Awakening a 10,000x Skill Proficiency Multiplier in the Apocalypse

The absolute silence of the Spire’s top floor was heavy. There was no victory music. There were no cheering crowds. There was just the cold empty space and a small pile of grey dust that used to be a god.

Sebastian lay on the white marble for a long time. His digital body was a horrific mess of severed limbs and exposed bone. His health bar was flashing a desperate angry red and hovering at exactly one percent.

If a rogue gust of wind had existed here, it would have killed him.

”Alright,” Sebastian wheezed as his voice sounded thin and ragged. ”Break time is over.”

He slowly pushed himself up. With his pain receptors permanently deleted, the process wasn’t agonizing in a physical sense. It was just a logistical nightmare of trying to operate a body that was missing half its essential parts.

He dragged his ruined avatar across the floor and left a gruesome trail of pixelated blood and black sludge.

He approached the center of the platform.

Resting on a pedestal of pure condensed starlight was the ultimate prize. The Chronos Heart.

It was breathtaking. It wasn’t a standard static item model. It was a fist-sized geometric shape that constantly folded in on itself and shifted through impossible four-dimensional configurations. It radiated an aura of pure blinding gold that felt warm and heavy like holding a miniature sun.

This was the administrative bypass key. This was the item that told the server you were no longer just a player in the simulation.

Sebastian reached out with his one remaining trembling hand. His black leather glove was torn to shreds and his knuckles were exposed and bleeding.

He wrapped his fingers around the shifting gold artifact.

BING! BING! BING!

The system chimes didn’t just echo in his skull. They vibrated through the very bedrock of the universe. The sound was so absolute and commanding that the swirling nebulae in the skybox above actually froze in their rotation.

A massive golden interface window violently expanded in his vision. It wasn’t the standard blue color. It was a deep imperial gold laced with pitch-black runes.

[System Override Initiated.]

[Item Recognized: The Chronos Heart.]

[Validating User: Sebastian (Zero).]

[Validation Complete. The Trial of the Timekeeper is cleared.]

The Chronos Heart liquefied in his grip. It didn’t burn or melt. It turned into a stream of pure liquid timeline and shot directly into his palm. It snaked up his veins and plunged straight into his digital chest.

”Guh!” Sebastian gasped as his back violently arched.

[Divinity Acquired.]

The notification hit like a physical shockwave.

A blinding pillar of golden light erupted from the pedestal and entirely engulfed Sebastian. Inside the light, the catastrophic damage dealt by the Time Mage was instantly and aggressively rewritten.

His severed arm snapped back into existence and rendered perfectly from the shoulder down. The necrotic grey flesh on his chest was scrubbed away and replaced by the dense hardened muscle of his twenty-percent physical synchronization. The digital blood and sludge vanished entirely.

But it wasn’t just a full heal. It was an ascension.

Sebastian felt his very code unzipping and restructuring. The arbitrary mathematical limits placed upon his avatar were being forcefully uninstalled. The heavy golden padlock that had hovered over his Level 60 experience bar shattered into a million pieces of digital confetti.

[Level Cap Removed.]

[Mortal Shell Discarded. Ascending to Demigod Tier.]

The golden text continued to scroll and replaced his old ragged identity with something entirely new.

[Class Evolution Available.]

[Current Class: Drifter (Tier 0)]

[Evolving based on accumulated Conceptual Laws...]

The system paused to calculate the sheer unhinged amount of broken code Sebastian had absorbed. It registered his absolute control over space, gravity, time, mass, and death. It registered his permanent deletion of pain.

[Class Evolved: Void Walker -> Sovereign of Laws]

The pillar of light faded and left Sebastian standing alone in the center of the platform.

He didn’t look like a ragged homeless Drifter anymore. His dirty cloth tunic and torn leather coat were gone.

The system had automatically rendered a new set of base armor fitting his Demigod status. He was clad in a sleek tailored suit of pitch-black material that looked like woven obsidian. It absorbed the ambient starlight around him. A long high-collared coat of dark shifting material draped over his shoulders and the hem faded into a faint smoky mist.

His plain white half-mask was replaced by a sleek metallic visor of dark silver that covered the upper half of his face.

He opened his eyes. They were no longer the empty pitch-black voids of a man who had deleted his humanity. They were a brilliant burning silver pulsing with the slow steady rhythm of the server’s foundational code.

Sebastian raised his hands. He flexed his fingers.

He felt entirely different. He didn’t feel the comforting localized well of mana in his chest anymore. It was gone.

He opened his new gold-trimmed status menu.

[Name: Sebastian (Zero)]

[Class: Sovereign of Laws]

[Level: 61]

[Mana: N/A]

He frowned. ”N/A? The hell does that mean?”

He closed the menu and looked out at the dead space. He didn’t think about a spellbook. He didn’t access his glitched 10,000x multiplier. He didn’t cast a spell.

He simply looked at a massive floating chunk of ruined marble debris fifty yards away and he decided that it shouldn’t be there anymore.

He didn’t snap his fingers. He just willed it.

POP.

The chunk of marble vanished. It was instantly deleted from the localized reality.

Sebastian’s breath hitched. A slow terrifying realization washed over his perfectly optimized brain.

He didn’t have a mana pool because he didn’t need to cast magic anymore. Spells were just commands asking the server for permission to bend the rules.

As a Demigod and as the Sovereign of Laws, he was the server. Within his territory, he didn’t ask for permission. He dictated reality.

’I am the admin now,’ Sebastian whispered with a dark predatory smile curving his lips. ’Clippy is going to be so pissed.’