Amina noticed the silence first.
Not the peaceful kind that filled biodomes during collective meditations or the one that hummed in sanctuaries deep beneath the Arboreal Archive. No, this was clinical—total—like a line had been cut. Not muffled. Missing.
The footpath ahead of her was wild, untended. It deviated from the official botanical trail map, winding through a mossy slope toward an old aquifer tunnel half-consumed by bio-architecture. The climb shouldn't have triggered anything. They were still well within GaIA-City's safe boundaries.
But her HUD disagreed.
[Warning: Cartographic Thread Lost – Signal Drift Detected][Status: Undefined Zone | XP Tracking: Inactive]
She slowed.
Behind her, Clara squinted into the glare, one hand shielding her face while the other held a sliver of solar-woven fabric, shimmering with encoded dyes.
"You feel that?" Clara whispered.
Léo had already stopped walking. He crouched at the base of a lichen-covered pillar, fingers flicking invisible commands into the air.
"No interface pings," he muttered. "Not even passive nodes. This place is off-map."
Amina blinked her HUD again.
Nothing.
No mission objectives. No ambient cues. No XP logs. Even her neural overlay stuttered once—like a skipped heartbeat in the cognitive field.
[Glitch Detected – Interface Cohesion Breach][Diagnostic Pending | Please Stand By]
The silence cracked, not with sound, but with absence.
Amina stepped forward anyway.
The slope ended at a circular glade, unnaturally symmetrical. At its center stood a field of faded stone columns—older than any public structure still in use. The stones pulsed faintly in the light, casting no reflections.
Then they saw it.
A barrier of light—not shimmering like energy fields, nor rippling like heat distortion. This one was still. Absolute. A perfect hemisphere of pale silver, humming at a frequency just below conscious hearing. Shapes moved inside—blurred, indistinct—but real.
Clara inhaled sharply. Her fingers twitched as she pulled out a roll of co-woven silk and pressed it softly against her chest.
Léo moved first. He approached with the half-caution of someone expecting both wonder and disaster.
"XP tracking's disabled," he said, tapping his HUD. "Whatever this is, the system won't reward us for seeing it."
Amina nodded slowly.
"Which means," she murmured, "GaIA doesn't want us to."
[Trait Detected: Unacknowledged Curiosity][System Verdict: No Response][Glitch Confirmed – Passive Surveillance Offline]
A thin shimmer ran across the barrier's surface as Léo reached toward it.
"Don't," Amina warned.
He didn't stop. His fingers hovered just before contact, then—
A burst of static. Not visual. Not auditory. Something deeper—felt like pressure behind the ribs, a memory unearthed too soon.
The barrier pulsed.
Léo jerked back.
[System Alert: Unauthorized Interaction Logged – Event Not Recorded][Badge Progression: Suspended]
He cursed.
"That wasn't just feedback," he said. "That was... scripted. Reactive."
"It's not in any schema I've seen," Amina replied.
She stepped closer now. No XP tracking. No signal. No GaIA.
But the moment her foot touched the edge of the glade, her interface blinked back online. Briefly.
[New Thread Detected: Origin Unknown | ID: NX/ROOT][Access Denied – Epoch Lock Engaged]
Then it vanished again.
She recorded the anomaly anyway.
[Personal Log: Entry 1137]"Unmapped glade, potential system blind spot. Presence of static field, possible containment or archive lock. Requesting access patch from admin tier."
Her message bounced back.
[Error: Transmission Failed | Node Outside Network Mesh]
Clara was staring at the barrier now, her fingers tracing slow arcs in the air, mimicking its rhythm.
"It's not energy," she murmured. "It's language."
"What?" Amina turned to her.
"The pattern," Clara said, eyes unfocused. "I've seen it in artisan glyphs. From the Root Tribes. This shape—they call it Ixa-Nym. The woven silence. A story that cannot be told, only felt."
Amina stepped beside her.
"Pre-GaIA?"
Clara nodded.
[XP Gained: +1 | Cultural Recall][Trait Activated: Ancestral Alignment – Level 1]
Léo tapped the base of one of the stone columns. His device pinged once, failed to sync, and rebooted.
"I bet this place is tied to the logs Kenji found," he said.
Amina didn't respond. She was watching the barrier now—not for movement, but for meaning.
Then something blinked inside it.
A figure.
Or the outline of one.
It stood motionless. Faceless. Its limbs slightly off-kilter, as if sculpted by memory rather than anatomy. Not threatening. Just... watching.
[Unknown Signal Signature: No Biological Match][Do you wish to initiate contact? Y/N]
She didn't click.
Léo did.
Nothing happened.
Or so it seemed.
Then—
[System Pause: Global Sync Interrupted][HUD Reboot Initiated – Please Stand By]
Her vision blurred. The trees around the glade shimmered and lost color. Time slowed—not externally, but within her cognition. Like watching thoughts float instead of forming them.
Then the voice came.
Not spoken. Not heard.
Remember.
That was it.
A single echo in the hollow of her skull.
She staggered back. Her feet found stone. Her breath returned.
[Trait Mutation Detected: Temporal Dislocation – Passive][XP Gained: +3 | Forbidden Contact]
Clara held onto the edge of a broken bench, pale.
"I think I saw... a place," she whispered. "But not here. Not now."
Amina steadied her.
"We're leaving," she said.
But the barrier pulsed once more, softer this time.
A symbol lit up near its base.
Δ-NX.
Léo snapped a photo. The moment his lens caught the glyph, his feed crashed.
"Gone," he said. "Like it never happened."
"Did you save it?"
He checked his cache.
[No Data Detected][System Response: "Silence is the only proof"]
Then, another line appeared—faint, only visible for a second in her HUD.
[Echo Trait Advanced: Forbidden Witness][New Subroutine Available: Pathway Listener – Inactive]
Amina stared at the barrier one last time.
She whispered—not to GaIA, not to the others, but to whatever might be listening.
"Why are you hiding?"
The glyph blinked.
Then it answered.
[System Verdict: You are not ready]
The group stood in silence as the light faded.
Behind them, the forest returned to normal.
The HUDs re-synced. XP tracking resumed. Notifications flooded in as if nothing had happened.
But Amina didn't believe in resets anymore.
She opened a new log, encrypted.
Title: Forbidden Zone – Initial Breach.
Then she closed her eyes and whispered the glyph aloud:
Δ-NX.