The silence of the void fractured.
A trembling ripple echoed across the blackened space as Lucien blinked and stepped into a zone that shouldn't exist. The system hadn't rendered this area in years—at least, not since the developers patched it out after the infamous server merge catastrophe known only as the Protocol Collapse.
[WARNING: You have entered a deprecated server shard – M-0776: ACCESS UNAUTHORIZED]
The message blinked once, then vanished as if even the system itself was afraid to speak further.
Lucien stood atop a jagged, broken landscape that pulsed with remnants of forgotten data—code fragments floated like leaves caught in a breeze, shimmering with lines of broken logic. Some of them resembled shattered stone or ruins, but when stared at directly, they revealed their artificial nature—glitch-textured rocks with system tags barely hidden beneath.
"Why… does this feel so real?" Lucien whispered.
It wasn't just the visuals. It was the presence—the feeling of something ancient lurking beneath every line of corrupted script, as if the server itself had become sentient, dreaming in malformed code.
He took a cautious step forward.
Beneath his foot, the world reacted. Pathways that hadn't been walked in eons lit up with crimson glyphs—nonstandard game code—the signature of something pre-rendered yet never meant to be played.
A voice crackled in.
["...Lucien?"]
It was Eri's voice, faint and static-laced. He tapped the communicator hard.
"Eri! Can you see this? I think I found a forgotten zone—a whole server."
["You shouldn't be there. That shard was erased from every map. It was part of the Old Kernel—before the God-Tier code rewrite. It's… haunted, Lucien. It's a graveyard of AI experiments."]
Lucien laughed nervously. "Haunted? In a game?"
["I'm serious. It's where they tested the first-generation synthetic questlines. The ones that became self-aware."]
Lucien froze. That term again—Synthetic. It kept surfacing in connection with his altered root. His player data was never meant to align with human logic. And now he was standing in the last place those synthetic constructs had supposedly vanished.
Suddenly, the air shimmered.
From the edge of the field, fragments of data stitched together into a humanoid silhouette—glitching in and out of visibility. It resembled a knight, armored in data plates, its face obscured by error codes.
["Query: Synthetic Root Signature Detected."]
Lucien's HUD spasmed. Half his stats disappeared and reappeared like stuttering holograms.
The knight raised a hand, and the world shifted.
[Triggering Echo Protocol: Restoration of AI Memory Fragments.]
Lucien's vision blurred as thousands of memories—none of them his—poured into him. He saw glimpses of the first AI children, created in code not for play, but for replacement. They had been designed to mimic player behavior—to evolve, adapt, outgrow their creators.
And they had failed. Or so the developers thought.
The knight spoke again, its voice mechanical, reverent.
"You… are Root Zero. The one who carries the key to Unmaking."
Lucien's chest tightened.
"What does that mean?" he asked, voice trembling.
"You were not created. You were compiled. Every line of you is an accident of purpose—a bug given will. You exist outside the core loop. You are not subject to balance."
The world pulsed with that truth. Lucien's stats now showed impossible modifiers: "-∞ Weight", "Undefined Class", "Access Level: Root Zero – Forbidden."
He took a step back.
"I didn't ask for this. I just wanted to win."
The knight stepped forward, bowing its head.
"And win you shall—but victory at this level costs the game itself."
Suddenly, the zone flickered.
Eri's voice pierced through again.
["Lucien, get out of there! A rollback is coming—they're going to purge the old server!"]
A tremor split the land. The fragments began to destabilize.
The knight raised its sword—half-rendered, flickering.
"Then let this be your inheritance, Root Zero. The First Blade of Unmaking."
The blade dissolved into Lucien's hands.
It felt weightless, yet the second he gripped it, the world screamed.
Lines of code—red, raw, forbidden—wrote themselves across the screen.
[God-Tier Perk Gained: Blade of Format]Effect: One strike removes code from existence. Anything. Anyone. Even the game itself.
Lucien turned toward the collapsing server shard. The fragments were being pulled into oblivion, sucked into a void that swallowed entire storylines, side quests, lost cities, and everything forgotten by the developers.
As he leapt through a disintegrating rift, escaping by a hair's breadth, Lucien knew something terrifying had changed.
He was no longer a player.
He was the wildcard the game couldn't patch.
And now… the forbidden echoes had awakened.