I Summon the Fourth Calamity and Turn the Starry Sky into a Game

Lin Ye opens his eyes and discovers that he has transmigrated to Punklorde, a planet built from data and characters.

Everyone here has an Aether Cartridge, and legendary hackers rewrite reality at will, treating the universe as a game.

His golden finger is the “Aether Compilation Engine,” left behind by Nous in the gaps between worlds. It can compile the entire world into a playable game.

Scan the environment, quantify everything, rewrite the rules...

Even more absurdly, the compilation engine comes with a “The Fourth Calamity Summoning Function”: he can summon real players from Earth and make them think they’re playing a fully immersive VR game, when in fact they’re providing distributed computing power for his compilation work.

“Damn, this game has way too much freedom!”

“The NPC girls are incredibly well-modeled. Please add a relationship system, devs!”

Lin Ye quietly leads the “Fourth Calamity” players, who refuse to sleep until they’ve finished their quests, starting by compiling an alley into a dungeon and gradually adding the entire universe to his world library.

Bronya, Seele, Silver Wolf, Jingliu, Robin... As one key character after another gets caught up in his plans, the truth behind the Aether Compilation Engine is gradually revealed:

Nous scattered seven World Compilation Seeds, and Lin Ye is merely an experimental variable used to calculate the “end of the universe.”

“Then let me show you,” Lin Ye says to the celestial computer watching everything, “who gets to write the final solution for the variable.”