The darkness slowly fades to light, and sensations come along with it. Sen blinks, everything feels, well, real. He takes a few steps, and notices that it feels almost exactly like his real body.

Around him is a plain white room, the walls, floor , and ceiling almost seeming to blend together. There’s a floating screen at one end, feeling out of place in this plain area. He walks over to it, and sees that it is where he can customize his room, enter the training room, or enter fifth dimension, though the last option is currently greyed out with a timer counting down to midnight.

As he raises his hand to start messing with the settings, he notices that the ads that had come out weren’t an overstatement at all. If anything, they understated the realism of the capsule. His body is a perfect replica of his body in real life. He thought it was a bit creepy that they have that much information about his body, but at least they had bothered to clothe him in a plain white t-shirt and black shorts. Waving his hand around, he can feel the air resistance, another thing no game had gotten right.

He plays around for a bit, feeling his heartbeat, and trying to find any differences from his real body, but is unable to notice even the slightest hair out of place. Eventually, he stops playing around, and starts messing with the settings, eventually settling on an area that looked like an arena, a circular sand floor surrounded by bleachers, with a few training dummies set up, and a rack of weapons to the side.

After looking through a few more of the options, he is a bit irked as he notices that the parental controls were on, meaning that he will not be able to see any blood or gore, and he can’t have the pain setting above ten percent. At least now that he is older than thirteen, he is allowed to have his weapon look like a real sword rather than the oversized foam looking one he’d been stuck using before. He won’t be able to Have full access until he turns sixteen and becomes an adult.

He quickly grabs one of the claymores, and starts happily hitting the training dummies. He is surprised to notice that they actually cut in almost exactly the same way that the straw dummies he had practiced with in his previous life had. Figuring that the minor difference could be attributed to a different type of straw, he happily whacks away, practicing his form.

It isn’t until he was dripping with sweat that he notices how exhausted he feels. Most games will simply have a tireless body, or some sort of stamina mechanic, as they aren’t able to reproduce the feeling of exhaustion and soreness in different muscle groups.

He shivers again at how different this is. Maybe those nutjobs who claim aliens had given us the technology were on to something after all. He sits down for a while to rest, and checks the countdown, but he still has seven hours until he could actually play, so he decides to log off and get some food. As soon as he logged off, he notices that the exhausted condition of his body has seemingly carried over into real life, but at first he simply believed it to be some sort of phantom exhaustion.

It isn’t until the tiredness keeps up that he starts wondering what’s going on. Getting distracted from his original goal of food, he hops on his computer to see if he can figure out what the hell is going on. It doesn’t take him long to find out that everyone else is experiencing the same thing, and it is confused until someone very snarkily mentions that if anyone had read the manual that came with the capsules, they will know that the game capsules will exercise your body using electrical impulses in order to simulate exercise. Supposedly it is a health benefit put in so that long term capsule users will stay in shape.

Shrugging, Sen goes back to his original goal of food. Putting together an egg salad sandwich in the oversized kitchen, he munches on it as he looks around to find out if there was anything else new that had come up.

All the posts are simply talking about how realistic it is in game, and there are tens of thousands of complaints about how one is stuck using their own body. Sen isn’t one of the people who think it is a bad thing though, he is more comfortable using his own body compared to the avatars other immersion games will give you, even if he spends a lot of time in them.

He spends the rest of the day looking at different posts in an attempt to distract himself from how slowly time seems to be going. Once it hits eleven o’clock, he hops back in, and messes around with the settings in an attempt to burn some more time. Once he gives up on that, he starts doing warm ups, as he feels that it won’t be a surprise if it was possible to pull a muscle in the game.

The last five minutes tick by with excruciating slowness, and once the countdown got to one, he starts tapping the button for fifth dimension like crazy. The transition into the game is instant. One second he is in his arena like home room, the next he is floating above a massive land, littered with absolutely massive lakes, yet no ocean in sight, even though he is high enough to see hundreds of miles.

His body flies along, weightless, as he passes by gigantic monsters, from a massive turtle with two heads, large bipedal beings, even what looked like dragons. As he flew by, he sees earth shaking contests between two of the beings, one of the dragons fighting with a gigantic flaming bird he presumed to be a phoenix.

He can barely see them with how fast they were moving, leaving afterimages behind as they moved, each slowly accumulating wounds from the talons of the other. His flight takes him right between the two, and they pause for a moment, giving him a clear view of the two massive beasts, towering over him in size, each almost a hundred feet high.

His breath is taken from his lungs as he admires the two beasts, looking regal even with the bloodlust currently radiating from them. His flight soon takes him past them though, and he slowly gets closer and closer to the ground, to the point where he is flying through a range of mountains rather than far above them. The mountains themselves are far larger than they have any right to be, miles tall, covered in snow, and he feels utterly dwarfed as his flight weaves through them.

Eventually his flight slows, and everything goes white, with a large logo of a dragon and phoenix circling each other and the words “fifth dimension” underneath in a flowing script. When the whiteness fades away, he can feel cool tiles underneath his feet, and he nearly falls over from the sensation of standing again.

His vision is instantly drawn to an impossibly beautiful woman standing before him, her flowing golden hair falling down her soft looking white shoulders, and her piercing blue eyes seeming to look through him rather than at him. Here pure white dress accentuates her curves, showing the line of her body far better than it has any right to be shown. Her light pink lips are curved up in a welcoming smile, and she gives a short nod before speaking.

“Welcome to fifth dimension. I will be your guide for the beginning of this game, and will help you to learn what you will need to know to survive here.”

Sen is a bit too busy staring at her to properly process the words immediately, but eventually he puts together his fragmented thoughts.

“So what do I need to know?”

“The first thing you will need to do is sense your energy. Simply focus on your body, take deep breaths and try to sense the change in your body.”

She pauses, and Sen did as he was asked, calming his mind as he would always do before a fight, before sending his senses inwards, trying to feel anything out of place. It doesn’t take him long to find it. It is strange to be able to actually sense something flowing within his body. It seems to be flowing in the same way his blood is, following his arteries and veins, though he isn’t sure about that, as he isn’t too clear on human anatomy. A large ball of it seems to be focused in his heart, pulsing with every beat the heart took.

As he is focusing on this entirely new sensation, the woman continues.

“Now you will need to learn to control it. Simply will it to move. Try to convince it to spread evenly throughout your body.”

He did as she said, trying to will it to spread out from the circulating path it was currently following into the rest of his body. At first, it was like trying to grasp water only to have it run out of his mental fingers, but after a time he was able to spread it out into his body, using the mental image of a gas diffusing.

As he finishes, the woman nods, and waves her hand, making a straw dummy and longsword appear to her right.

“This is the most basic skill that everyone will learn. It is commonly known as body strengthening. Come take the sword and see how much you’ve already changed.”

Shrugging, he does his best to maintain his mental image as he grabs the sword, finding it surprisingly easy, as he quickly grows used to controlling it, feeling as if controlling the energy is simply like controlling another limb he didn’t know he had. As he grasps the sword, his first thought is that it feels terribly light, as if it were made of balsa wood rather than the metal it appears to be made of.

Shrugging, he swings it at the target, and his eyes widen at how much faster his swing is than he expected. The longsword tears through the target in an instant, cutting through it like it was tofu. The surprise from the speed of the blow leaves him a bit delayed, and the sword crushes one of the tiles beneath the dummy, sending fragments flying. He preemptively winces, expecting to get cut from the fragments, but they seem to simply bounce off of his skin as if his limbs are made of metal rather than the soft flesh they were.

Maintaining his body strengthening, he pinches himself. His skin retains its softness, but it seems that it was far, far stronger than before. Looking back to the sword, he noticed that is isn’t even chipped, and he looks at the woman in confusion.

She simply ignores his querying gaze, and continues. “While there are many more advanced forms of body strengthening, and many more skills, some of which will seem like magic, all of them are using the energy flowing within you. Be careful not to run out in the middle of a fight, as it will often be a fatal mistake.”

As she speaks, he can feel himself getting quite lightheaded, and notices that the thick energy that had been permeating his body is now growing thin. He quickly releases his control over the energy, and feels it go back to flowing along with his blood. He watches it for a while, at this point too interested to pay attention to the woman, as beautiful as she is. After a bit, he notices that it is slowly growing back, though he thinks it will probably take around an hour to fully restore itself.

Once he was finished, he looks back to the woman.

“Are you ready to begin your adventure in this new world?” the woman asks.

Sen simply nods, and is whisked away.