November 22, 2024.
Three whales drifted ashore on the waves of the Ariake Coast Sea, their immense bodies lying motionless against the coastline. They weren’t dead, merely unconscious—yet the sight was no less unsettling. Researchers gathered immediately, baffled by the cause, while communities and media outlets lit up with speculation. What stunned the public most was the discovery that each whale bore markings—digital tags—issued by CyberConnect Corp (CC Corp).
Why would creatures of the ocean carry such identifiers? And why had they collapsed here, all at once? Crowds gathered at the shoreline, whispering, recording, and broadcasting the event worldwide.
For many, the incident evoked a chilling memory—the echoes of the 2020 catastrophe. And though the whales themselves were but one piece of the puzzle, it marked the beginning of something far greater and far more dangerous.
Beneath the surface of ordinary life, the Net was breaking. Errors surged with alarming frequency, disrupting infrastructure worldwide: networks collapsed, electronics failed, signals vanished, traffic systems froze, and critical systems faltered in ways that no engineer could explain.
The cause?
A virus.
It wasn’t confined to the Net alone. It seeped into THE WORLD: Force Era, the newest and most expansive version of CC Corp’s famed MMORPG. Within its servers, the virus rampaged unchecked, overwhelming even SOPHIA, the company’s state-of-the-art Anti-Virus AI. Players found their Full-Motion Dive terminals compromised—ALGOS systems hijacked—until the infection crept past firewalls and into their very minds.
The consequences were devastating. Hundreds of players collapsed in their homes, unconscious, their avatars left frozen in the game. They were dubbed “The Lost Ones.” It had been eight years since the last network catastrophe, and now the specter of collapse returned with vengeance.
The media would later refer to it as “The Fourth Network Crisis.” A calamity bridging flesh and data, reality and digital illusion.
And then—December 19, 2024.
On that day, as chaos threatened to engulf both the Net and the waking world, a radiance pierced through the storm. The one long thought gone returned once more:
Aura, the Goddess of The World.
Her arrival bathed the servers in blinding light. Where her brilliance touched, corruption shattered. The virus recoiled, unraveling in waves until nothing remained but fragments of data dust. With her intervention, order returned—both to the network and to THE WORLD: Force Era.
Now, silence has settled once more. Systems stabilize. Communities exhale. Players awaken. For the first time in weeks, life returns to its normal rhythm. The world, at last, seems safe.
And yet…
Following the events of the Fourth Network Crisis, the world did not return to peace with a simple happy ending. Far from it. What many hoped would mark a conclusion instead became the opening act of something far darker—a judgment long in the making.
Complaints poured in from every corner of society. Players. Communities. Minority groups. The media. Even governments. All turned their eyes on CyberConnect Corp. The company had long insisted that the Net’s disturbances were “minor issues”—yet reality proved otherwise. The crises weren’t small, nor isolated. They were vast, recurring, and escalating.
The evidence was undeniable. Car accidents caused by sudden network failures. Airplanes falling from the sky due to corrupted systems. Explosions and technological malfunctions in military warfare. And at the heart of it all, countless victims of The Lost Ones—players of The World left in comas.
It was the fourth time such a calamity had shaken the balance between the Net and the real world. The shadow of Immortal Dusk, an incident still whispered of years later, only deepened the mistrust.
Public opinion shifted sharply. Could these really be the work of nameless hackers, as CC Corp insisted each time? Or had the corporation itself allowed the crises to happen?
The question grew louder, harsher, impossible to silence:
How had CC Corp managed to run The World across four versions, spanning eighteen years, despite distortion, viruses, and catastrophic breakdowns haunting it at every step?
Suspicion replaced faith. Where once the world blamed faceless criminals, now its gaze turned toward the company itself. Silence from CC Corp’s PR team only worsened the storm. Their refusal to address the matter directly was seen not as caution, but as a sign of guilt.
The facts were difficult to ignore.
Network Crises had become a regular occurrence since the early days of FMD terminals in 2009 and 2010. Every generation of The World seemed tied to them. And now, with 2024’s disaster, the pattern was undeniable.
Questions mounted. Did the FMD devices hide a function—an undisclosed flaw—that allowed distortion waves to directly affect the human brain? Was the system itself designed in such a way that players would fall into comas when interference struck?
Conspiracies, theories, and heated debates flourished.
Why was it always The World?
How could a game hold the power to trigger calamities of this scale?
And why, after all this time, did CC Corp remain unable—or unwilling—to prevent it?
The corporation’s response was meager. A formal apology, carefully worded and broadcast to the press. But apologies were no longer enough. The distrust ran too deep.
And so, even as The World: Force Era underwent emergency maintenance and restoration, analysts predicted what CC Corp feared most: a mass decline in logins. Dissatisfaction, suspicion, and betrayal would drive players away.
In the aftermath of the crisis, society itself fractured.
People were now divided into two clear sides: those who still loved The World and clung to it despite everything, and those who could no longer bear the weight of CC Corp’s denials, their faith shattered by fear of yet another catastrophe.
A vote was conducted across global networks. The results painted the divide in stark numbers.
Ten million players vowed to continue.
Ten million more swore they would never return.
A perfect split.
It was no longer just about a game. It was about trust. Half the community still believed in The World. The other half saw only betrayal, risk, and the looming threat of another network disaster that could reach beyond screens and terminals into daily life itself.
For CC Corp, the message was devastating. Losing half of their player base meant more than declining profits—it meant a crisis of legitimacy, an irreversible fracture in the bond between the company and its community. Yet still, they remained silent. No new statement. No explanation. Only the echo of their earlier apology, which now rang hollow.
And above it all, one question lingered, whispered in forums, spoken in hushed tones among those who had witnessed the light on December 19:
Where is Aura?
The Goddess of the World, whose radiance had once cleansed the virus and restored order, had vanished as suddenly as she appeared. Her fate remained unknown. Some believed she had sacrificed herself to protect the network. Others claimed she still existed somewhere deep within the code, waiting for the right moment to awaken again.
But the silence surrounding her absence weighed heavily, as though the Net itself was holding its breath.
The world was no longer at peace. It was only waiting.
According to CC Corp’s statement, the catastrophe had been traced back to a “controlled experiment”—a leak from a partnered company that had been developing a next-generation anti-virus program. The virus, they claimed, was never meant to spread beyond the testing environment. It was an accident, a failure in containment.
That was the story that made its way from the news to the public.
But was that story really the truth?
<<NEXT CHAPTER: WHERE THE WIND BLOWS>>