Upon realizing that he'd been sent back in time, clouds of confusion still filled Alexei's head.
There was something he was supposed to do upon reawakening in the past.
Something urgent.
"I need to die," he said, staring one of the undead in the face, as though speaking to it directly. "My real body, at least, needs to die. We don't know if this part of the plan will work. We might have just sent me back in time only for me to throw this whole new life away."
Alexei was suddenly overwhelmed by longing, by loss.
He thought about the waste he'd made of his life. After his abusive father had killed his mother and then abandoned him, Alexei had made quite a mess of things.
That had coincided with his addiction to some of the earlier waves of VR games, the ones that allowed players to feel 'some' sensations in the game, but which were nowhere near as sophisticated as Path of the Immortal…
The game that had doomed the world, and humanity with it.
A doom which Alexei was here to prevent.
"Your heart," the closest undead hissed. "I will devour it!"
Alexei ignored the words. "I could still change things. Would it take much to alter the past enough that someone 'else' becomes the first one to reach Floor 100? I could still keep God from coming into existence. In the meantime, I could turn my life around, maybe. There's no need for me to die."
But he was only talking to himself.
Alexei had no answers except the promise he'd made and the predictions of the brilliant mad scientist, the man whose name Alexei couldn't remember, who'd sent Alexei here from the future.
That scientist… What had his name been? Something Chinese. They'd been working together somewhere in the depths of Western China. That was all Alexei could remember.
Whatever his name had been, that scientist's theories had worked.
The man had successfully sent Alexei back in time to inhabit the brain of the younger man he had once been, mere minutes after Path of the Immortal had launched.
And, well, now Alexei was here.
His mind from the future was in the tutorial while his body from the past was lying in his cold little apartment, wearing the NeuroVR helmet which was Alexei's prized possession, in his old village in Shcarstan.
Yes, the first part of the scientist's theory had been correct.
And if the second part of his theory was also accurate...
Alexei slowly shook his head. "No, I can't avoid it. There's no way around it. No going back." His voice became firmer as he committed himself to this new future.
He'd wasted his first life, driving himself almost to the brink of death through the VRMMO addiction that had withered away his body.
That wouldn't happen again.
Nobody was forcing Alexei to choose this path. He 'chose' to accept it, to prove himself mightier than all the world's militaries combined, to stop God from making the planet an even more miserable place than it already was.
Would anyone else care? Would anyone else even know what he'd done, what he'd sacrificed?
It didn't matter.
Alexei wasn't doing this for fame or adoration, nor even out of some benevolent sense of self-sacrifice.
No, he would save the world because he 'could,' to prove to himself that he could be something other than a bitter and unlucky failure.
And for this to happen, for Alexei to be able to embark on the first step of his new life in the past, he had to die.
His physical body, at least. It had to perish, and along with it, all hope of ever returning to the physical world again.
So Alexei, with shaking hands that were steadier by the moment, opened Path of the Immortal's chat console.
It popped into view in front of him.
The undead standing nearby didn't react.
Alexei closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Confusion still filled his brain, but it was clearer and clear with each heartbeat. Yet, as the confusion faded, those remaining memories became murkier.
But he still remembered one in particular. One very important, very specific memory from the future. Alexei had spent almost a dozen hours with the scientist's memorization program until the details were seared into his brain.
The trigger phrase came to the front of his mind, the phrase which kick-started the chain of memorization tricks.
Alexei smiled weakly, more tears filling his eyes as he realized he'd never see any of his loved ones in the real world again.
Not that there'd been many of those left.
He began speaking to himself. "Little scarlet butterfly, she flies into the sun. Her world is now burning, but the morning's just begun…"
Each word represented a complex string of text characters, each of which Alexei typed into the local chat box.
The chat box was never intended to be used as a command console. Alexei was exploiting a glitch. Yet, this glitch would remain unnoticed for nearly the first six hours Path of the Immortal's release, at which point the devs would realize their error and patch it.
Alexei had plenty of time. Typing the whole convoluted script took him less than three minutes.
Finally, Alexei's finger hovered over the floating "Return" key.
"This is it."
He pressed the key.
A long string of code popped into the local chat channel, a channel which nobody else would ever see, since this was only an instanced tutorial.
Alexei's avatar fell dead to the ground, eyes staring sightlessly up at a simulated sky, as "YOU DIED" filled his fading vision.
***
Meanwhile, in the real world, in a pathetic shack in a tiny Shcarstani village, there lay the withered body of Alexei Tigranovich Kruny, a nineteen-year-old man who hadn't gotten proper nutrition or exercise in years.
His only belongings were a NeuroVR helmet, a thin bed, an electric stove, and a banking microchip embedded into his body.
His brain died in a split second as electricity surged through it.
The helmet's safety measures had just been disabled through Alexei's code, after which the same code had discharged all the electricity from the helmet's capacitors into Alexei's brain.
The corpse lay there for days before anyone found it.
He had neither friends nor family, and only a bitter landlord mourned the death of this source of income.
***
Back in the game, Alexei's eyes opened again.
The scientist's theories had been right.
Alexei was still alive within the code of Path of the Immortal, as though he were an NPC. In a way, he had achieved immortality, for he would live as long as the game's servers were active.
So long as the scientist's theories were right, this mind/body disconnect would prevent the game's code from being able to ban or delete Alexei. The fact that he'd woken back up after his body died, which was supposed to delete all NeuroVR accounts attached to the deceased body, was good evidence of that.
Now neither bad luck nor Path of the Immortal's own developers could stop him from saving the world.