The sky above the lower District Rings was always a shade too green, the kind of green that made your eyes ache if you looked too long. A byproduct of atmospheric filters that hadn't been cleaned since Kael was ten. That was the year the sky changed color—and the year his mother stopped talking about better places.
Through his cracked QuestLens, though, it all looked cerulean. Deep blue, soft and empty, brushed with clouds that didn't exist. The illusion was better than nothing. Maybe that's why he hadn't scraped together enough cred to fix the Lens. He didn't want to see the truth all the time.
[QUEST: CLEAN ZONE 4D - TRASH RUN]
REWARD: +30 XP | +1 Chain Credit | +5 Sanitation Rep
TIME REMAINING: 00:19:42
Kael sighed, fingers curling around a half-melted chip-wrapper that had been stuck in the gutter since yesterday's acid drizzle. The pop-up blinked out with a soft ding. That made twenty-seven pieces of trash for the day. Three more and he could maybe afford a synthbar that didn't taste like old rubber.
"Big dreams," he muttered, stuffing the wrapper into his rusted trash drone. It beeped in response, struggling to hover. The thing had been limping along since the last firmware downgrade.
Above him, a luxury transit orb whooshed by, gleaming like a silver god in the sky. A level-62 user lounged inside—legs up, probably sipping designer stim-coffee while scrolling through corporate quests like Take your pet AI for a walk or Rate 15 MoodBoost tracks.
Kael was still Level 8. And if he didn't hit 10 by next week, he was getting Dropped.
Dropped wasn't just getting booted from the system, it meant losing access. No quests. No credit. No housing. You went from barely scraping by to full-on invisible. There were rumors about what happened to Dropped citizens. Some said they got shipped off-grid. Others said the system just stopped logging them. Kael didn't know the truth.
The first time Kael Virex remembered watching someone get Dropped, he was six.
The man had been a Level 11, just above survival threshold but failed three major quests in a row. Something about missed reports and talking back to a chain agent. When his level dropped to 9, his lenses shut off mid-conversation. His profile vanished. And then the sirens came.
Nobody helped him. Helping someone with Chain Decay was risky.
Contagious, even. People were too afraid.
Kael remembered the way the man screamed when the Cleaners dragged him into the transport.
Not because of the pain—but because he knew no one would ever see him again.
That was the world now. Not run by governments, but by the Game.
Questchain began as a game. An ambitious attempt to gamify productivity turn boring jobs into rewarding challenges. It worked too well.
In just a decade, it replaced everything:
Schools became learning arenas with PvP tests.
Jobs turned into faction quests and level-locked roles.
Housing access required daily XP upkeep.
Healthcare?... Only available past Level 20.
Travel?..... Level 30+.
Above Level 50?... Untouchable. Elites. People who lived in cloud-towers and didn't speak to grounders anymore.
Even emotions were gamified.
Consoling a crying neighbor....+10 Empathy XP.
Missed your quota because you were sick..... -20 Penalty. Chain Decay warning issued.
Everyone wore their levels in their eyes
visible in AR to anyone with a lens.
So people smiled more. Pretended harder, faked generosity, faked kindness,
Because every move was being scored.
Kael hated it.
But he was born into it.
Kael lived in District Ring 12, one of the outermost circles closest to exclusion zones. The further you were from the Core City, the lower your chain average. People here were poor, bitter, desperate.
Low-tier quests flooded their lenses:
Trash Collection
Sewer Patches
Pest Hacking
"Kindness Tokens" (helping elderly NPCs smile, mostly)
Some quests were real. Others... were just illusions to keep them busy.
The only hope....Climb. Grind. Survive.
The trash drone beeped again full. Kael kicked it gently, and it whirred unhappily.
That's when his lens flickered.
Just for a second a pixel out of place, hovering on the corner of the street like a bad render. A building edge too sharp, too clean. Like reality had coughed.
He blinked, Gone.
[???: CORE QUEST DETECTED]
Would you like to accept?
[ACCEPT] [DECLINE]
Kael's heart kicked hard against his ribs.
Core quests weren't real. Everyone knew that. They were forum myths—fake screenshots and elaborate jokes cooked up by bored high-levels. Stories meant to mess with grinders like him. No one he knew had ever seen one. Ever.
But there it was. Floating midair, golden-red and pulsing like a heartbeat. It shimmered at the edges. The kind of shimmer his HUD usually reserved for dream sequences or restricted zones.
His thumb hovered over [DECLINE]. He could still finish his Trash Run. Hit 30. Get the XP. Maybe buy that synthbar. Maybe live.
But what if it was real?
His hand shook.
What if this is the only way out?
He thought of his mom again—how she'd stopped dreaming, stopped fighting, stopped speaking up at all. She sat in their unit now, staring at static most days, her HUD burned out, her level frozen at 14.
He couldn't end up like that.
Kael tapped ACCEPT.
The screen flared white and the world fractured.
Sound shattered like glass. Street edges folded in on themselves. Gravity twisted. The fake sky blinked out, and for a breathless second, he saw something behind it something older, raw and flickering with data he didn't understand. Then darkness.
And silence.
Then, softly:
[CORE INITIATED: WELCOME, KAEL ARDEN.]
[YOU ARE NOW BEING WATCHED.]