The Vanishing Otaku

Prologue: The Vanishing Homebody

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Having been in the workforce for several years, Tang De maintained a leisurely and stable job. Outside of work, his greatest hobby was engaging in gaming battles with others. If there was anything about him that could be called out of the ordinary, it was only ever reflected in an online game called Warcraft!

As an enthusiast of Warcraft battles, he had started playing the game even before he entered university.

Being a semi-homebody, aside from his relatives and classmates, the friends he got along with best were all people he had met through this game. Although he wasn't an international top-tier expert, he was still quite well-known within the circles of his school and the surrounding city district.

Until one day, the residential complex where he lived was undergoing electrical grid renovations. It just so happened that a rare, massive thunderstorm occurred. The workers were forced to stop temporarily, and because the power had not yet been restored, some newly installed, unfinished cables remained exposed to the air. At that moment, a terrifying, giant bolt of lightning, dancing like a swarm of snakes, was attracted to the exposed high-voltage lines and whistled straight down from mid-air.

The small apartment Tang De rented was located right next to the construction site. Infused with the power of the giant lightning bolt, the high-voltage line whipped about as if convulsing, its immense force shattering his window and entering the room. The powerful current actually remained exposed in the air, forming a blinding ball of lightning within his bedroom.

Then, the ball of lightning suddenly expanded violently, before snapping inward, contracting into a point of light invisible to the naked eye in less than a thousandth of a second.

This point of light condensed all the power of the giant lightning bolt. Containing terrifying energy, the effect of its qualitative change tore through space, opening a palm-sized rift in the center of his bedroom, which was less than thirty square meters.

There was no scenery within the rift, but anyone who glanced at it could feel that it seemed to contain a terrifying storm, as if countless living beings across boundless worlds were being destroyed, reborn, and destroyed again in an instant. A speck of golden light drifted at the exit of the rift, seemingly trying to break free from some kind of restraint and escape that place to reach the real world.

However, the terrifying power within the rift was too great. That speck of golden light had already neared the exit, vaguely revealing the shape of a book, but in the end, it fell short of success.

Seeing the rift about to close under the influence of the great world force, the golden object, unwilling to fail just like that, simply leveraged the power of the surrounding storm. It suddenly released a powerful suction force, barely projecting it out of the rift to capture all biological entities within about three meters of the opening, and was then ejected by the force of the storm far away from the direction of the rift, along with its harvest.

All of this happened extremely quickly. The unfortunate Tang De of the previous life was in the middle of a heated battle against his comrades in front of his computer, right at a life-or-death moment. Before he could even react, having only enough time for half a scream, he was sucked into the rift formed by the sudden intrusion of lightning. His physical body was instantly destroyed, while his soul, protected by the speck of golden light, was swept into the terrifying spatial storm.

Only after his soul merged into that book-shaped golden object did Tang De realize that the culprit behind his death in that world was the very artifact that had preserved his soul: the Book of Truth.

However, despite being a legendary and powerful artifact, it could exert no power within the most dangerous spatial storm turbulence outside the universe, and could only cower and passively protect itself.

If not for the once-in-ten-million-years qualitative change in lightning power that had broken through the extremely stable spatial barrier of that world by focusing force on a single point, and the fact that the Book of Truth happened to be near that spatial rift, it would have been impossible. But the barrier of that world was unexpectedly stronger than the Artifact Spirit had anticipated. In its current state—unmanned and lacking follow-up power—it could not break through the rift exit to leave the terrifying spatial storm turbulence and descend into that prime material world.

Ultimately, having no other choice, the Artifact Spirit, which had not yet formed true intelligence, could only think of the method of absorbing a living being to become its master. With a sentient being to actively control it, the artifact could exert greater power, perhaps one day succeeding in escaping this dangerous and lonely spatial turbulence.

And so, Tang De's soul was protected by the artifact, subconsciously falling into a state akin to deep sleep, drifting aimlessly through the space-time turbulence with the Book of Truth for who knows how long.

Until one day, the outer crystal wall system of a vast multiverse fluctuated due to the power of some powerful existence, forming tiny rifts large enough only for insects to pass through.

The Book of Truth, which happened to be nearby, seized the opportunity and instantly crossed the barrier of the universe, entering the prime material plane of a strange universe.

After descending into the prime material plane like a shooting star, the artifact, having almost completely exhausted its energy after countless years in the spatial turbulence, could only passively succumb to the influence of this world's gravity, falling from an altitude of several thousand meters.