the way Path of the Immortal transmitted and rendered the emotions of human players in such detail.

"I can't believe it worked. I'm really back here. Back at the beginning of the game, sixteen years ago. I'm… nineteen again."