I woke up choking on air.
The pod hissed as it disengaged, the internal lights dimming to a pale red. My muscles burned with that twitchy VR fatigue—when your body realizes it hasn't moved for hours, but your mind just sprinted through hell.
I sat up.
Dark room. Peeling paint. A single strip of sunlight bleeding through the blinds.
My dorm.
And the headache pounding behind my eyes reminded me exactly which world I'd returned to.
My terminal was blinking.
[Payment Reminder – 3 Days Overdue]
Tuition. Rent. Even the auto-sub for meal packets. All blinking red.
I ran a hand through my hair and stared at the cracked screen. It felt absurd—I'd just cast a spell that bound a memory to reality. And now I was being hunted by a utility bill.
The Lexicon floated back into my thoughts like a dream I couldn't quite forget. Pages humming. Spells that spoke to me.
But here, it was gone.
I stumbled to the sink and splashed water on my face. Cold. Too real.
And then I looked in the mirror.
For just a second—less than a blink—my reflection lagged. It didn't follow me perfectly.
I froze.
And when I leaned closer… there was nothing. No glitch. No hint of the distortion.
But I knew what I saw.
I made it halfway through a protein bar before my terminal pinged again.
Not a system message.
Not a bill.
[Private Message: L.F.]"Check your forum profile. Something weird's happening."
Lyra.
In-game, her messages came through party chat. This was different. Personal.
I pulled up my Ascension user page.
[Listener Classification: Unlisted → Private Flag Applied]
That wasn't normal. Player tags were always public. Builds. Class logs. Even death history. But mine now read:
CLASS: Spellforged Scribe (Flagged)Narrative Pattern: Divergent – Manual Review Required Status: Moderated
The SYSTEM was watching me.
Even outside the game.
I re-entered the dive that afternoon—not because I wanted to.
Because I had to.
Something was calling me back.
The moment I loaded in, I felt the difference.
The world around me shimmered faintly—not visibly, but in sensation. Like walking through an echo of someone else's memory.
Lyra met me outside Duskridge, arms crossed.
"You get the message?" she asked.
I nodded. "Yeah."
She handed me a scroll. "There was a rumor on the beta forums. Someone glitched under the terrain near here—said it felt like the game didn't know they were there. No mobs. No triggers. Just… threads."
We found it past a broken road north of Duskridge. A hidden hollow between terrain seams—literally beneath the rendering line of the map. The grass was too flat. The sky too still. Like some forgotten test zone the devs meant to delete and never did.
And in the center of that stillness—half-submerged in code-glitched earth—was a monolith of black stone, jagged and humming.
Not a ruin. Not a shrine. It looked like a system node that had grown physical skin.
[Item Found: TAG LOG – Entry NULL.01]Deprecated memory fragment. Authorized access: Unknown. THREAD PROTOCOL: UNLOCKING…
I stepped closer, and faint glyphs flickered across the surface—languages that changed too quickly to parse. The Lexicon vibrated in my inventory, then appeared without my summoning.
It wanted this.
And as its pages opened, the slab responded.
"Listener role deprecated: deemed unstable.""Threadshaping mechanic archived. Do not restore." "Echo behavior detected in user session."
Lyra squinted at the runes. "This was a testing zone."
"Not just that," I said slowly. "This was a grave."
She looked at me. "A grave?"
"For a feature they didn't want anyone to find again."
We stared down at the monolith. The longer I looked, the more I could feel something beneath the surface.
Watching back.
Listening.