"A rusty sword and a pristine, chained blade..."

  Cyrus compared the bold ink-stroked illustrations at the back of the two cards on the first row of his spread. Turning them around, flashy character splash arts of a male character stood on the front of each card. The first was a young man dressed in something that resembled the dark green modern military clothing. Beneath the dark circles and roughened face, he actually looked pretty young, most likely in his early twenties.

  The character on the other card looked just as young and wore clothes similar to Cyrus's: the typical long, flowy cultivation robe covered in neat silk embroidery. Cyrus looked down at his own silk white robe that flowed and felt like strips of cloud.

  "Mine looks like it totally costs more but..."

  Yet, even lower-quality clothing looked better when paired with a face like that. With hair like strokes of starlight tied back in a neat, high ponytail from where it cascaded down his back like a silver stream and a pair of sharp, bright eyes that captured molten sunlight in their brilliance...

  That's what you'd call an Xianxia Immortal Hero, huh.

  Unlike the two men, the other characters on the second-row cards were all grayed out. All of them had average appearances and gave off normal civilian vibe. He scanned through them and noted that they were all either one-starred or two-starred, so that checked out. At that thought, a string of text emerged above the cards with a puff of mist.

  < Heroes beneath three-starred are too ordinary for my liking, barely good enough to serve me with mundane tasks. For higher performance and better yield, I should obviously choose a Hero with a higher rating. >

  "Oh," Cyrus muttered.

  Did that mean he only got to keep one out of the ten he'd pulled? The wish system was entirely different from what he was used to, and no one told him anything about this. He was more disappointed than he was surprised. It was honestly quite a shame, being allowed to keep just one Hero in a ten-pull. He wasn't sure if this was unique to Hell difficulty or if it was the same for everyone. Though this did open up to countless possibilities that the game had promised.

  Each playthrough is entirely unique, the game development team told him. So, this was one of the reasons why: a high-risk, high-variance Gacha system.

  He turned back to the first two cards: the modern man had three stars beside his figure, while the cultivator was actually a five-star. At first glance, the choice seemed to be a no-brainer with the 6-Star character being the highest rarity and all. But the stars and the actual stars weren't the only things on the cards.

  Beside the neat column of stars was an icon of a featureless figure on its knees. The figure sat slightly bent forward with their hands on the opposite shoulder. Gradient filled the icon on the three-starred all the way up to its neck. In contrast, the other icon was mostly empty. Only when he squinted could he see a thin hairline of color at its bottom.

  < Of course, higher Loyalty is better. It means they're less troublesome and less likely to refuse the Hero Quests I assign them. >

  "So the choice's between rarity and obedience," he mumbled. The two swords on the back made sense now. A dull blade versus a sharp yet noncompliant sword, one was less useful, while the other wouldn't listen.

  At last, his gaze landed on the play button icon at the top of the cards. "Must be a character story preview," he concluded.

  "Master’s wisdom is flawless. Joylessly, Master could only visit two of the worlds belonging to the Heroes. Moshi recommends Master to choose the two less inadequate mortals from Weaving Swarm!"

  "Alright," Cyrus readily agreed.

  He certainly wasn't going to pick one or two-starred characters over them anyway. Even if they could turn out to be hidden gems, he wasn't at the point where he could afford to gamble. As a 1-Star Hero, he imagined there would be so little he could do by himself after landing in the mortal world.

  Cyrus saved the big shot for last and reached for the 3-Star card. In an instance, the world around him swam, morphing away like a disturbed mirage.

  War replaced peace with a stroke of heat. The whistles of birds turned into distant wails of men. Fiery red and flaking gray overtook the shades of green and white of the Pavilion as he found himself standing under a shower of ashes and embers. The scent of death came close.

  "Fuck! Why not me!"

  A man's roughened voice tore through the sirens and distant explosions. From the raspy voice, Cyrus would have assumed the Hero was much older if he hadn't seen the guy's face. Cyrus looked around but found nothing but corpses—men, women, and beasts, all kinds of beasts. Smashed giant wasps in pools of green blood. Winged-tigers with torn limbs and countless small donut holes in their torso.

  Cyrus scrunched his nose at the strong smell of iron in the air mixed with a distinct sourness from the beast carcasses. No wonder the game was R-rated. This was a scene that most streaming platforms would censor. He turned his head away from the attacks on his nose to find what looked like a massive circular crack in the sky, pulsing like a beating heart.

  "Ah~" He let out a sound in realization that this must be those kinds of portal-break, system apocalypse settings.

  Neat.

  The game truly was an all-in-one buffet with everything everyone could ever ask for. No wonder it was estimated to take up to three real-world years to 100% it unless you ignored the recommended playtime per day. Even then, it would take months. With one game day lasting around three hours in real life, that was seven years before Hollow Rift's foreseen doomsday—the Seventh Hour before Sunset as Heaven had declared.

  I'm going to be twenty-four years older mentally by the time I leave the test center.

  Thinking about it, it felt kind of strange... He was basically spending half a lifetime in this world, even if everything he'd experience during his time here was essentially fake.

  "WHY?!" the Hero candidate yelled again, snapping Cyrus out of his cerebration. Right, forgot about him.

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  When he looked in the direction of the shout, Cyrus found a huge, elephant-sized crocodile, or was it an alligator? He could never remember the difference between the two. Whichever it was, the corpse of the mutated beast trembled slightly, and he realized the man was buried under it.

  "Sucks to be you, man." Cyrus gave him a commiserating head shake. "That's some shitty luck."

  He felt a bit of a kinship to the poor guy. Cyrus could see that happening to him, too, and he wouldn't be surprised at all if it did. His luck wasn't all that bad, but he'd keep getting himself into all sorts of trouble for some reason.

  "Never me. Never me. It's never me!" the man roared, giving one last push against the monster with a grunt, but it didn't yield—overpowering him even in death. It looked like he was soon going to be crushed to death or die from suffocation.

  Then the man's voice, or rather his thoughts, echoed inside Cyrus's head.

  [ Why am I never chosen? Why not me? If I… If I were given a chance, just one damned chance, I'm sure I could do what they can. No. I could be so much fucking better than those dumb fuckers who can’t even save a city without wrecking it themselves anyway! ]

  His commendable internal declarations were interrupted by choking noises, likely on his own blood. Then, some soft weeping and sniffing sounds came from that direction.

  "Gods, devils, someone...anyone. I will do anything. So, please. Please choose me."

  The world shattered. Cyrus blinked, and he was back at the pavilion. That was it? Sure, the setup, atmosphere, and visuals were incredible, but the cutscene was way too short to make him feel anything particularly about it.

  The vivid scene of terror and brutality, along with how real and close everything was, would have made an impression on an average player. Cyrus was different, as in he didn't have the privileges a normal person did. Growing up as a street urchin in an unflagged zone, he'd seen things worse than death, often right in his face.

  If other players could remain rational enough to remember that this was all but a game, no matter how much money Etercon had poured into it to convince their senses otherwise, they would think the same as Cyrus. People like him, who had wasted all of their free time staring at pixels on a screen to escape reality, should be thoroughly desensitized at this point.

  He did feel some sympathy for the 3-Star Hero, but that wouldn't affect his choice in the least bit. With a shrug, he reached for the 5-Star card and hoped its character introduction would give him something more than that.

  This time, he flew. A sense of weightlessness lifted him upward for a while before he stood among the clouds. The 'cloud' closest to him wasn't one at all as his palm met with a soft plush, and sank in a bit. Vibration seeped into his hand when the cloud beast let out a long roar that sounded like a contented purr. It could pass as one if you ignored the fact that it was powerful enough to scatter the rolls of clouds around them.

  The strikes of metal clashes and flails of dancing fire colored the scene below. Cyrus stood directly above the dividing line of the world; to his right were people dressed in blood-soaked robes pushed back by hordes of beings without a definite form.

  Thick black swirls of smoke charged, once as claws of beasts, twice as slicing swords, and thrice as vicious fumes. Their claws tore through flesh, their swords cut limbs clean off, and their fumes forced into every orifice. Yet the blades of hopeless men met with nothing as they slipped right through the smoke entities. The fire of the men barely parted the smoke for a second before the monsters simply regathered themselves.

  It was clear which side would remain standing at the end.

  He swept his gaze across the entire ground. The human side could be grouped into six according to the colors of their robes. "All the sects uniting to fight against...demons?"

  He didn't have to look too hard to find the main character of the scene, taking on the largest swarm of demons at the frontline. His eyebrows shot up when he saw that the demons cut by the white-haired man's blade of light didn't merge back into one. The split parts seemingly couldn't gather themselves at all, shrinking each time he lowered his sword until nothing was left of them.

  "Sheesh. He's carrying the entire battlefield by himself."

  Just as Cyrus bent his neck down for a closer look, the man snapped his head upward, fiery golden eyes locking with his for a brief moment. No, not quite him. He was looking at the cloud beast behind Cyrus.

  A mellow voice resonated in Cyrus's head, the kind that remained steady and noble even in a situation as grim as this. Each word was spoken with clarity, shaped by someone who has nothing to prove, yet everything to protect.

  [ Save me. ]

  "Save you?" Cyrus stroked the air before his chin, rubbing his non-existent long white beard in thought. The man looked like he cared about the world tenfold more than he cared about himself, so asking to be saved was the last thing Cyrus had expected from him.

  "He's wounded and wearied."

  "Fuck! You scared me," Cyrus yelped, snapping back at the cloud behind him. "You can talk??"

  The cloud beast only laughed once. "As you may or may not care to know, Great God, when a world is ending, the many wills of its people unite into one. Sumiya is close to its end. Thus, I, the World Will, have become much stronger—strong enough to ascend as a conscious being, but not enough to save my country or my children."

  "Oh?" Cyrus circled the cloud, casually strolling mid-air. He took in what this World Will was exactly and supposed it was some kind of magical ruler of the world. It had the appearance of one with a mighty swirling beard, husky torso, and stumpy legs.

  "I see," Cyrus nodded. "The dude's beat, so he can't keep this up. He wants to be saved so that he can save his world himself?" He touched his index fingers, connecting the dots.

  "Yes," the cloud shook, seemingly in grievance. "The child isn't one to include his people in a deal. He's a good child. A very pure soul, he has—even if he begs to differ. So, Boundless God who dwells beyond Weaving Swarm, do you care to save him?"

  A low hum escaped Cyrus. He now knew exactly the reason for the drastic gap in Loyalty value between the two Heroes. As an Isekai God, all he could do was obviously Isekai people, which was exactly what the first guy wanted: to become the chosen one.

  This guy, however, wanted to be 'saved', and the only way Cyrus could save him was by stealing him away for Hollow Rift. But if the cultivator—the one and only person who could fight the demons—was taken away, the fate of his homeworld...

  Heh. Cyrus rubbed his lips. I wonder if I could do something now, though. Help them out a bit.

  The question was whether the previews were interactive or not. Only one way to find out. Cyrus raised a finger to poke at the mortals below as he did with the lights along the mountain and—

  A growl rumbled from the cloud beast's throat. "Great God," the beast warned. "This one assumes you're with the intention to help, but please. Don't. Sumiya cannot bear a Divine, and it's my duty to protect it."

  Cyrus turned at the grumbling beast, meeting its sharp eyes. He didn't doubt that the moment he moved, the beast would pounce. The corners of Cyrus's lips turned upward. It'd be a lie if he said he wasn't curious about what would happen. The game kept calling him a great god without letting him see for himself how great he was just yet. A fight in the sky between a god and a World Will sounded fun.

  If he had been playing for fun, he would have totally fucked around and found out, but he was on the clock, here to work with a specific ending in mind. His newly attained 5-Star Hero might end up as collateral damage, and that wouldn't do.

  "Fine, fine." Cyrus gave in. He imagined he'd be having an epic fight with a World Will or two eventually.

  Instead, he proceeded to ask the cloud beast, who had visibly relaxed after hearing his compromise. “So what will I get from, uh, saving him?"

  The cloud beast waved its paw. At its gesture, a fierce shout erupted from below, breaking through the battlefield and reaching to the sky where the two immortal beings stood.

  "Everything. You can have everything I am if you help me!"

  The world parted with a final swing of the man's blade. Cyrus sat inside the serene pavilion with a small grin tugging at his lips. The 5-Star Hero's flashy, powerful sword skills replayed in his mind. The incredible range of his attack that had dozens of demons falling at every strike. His fiery sword aura that lit up the battlefield like a smaller Sun on Earth. Hell, he was the Sun of Sumiya.

  Without a doubt, the guy would make an incredible DPS.

  "Sounds good then," Cyrus decided, his gaze drifting to the pristine sword. "Allow this Great God to save you at the price of, let’s see…your everything."

  follow, favorite, comments, ratings, and maybe even a review when you're ready. The number helps feed the Algorithm Goddess. If you don't want to wait for the next chapter and want to show more support for the story, Patreon is currently 12 Chapters ahead!??

  I plan to use this place for random thoughts/scribbles drafted during the writing and editing of the chapters that might or might not add to the story. Any of the backend logic stuff will be here for maths lovers and those who care. They aren't necessarily spoilers. It's only spoilered to not get in the way of those who might be bingeing.

  Maths makes my brain hurt:

  Full game = ~IRL Play-time 7,665 Hours (300 Days, 10 Months) = 3 years with about 3.4 hours recommended per day

  IRL 7,665 hours = In-game time, 2,555 days = 7 game years!

  Plan for beta-tester:

  Conclusion: