Time kept moving, yet my life stayed exactly the same—like a photocopy machine endlessly printing the same page over and over again. My only escape from that mind-numbing routine was Gaia World, the MMORPG I’d been playing since day one. Six years wasted, an embarrassing amount of money gone… but who cares? Everyone has their own method of staying sane. I never expected all those “investments” to earn me the ultimate reward from the developers: The right to create an Avatar with no limits. One winner. One chance. And somehow, that winner… was me. When I pressed the confirmation button, I thought it was just some fancy VIP feature. It wasn’t. Because the next moment, I wasn’t looking at my screen anymore— I had become the Avatar I created. Beautiful… and very obviously no longer male. And the further I walked, the clearer one thing became: The Avatar I over-designed wasn’t just a game character, and the world inside the game wasn’t just data.