In the beginning, this story might seem a bit ordinary to you... but as the gears turn, the real entertainment is about to unfold.
In a crowded, run-down district of the city—a budget neighborhood filled with cheap, cramped apartments rented mostly by struggling students—someone's eyes snapped open.
As soon as he woke up, he stared blankly at the unfamiliar ceiling shifting above him.
"What on earth is this...?"
Confused and still trapped beneath heavy layers of sleep, he assumed it was just a vivid morning hallucination.
He tightly shut his eyes again, wanting nothing more than to complete his sleep and wake up in his own familiar bed. But a few minutes later, when he forced his eyelids open, the exact same strange ceiling stared back down at him.
He sat up abruptly, his mind racing. "What kind of garbage joke is this? Where the hell am I?"
For a solid second, the boy who had just awakened in this room was plunged into deep, chaotic thought. The environment surrounding him had been completely transformed overnight.
He remembered with absolute certainty that he had fallen asleep in his own room the previous night.
He had been gaming for hours until it was incredibly late, but he was undeniably inside his own house.
Slipping out of the bed, he stood up straight and aggressively surveyed his surroundings.
This was absolutely not his room. "Me...?" he muttered, panic tightly gripping his chest. "Where the hell am I?!"
As he looked around, his eyes caught several bizarre details.
There was something subtly different about the way his feet moved across the floor—a strange structural weight—yet, there was an embedded muscle memory within it that felt strangely familiar.
He wasn't experiencing any physical difficulty walking, but the psychological sensation was deeply unsettling.
This place was worlds apart from any location he had ever visited in his life.
Resting right beside his bed was a device that looked vaguely like a laptop, yet its design was impossibly sleek and futuristic.
In his actual world, machinery this advanced was astronomically expensive, reserved only for the topmost elite. 'Did some alien race kidnap me overnight?' he thought frantically.
'But wait... that makes no sense. I'm not even handsome enough to get kidnapped!'
Stepping forward, he approached the device. Its surface was completely transparent, looking like a sheet of pure crystal glass.
Driven by a strange instinct, his hands reached out and picked it up.
For some inexplicable reason, he knew exactly how to operate it.
He tapped the interface, powering it on, and his fingers danced across the screen entirely on autopilot, opening the front-facing camera app.
For a few agonizing seconds, the room fell into absolute, suffocating silence. And then—
"Abe! What kind of utter bullshit is this?! Who the hell is this guy?!"
A shocked scream echoed against the walls. He frantically raised his hands, rubbing and pinching his own face in pure, unadulterated confusion.
The reflection staring back from the transparent screen was not his own.
His face had been entirely replaced.
In reality, his actual age was twenty-five years old, but the boy looking back at him from the glass appeared to be barely eighteen or nineteen.
However, the detail that shocked him the most was the sheer aesthetics of the face—this teenager was undeniably, overwhelmingly more handsome than his original body had ever been.
Suddenly, a blinding, white-hot spike of pain seared through his skull.
Shattered fragments of alien memories began to flood his consciousness, stitching themselves into his brain one by one.
Who was this boy? Where was this place? What was happening to his reality? As the memories settled, a sharp, cold realization clicked in his mind.
Transmigration.
But wait... this wasn't just a random parallel universe. He wasn't even in a standard magical world. He was trapped inside a video game.
His mind reeled as he recognized the parameters of this specific universe.
This was a wildly famous, high-tier Magic World RPG—a game whose official launch he had eagerly awaited, and whose webnovel adaptation he had thoroughly read back on Earth.
The boy whose physical body he now commanded was named Kirish.
And Kirish was nothing more than a baseline, insignificant Side NPC—the kind of low-tier character that littered the game map just to hand out minor tutorial missions and flavor dialogue to actual players.
'My actual name is Gani...' he thought, his jaw tightening. A name that literally translated to 'The Wealthy One.'
Back on Earth, his main gaming account carried the user ID 'Kirish'—a tag he had chosen years ago simply because he liked the badass protagonist of a movie he had watched.
And now, by some twisted stroke of cosmic irony, he had awakened inside the flesh of a literal nobody NPC sharing that exact same name.
"To hell with the name!" he barked out loud.
The thing that terrified him the most was the sheer volatility of this world. He had read the original novel a long time ago, and he remembered that the storyline didn't revolve around a single, safe protagonist.
The plot was a chaotic, brutal meat-grinder featuring multiple shifting main characters, cataclysmic wars, and endless death flag events.
Recalling the sheer danger of this setting, Kirish could only squeeze out a bitter curse. "Bullshit! This entire situation is pure garbage!"
He aggressively pinched his arm, praying that the sting would break the illusion and wake him up on his actual, beloved lumpy mattress.
But the sharp throb of pain only solidified his reality.
He was stuck.
Suddenly, he remembered the golden rule of every transmigrator story. 'Everyone who gets thrown into these worlds receives their own cheat code, right?'
"System! Hey! Where the hell is my System?!" he yelled out into the empty room.
But no glowing blue screen manifested before his eyes, and no mechanical voice chimed in his head. The air remained entirely still.
He furrowed his brows as a specific plot detail from the novel drifted into his mind. In this specific game world, the System was a notoriously deceptive, calculating entity.
It possessed a unique, symbiotic algorithm that calibrated itself based on its owner's core, unvarnished personality.
If you were a devious, unprincipled scoundrel, you were bound to get an equally devious, greedy System. If you were pure and righteous... well, you'd get something different.
"Great. I bet the damn thing is deliberately testing my patience right now," Kirish muttered, crossing his arms.
Still struggling to fully accept that he was trapped inside a digital simulation, he began to meticulously review his knowledge of the game's core lore.
The baseline rules of this universe were absolute: monsters, ancient anomalies, and supernatural forces were completely natural laws of geography here.
People didn't view magic as taboo or dark witchcraft; it was a fundamental science of survival.
Sitting down on the edge of the bed, Kirish forced himself into a long, calculated state of deep thought.
'Look, I'm definitely not a saintly, noble person... but I am undeniably a bit of a devious, street-smart rogue,' he reasoned with himself. He was the type of guy who silently observed and adapted to everything around him.
Back in his old life, he had a neighbor—a brilliant, intensely hardworking student who poured his entire youth into his studies.
Yet, the moment that guy finally landed a corporate job, he spent every single hour of his free time locked away gaming, completely burnt out, until he tragically ended his own life.
Gani had watched that tragedy unfold and extracted a profound life lesson from it.
He had studied hard, secured a stable job, but ensured he balanced his remaining hours playing games to actually enjoy his life.
But one day, looking back at his old self, he had asked a silent question: Was that guy truly just weak?
Now, Gani had been thrown into a world of literal monsters.
He might be an introvert who despised crowds, but he wasn't weak, and he refused to use his introversion as a pathetic excuse to fail.
He might be a lazy, devious slacker on the inside, but he was fully prepared to execute whatever maneuvers were necessary to survive.
Right then, another minor headache flared up, and the structural memories of the original Kirish's past integrated seamlessly into his mind.
To put it bluntly, the original Kirish's backstory was a classic, tragic NPC tale. He was an orphan who had been separated from his biological family at a chaotic, tender age.
The local authorities had dumped him into a rural orphanage located in a remote border village. Despite the grim circumstances, the boy was exceptionally sharp and adaptable, quickly securing his place within the small community.
The officer who had originally rescued him and placed him in the facility was a genuinely righteous man. He would frequently visit the orphanage to check on the children.
But one tragic day, that officer was brutally slaughtered during an unexpected beast skirmish.
That exact moment ignited a burning, deep-seated hatred for monsters within the young Kirish's heart.
He swore a silent vow to eradicate them. But at the time, he was a helpless seven-year-old child. His fellow orphan brothers and sisters shared that exact same raw, vengeful mindset.
Kirish resolved to become a powerful Mage.
Surviving day-to-day within the orphanage, he pushed his physical body to its absolute limits, studying the basic concepts of magic and working himself to the bone.
To rise above his peers, he sacrificed his sleep, studying day and night until he miraculously ranked first in his entire village examinations.
That victory earned him a coveted scholarship admission into an Internal City Magic College.
The village elders had highly praised his achievement, pooling their meager funds to support his journey.
Kirish had proudly promised his orphan siblings and friends that he would become a powerful powerhouse, carving out a safe path for all of them to follow.
But time was a luxury he didn't have.
In this world, a devastating natural calamity occurred precisely every twenty years, driving the wilderness beasts into a hyper-aggressive frenzy.
Whenever the tide hit, his home village sat directly in the line of slaughter, forcing evacuations and causing immense casualties.
The original Kirish had intended to become a high-tier Magician within a few short years to single-handedly shield his village from the upcoming cycle.
'As far as Side NPC backstories go, it's a pretty compelling script,' Gani thought, leaning his head back.
'But the kid completely ruined his own prospects at the final stretch.'
Resting on the wooden desk right in front of him was an official medical diagnosis report detailing his current physical and magical structure. Gani picked it up, and his face instantly fell as he read the numbers.
The latent magical energy currently dwelling within his body was laughably pathetic.
According to the standardized stat points, his total capacity maxed out at a meager 200 Mana Points.
For an aspiring Magician, this number was a definitive death sentence. It wasn't even close to the baseline threshold.
To even qualify for basic Magic Manipulation training, an individual required an absolute minimum baseline of 500 Energy Points.
While a score of 200 wasn't inherently broken for a regular civilian, it was utterly useless for a Magician path. However, those specific stats made him far better suited for a completely different track: The Magic Fighter.
With 200 points of dense, localized energy, he could train his physical body to become a formidable close-quarters combatant. But that ran entirely counter to what the original Kirish had planned.
Gani sank back onto the mattress, burying his face in his hands as a heavy sigh escaped him.
He was completely stuck. First of all, he had been unceremoniously dropped into a lethal video game universe whose intricate high-level secrets he barely remembered.
But what truly irritated him wasn't the lack of information; it was the fact that the lingering emotions of the original Kirish were actively bleeding into his own consciousness, affecting his psychological state.
Gani didn't have any close friends in his past life to mourn over, yet he was experiencing a profound,
overwhelming wave of pity for the dead boy whose body he now inhabited. Why? Because whether he liked it or not, he was Kirish now.
"Fine. Let's break down the mechanics first," Kirish muttered, forcing his analytical mind to categorize the core power structures of this game:
Magic Fighters: Warriors who utilize mana internally. They excel in close-range engagement, reinforcing their physical bodies, blades, or bows with localized magical energy to execute devastating physical strikes.
Magicians: Scholars who manipulate external natural elements. They rely on large-scale, long-range elemental spells to obliterate targets from a safe distance.
Magic Summoners: A completely distinct tier of magic. Because their power derives from taming and commanding external entities and beasts—including the taboo Necromancers who force the dead to fight—the system categorizes them into an entirely separate, unique matrix away from nature.
Looking at the sheets, Kirish faced an immediate tactical dilemma.
Which path should he choose? He could afford to deliberate later, but the flow of time was working heavily against him.
He had some immediate, incredibly annoying chores to sort out first. A look of pure, unadulterated annoyance washed over Kirish's face.
He had absolutely zero interest in formal studies, rigorous academy lectures, and academic stress.
In reality, his ideal day consisted of staying locked inside his room, lazily listening to the pleasant chirping of wild birds outside the window while lounging on his bed, working exactly when and how he wanted.
But his third immediate task was tied directly to his new college enrollment paperwork.
Whether his introverted, lazy soul desired it or not, he had to take his very first steps out of this apartment and into the dangerous world outside.