Darkness.

Birdsong.

Bird’s twittered in the Darkness.

Such annoying sounds disturbed my sleep.

Wait! My sleep? Shouldn’t death be more… permanent?

Plagued by this question, I opened my eyes and was welcomed by an unknown landscape.

Clear blue sky framed a snow-clad mountain range. Small, trickling streams of melting water paved their way down barren slopes, culminating in a paltry river. Only those splashes broke the silence along with the bird’s twitter. Neither human speech nor animal cries sounded in my surroundings. Only me sitting somewhere in no-man’s-land.

Did the hospice’s personnel find me too early? Some online instructions mentioned how timely pumping-out of the stomach could help people survive. But why did they leave me online? Shouldn’t they disconnect the game and take off my visor? Did they do a body-check without moving me at all?

Their behavior made no sense.

Even more baffling was the sudden change in scenery. This wasn’t the narrow private room I owned. Instead, I got transported without my inputs. Never heard of such a weird glitch. This also made no sense.

But another issue was more pressing. Thanks to me deactivating the suppression system, I felt my body’s sensations even in-game. Which meant my bladder’s overflowing content was also transmitted into the game. Hence, I sighed and moved my left hand to log out.

Nothing happened.

Hand movement after hand movement, command after command - nothing happened.

This made no sense.

None.

Even trying to remove the visor by myself didn’t work.

Nothing worked.

In fact, none of the game functions worked. The status icons in the corner? Gone. Area description at the top? Gone. Skill bar, health bar, map, inventory, chat? Gone, gone, gone. Everything was gone. Only the unknown landscape in front of me, more colorful than any photo on earth, remained.

Furthermore, my hands would move each time I tried to input a command. Directly. No need to move my right fingers to lift my leg. All the parts moved on their own, without problems or pain. That constant companion had vanished.

I could stand up, walk around, jump, roll, punch. Everything without pain.

Laughter.

I understood. This was some weird fever dream.

Everybody knows that scene. You die and in your last moments all the important memories flash by in front of your eyes. But how stupid was this? Had my life been so boring my brain showed me the game instead? Harsh.

But that’s alright to me. If this was my brain’s parting gift, I would accept it in gratitude. No need to re-watch months of bed-ridden suffering when I could enjoy my last moments instead. And so I explored my environment.

At least after I took care of my bladder’s problem.

There wasn’t much to find up here. A handful old ruins upstream were the only noticeable features. Based on their number and size, they once formed a now abandoned village. Or maybe destroyed described the situation better?

Charred wooden beams, collapsed walls and scattered furniture. Broken crockery, rotten food and moldy water. It told the story of a forcibly emptied village, slowly dying after its residents had long left.

A remote mountain village, raided by some bandits, leaving behind a sole survivor? I knew that story. In fact, I even picked that story as a background setting for my current character. It gives decent bonuses to strength and resistance and it was one of the less cringe-worthy options.

A hero’s unknown descendant, a noble’s bastard son, a boy born under a cursed star, a child mercenary and so on and so forth. The list was sheer endless, and the developers managed to make each one about a special person. Congratulation, your world has now 1.7 million new foretold inhabitants, every one of them a hero.

A brief check in the river’s surface confirmed my suspicion.

A stubbly beard, long mud-blond hair combed backwards, a small scar on the forehead. My character’s face, distorted by the waves, looked back at me. But it wasn’t it’s usual middle-aged appearance, but that of a younger boy. Seventeen or eighteen?

So, you took my character and his childhood story, mixed it up with my real age, and threw the adolescent version into a long-dead village? Yeah, brain, a job well done! This wasn’t even a playable area in the game, so how am I supposed to get out of here? The starting point for new players should be the city and not this dump. Though perhaps I should be happy I’m not running around as a five-year-old brat.

But what now? Would I sit here and enjoy the fresh air until my real body lost its last struggle? And how much time remained until then? Enough to make peace with my past? Was the time inside this dream passing at the same rate? Or would I have days or weeks to enjoy myself one last time? It was a weird sensation to wait for one’s own death with no signs. And I could finally walk on my own feet again.

Therefore, I decided to get up and explore the landscape further downstream. People always established their villages and cities beside water sources. My brain should also know that fact, so there was a decent chance to find other humans as long as I followed the stream. Let’s see what my brain comes up with next.

Said and done.

With no success.

My first night was chilly. With nothing but a coarse shirt and short trousers on my body, the falling temperature soaked right into my bones. Even a bed of fallen leaves barely stopped the shivers. First night in your last dream and you feel like shit. Great.

Sleeping inside a dream sounds like a recipe for disaster. Do you wake up in the actual world? Or do you wake up in another dream? The dream inside your dream. Or, in my case, do I just sleep forever? Despite all those useless questions, I fell asleep in no time and awoke the next morning to more bird’s twittering.

The following days were endless iterations. Wake up, drink some river water, wander down the river, find some berries to eat, wander some more, go to sleep, repeat. This had long stopped to be an enjoyable walk down the river. I had no shoes or other protection against the underwood and my speed plummeted when I entered a forest. Additionally, the handful berries weren’t anywhere near enough to fill my stomach.

One week in and reality proved me wrong. There was no settlement down the stream. It never grew bigger, but became a slow creek and vanished into the ground. My only water source gone. Now I stood there with neither meals nor orientation. I just followed random directions and kept walking.

But even walking itself annoyed me. For the first few days, my body reacted as if it were my original one. Neither the difference in height nor the difference in weight lead to any unease. Just jumping up and down made me happy. But now I had become the same stumbling mess I recognized from my prior hospital days. Dizziness and headaches returned, and I asked myself more than once whether this was the end. Is this the fever dream collapsing?

In my desperation, I ate mushrooms and tree bark. Only to throw them up again. A sheer endless nightmare. Why would it continue for so long?

It took me 10 days to exit the forest and stumble onto a meager road. Though calling it a road was too kind.

A small dirt track with trees on both sides would be the correct description. But I rejoiced the moment I spotted two parallel furrows. Carriages traveled along this path. People lived here.

Hence I picked a direction at random and stumbled forward, step by step, for another day. And then, in the morning hours of my 11th day, I saw my salvation.

Rows and rows of orderly lined cabbage, or at least some smaller look-alike, filled vast fields behind the forest outskirt. Something to eat after days of starvation. So I stumbled my way down and bit into the first one I got my hands on.

It tasted horrible. And without water, just swallowing was an issue. But it also was the best meal of my life. Bite by bite, until I engulfed the entire thing. Ten minutes later a satisfied sigh escaped my throat. And with my stomach now full, I explored my surroundings.

Some other fields, probably wheat, filled the horizon, with a few buildings in between. So these cabbages belonged to someone, I realized. They didn’t grow on their own. And the owner was probably somewhere nearby and not that happy about my intrusion.

But for now I listened to my stomach and concentrated on a second cabbage. Those people are just some fantasy, anyway. They’ll understand as long as I explain myself. The vegetable’s core was sour, so I dropped it, and grabbed another one. And another one.

Until I heard some rustling behind me.

Piercing pain at the back of my head.

And darkness.