Root Access

Rhys is twenty-six, a software engineer, and on a remote-work holiday at a mountain lodge in continental Europe when the system arrives. No warning. No build-up. Mid-morning, mid-sentence, the world stops — and every human being on Earth receives the same cold notification: your planet has been selected for integration into the Universal System. Tutorial transport commences in four minutes and seventeen seconds. Rhys reads every line before he moves. What follows is the tutorial — a constructed environment populated with monsters, dungeons, and a thousand confused humans thrown together and told to survive. Most people panic. Some group up. Rhys reads his skill list twice, picks the option near the bottom that nobody else would choose, and starts moving toward the treeline before anyone has finished processing what just happened. He is not heroic. He is not chosen. He is a software engineer who treats the greatest catastrophe in human history as the greatest optimisation problem in history — and he is extremely interested. Root Access follows Rhys from the chaos of first contact through an epic journey toward something the universe didn't account for. Every tier is earned. Every threshold costs something. The power fantasy is real and so are the consequences. This is the beginning.