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

The drop was only about fifty feet, but the sideways gravity of the Dead Servers made it feel like he was falling diagonally. He braced himself, pointing his boots toward the churning, luminescent waves.

SPLASH!

He hit the water.

The moment his physical avatar breached the surface of the liquefied memories, his entire existence exploded into a symphony of absolute, mind-breaking agony.

”GAAAAAH!” Sebastian roared, the sound instantly swallowed by the thick, glowing fluid.

It wasn’t physical cold. It wasn’t the searing heat of a plasma blade. It was a torrential, catastrophic flood of raw, unadulterated human terror.

He didn’t just feel the water; he felt the billions of lives that had been forcefully melted down to create it. In a fraction of a microsecond, his highly optimized, Demigod-tier brain was violently forcefully injected with the agonizing final moments of an entire multiverse.

He saw a mother screaming as a Void Crawler tore her child in half on a burning street. He felt the crushing despair of a Level 80 Paladin watching his guild shatter under the foot of a Titan. He tasted the bitter, coppery blood of a starving refugee dying in the mud of an assimilated world.

It was an endless, suffocating barrage of grief. It was too much. The human mind was a fragile, localized biological construct. It was never meant to process the collective tragedy of a billion deleted planets simultaneously.

Sebastian’s digital ego began to violently fracture.

His vision went completely white. The concept of ’Sebastian’—the sarcastic, pragmatic landlord who just wanted to protect his warehouse—started to rapidly dissolve into the background noise. He was losing his identity. He was becoming just another drop of sorrow in the endless ocean.

He stopped swimming. His body went limp, slowly sinking deeper into the glowing blue abyss.

’Just let go,’ a thousand overlapping voices whispered in his mind. ’It hurts too much to exist. Just let it end.’

His green Administrator UI violently flickered, a cascade of red warning prompts desperately trying to warn him of his imminent psychological deletion.

[WARNING: EGO COHESION FAILING.] [CRITICAL ALERT: SEVERE PSYCHIC TRAUMA DETECTED.]

He couldn’t lift his remaining arm. He couldn’t access his [Code Compiler]. The sheer weight of the ocean was crushing his willpower into dust.

Suddenly, a brilliant, blinding beam of pure blue astral light pierced the dark water.

It shot down from the surface, completely ignoring the chaotic currents of the memory ocean. The light didn’t feel like the cold, dead data of the Ethereal Plane. It felt warm. It felt distinctly, undeniably human.

A hand grabbed his left shoulder.

Sebastian’s eyes snapped open.

Hovering right in front of him, entirely submerged in the horrific ocean of grief, was Valerie.

Her Astral Avatar was flickering wildly, the translucent azure silk of her robes tearing and rendering as the sheer psychic agony of the fluid attacked her connection. She wasn’t physically there—her real body was still miles away, safely locked in the Sanctuary medical ward—but her digital projection had followed his tether straight into hell.

”Sebastian!” Valerie’s voice screamed in his mind. It wasn’t a calm, corporate command. It was a raw, desperate plea.

Through the physical contact on his shoulder, she forcefully yanked half of the psychic burden onto herself.

”Nnngh!” Valerie’s astral face twisted in absolute torment. Her eyes squeezed shut, and a stream of glowing red digital blood began to pour from her nose as her own mind was assaulted by the billions of deaths.

But she didn’t let go. Her grip on his leather coat was like a vice of pure iron. She acted as an absolute, unyielding anchor, forcefully dragging his fractured ego back from the brink of deletion.

”Look at me!” Valerie commanded, her blue eyes snapping open to glare at him. ”You do not get to drown here, Seattle! We have a base to run! Get what you came for and let’s go!”

The fog in Sebastian’s mind violently shattered.

The despair was still there, tearing at his sanity, but it was no longer absolute. He had a tether. He had a reason to fight back. The Sovereign of Laws didn’t drown in the tears of the Ethereal Plane.

A cold, terrifying fury ignited in Sebastian’s chest.

”Right,” Sebastian grunted, his voice a metallic, distorted hum that vibrated the water around them. ”Let’s grab the loot.”

He didn’t try to swim up. He raised his remaining left hand, his silver-tinged eyes locking onto the swirling currents of raw data surrounding them.

He bypassed his combat spells. He opened his green, corrupted UI and forcefully activated his specialized extraction mechanic.

[Action Registered: Access Code Compiler.] [Skill Activated: Concept Extraction.]

He wasn’t grabbing a weapon. He wasn’t grabbing a physical item. He reached his hand into the deepest, most concentrated cluster of the glowing blue fluid, and he grabbed the absolute, mathematical concept of the grief itself.

He didn’t just want the data. He wanted the pain.

He clenched his fist.

BZZZZT!

The ocean violently violently bucked. A massive, localized whirlpool formed around Sebastian’s hand as he forcefully ripped the concept of ”Human Suffering” out of the ambient environment.

The blue light of the water rapidly darkened, condensing and compressing into his palm until it formed a perfectly spherical, pitch-black orb of raw, unadulterated code. The orb pulsed with a sickly, heavy heartbeat, radiating a feeling of such profound misery that the water around it physically froze.

[Extraction Successful: Concept of Human Suffering (Raw)]

”Got it,” Sebastian hissed, clutching the black sphere tightly to his chest.

He didn’t waste another second. He grabbed Valerie’s translucent hand, kicked his heavy boots against the invisible resistance of the water, and engaged his [Concept of Mass] to forcefully propel himself upward.

They shot toward the surface like a torpedo, bursting out of the glowing ocean and launching into the cold, dead air of the Juncture.

Sebastian landed heavily on the rusted metal decking of the Rusthound’s cargo bay, crashing to his knees. The heavy iron airlock doors slammed shut behind him, cutting off the eerie, silent glow of the Dead Servers.

He lay on the grated floor, his chest heaving, clutching the pitch-black sphere of suffering. The phantom pain of his missing right arm throbbed, but he was alive. He was anchored.

He looked up at the flickering blue projection of Valerie. She offered him a weak, exhausted smile before her avatar dissolved into a burst of harmless static, her job done.

”Thanks, Princess,” Sebastian whispered to the empty room.

He pushed himself up. He had the ingredients. It was time to cook.

——

The cramped, oil-stained cargo bay of the Rusthound was freezing, but Sebastian was sweating.

He sat heavily on a stack of rusted ammunition crates, his legs splayed out in front of him. The black leather of his coat was soaked with the luminescent blue fluid of the memory ocean. He was shivering, the residual psychic trauma of a billion dead souls still lightly scraping against the inside of his skull.

But his silver-tinged eyes were entirely focused on the object resting in his left hand.

It was the pitch-black sphere of [Human Suffering]. It felt incredibly heavy, like holding a condensed ball of lead that actively hated him. It pulsed with a slow, sickly rhythm, radiating a palpable aura of despair and biological vulnerability.

Corbin slowly descended the ladder from the upper deck, his hydro-spanner clutched tightly to his chest. The code-smith took one look at the black orb and instinctively took a large step backward, his face paling.

”Boss,” Corbin squeaked, his eyes wide. ”What... what is that? It feels like a bad breakup and a car crash rolled into one.”

”It’s the cure,” Sebastian muttered, a dark, humorless chuckle vibrating in his chest. ”The Cleaners are perfect, right? They are flawless, sterile lines of anti-virus code. They don’t have health bars. They don’t feel pain. They just exist to delete.”

Sebastian slowly stood up. He didn’t have his right arm to gesture with, so he just nodded at the black sphere.

”You can’t kill a perfect machine with a sword,” Sebastian explained, his voice dropping into the cold, terrifying hum of the Sovereign. ”You kill a perfect machine by forcing it to be human.”

He opened his glowing green Administrator UI. The interface violently flickered, protesting the sheer density of the corrupted data he was holding. He bypassed the standard Ethereal Plane settings and pulled up his [Law Synthesis] module.

”I’m going to write a virus,” Sebastian said, a vicious, predatory smile carving itself onto his face.

He forcefully dragged the pitch-black sphere of [Human Suffering] into the primary slot of the synthesis crucible.

[Input 1: Raw Concept - Human Suffering]

”I need to give them biology. I need to give them a nervous system,” Sebastian murmured, his highly optimized brain running the math at terrifying speeds.

He accessed the massive archive of skills he had hoarded and deleted over his journey. He found a high-tier healing spell he had ripped from a Vanguard Cleric weeks ago. It was a spell designed to aggressively regenerate organic tissue.