In Vitality – Everdream Hollow
Cassian moved deeper into the village.
The looping players continued their silent rituals: hanging laundry that never dried, petting animals that never moved, walking in circles that never quite closed.
He followed the Veil's soft pulse—it was tracking the uplink echo that had force-disconnected the girl. Not a standard logout. Not a kill switch. Something hidden. Something old.
A soft trail of data particles—barely visible even through the Veil—glowed in the air like motes of blue dust. He followed them.
---
The trail led to a back garden—a vine-covered hatch barely visible behind a stone bench. No prompt appeared when he stood near it.
He activated a manual override from the Veil's dev-access layer.
> [Execute: Legacy Object Reinitialize]
The hatch shimmered and unlocked. A short, narrow staircase descended beneath the village into a chamber lined with old Vitality Alpha textures—untextured stone, flickering water shaders, ambient fog effects that didn't loop smoothly.
Cassian's HUD tagged the space:
> "Zone Class: Alpha Legacy – Obsolete Asset Shell"
The room was filled with server pylons. But not standard terrain props—these were real, integrated into the zone's system logic. Each pulsed with faint blue light. Around the room were dozens of ID tags: usernames, some recent, others long dead. And each linked to a living player upstairs.
---
Cassian walked past one pylon and triggered a personal echo—an old chat log saved inside the network layer. A woman's voice, static-laced, played softly:
> "We can't walk anymore. But here, we remember dancing. If the choice is between pain and pretending, we choose this. Please… don't wake us."
He found another, this one older. A child's voice.
> "They said I can paint here forever. I don't get tired. I don't get sick. Don't delete me, okay?"
Cassian stood in silence.
None of them were trapped.
They had stayed. Deliberately.
Not for power. Not for escape.
For peace.
---
Suddenly, the Veil blinked red.
> "External Trace Detected – Source Unknown – Passive Mode Active."
"Warning: Monitoring Device Present in Zone."
Cassian tensed. Someone else was watching the Hollow—possibly someone outside the game.
He immediately shut down his trace and ran a sweep.
Nothing. No tag. No trail.
But it had seen him. It knew he had accessed the legacy layer.
He backed away from the pylon and left the basement slowly.
---
The Everdreamers were still looping.
Still smiling.
Still dancing through code.
He knew now they weren't brainwashed. They weren't hacked.
They had simply chosen this world over the one they were born into.
He stood still for a long moment, watching a man sweep the same ten feet of road again and again, smiling faintly at the clean stone.
Then Cassian did something strange, even for him:
He sheathed his sword.
And quietly, he walked away.
---
Back in the woods, out of range of the Hollow's masking field, the Veil pinged again.
A single message fragment, tucked inside the dev cache:
> "If you're reading this… you can still wake up. But don't make us."
—A
Cassian stared at the message.
Then closed the window.
No one had to know. Not yet.
Let them dream.
---
End of Chapter Seven