[GLOBAL SYSTEM PING: THREAT-CLASS USER IDENTIFIED — ZERO-ONE]

  

[SINGULARITY SIGNATURE RECORDED. ALL OBSERVATION PROTOCOLS ENABLED.]

  

[EXPERIENCE SYNC LOCKED. WORLD ANOMALY LEVEL: 0.3% → 1.1%]

  The sky had gone silent.

  Not clear—silent. No birds. No wind. Just a humming void, like someone muted the entire reality but forgot to mute its background radiation.

  Villagers no longer peeked from glitch huts. They stayed down. Afraid. Not of the monsters.

  Of me.

  I understood. After what I did to that wyvern… the air still hung heavy with aftershock particles. The trees still bent away from me. Gravity didn’t fully reset. I was a walking breach.

  And somewhere deep in this world, the System was watching.

  I had to move.

  A girl—barely older than me, draped in broken ceremonial cloth—approached before I could leave. Her face shifted like a half-loaded avatar, sometimes with a third eye blinking above her brows.

  She knelt.

  

“You’re going to the Glitch Ruins.”

  Not a question.

  

“Our ancestors say only System errors sleep there. And secrets.”

  She handed me a map.

  Map Fragment [Glitch Ruins – Sector Delta-9] Acquired

  

“If you’re going to survive… you’ll need more than raw power. You’ll need to speak to the Archive.”

  The Ruins were three days out. I made it in one.

  Not because I ran.

  Because something chased me the whole way.

  A shadow—formless, staticky. Sometimes it took the shape of the villagers I passed. Sometimes it was just lines of moving code.

  It never attacked. Never spoke.

  But it was fast.

  And it always followed.

  I reached the Ruins half-dead and hallucinating. My Gravity Siren pulsed on its own now, like a heartbeat that wouldn’t stop echoing. I had leveled twice from the road mobs—packs of RAM Crows, Loop Wolves, and one terrifying Error Bear that kept reloading its own wounds like save files.

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  EXP: 143,200

  Skill Slots: 2 Active, 1 Locked

  Crafting Tier: Zero. Resonance: 6.5%

  I needed a place to reset. To think.

  The Ruins gave me none of that.

  They rose out of the ground like a crashed server—a temple built from half-rendered polygon blocks, scripts floating like incense. Data particles danced in spirals, forming glyphs in the air. I saw a doorway—but it had no door. Just a floating line of debug text:

  

[IF USER.ACCESS LEVEL < NULL] THEN RETURN(404)

  I placed my palm against it.

  [ACCESS VIOLATION]

  It burned.

  But my body didn’t pull away. The Siren inside me answered.

  

[OVERRIDE: GRAVITY SIREN - USER ID VERIFIED: ZERO-ONE]

  

[ENTRY PERMITTED — WARNING: SYSTEM MEMORY INTEGRITY BELOW SAFE THRESHOLD]

  The ruins opened like a collapsing file structure.

  Inside, light was inverted. Shadows cast upward. The floor was glass, but underneath was history. Moving visuals. I saw battles. Sky cities. Ancient code beasts. A previous version of the world? Or one that never made it out of beta?

  I moved slowly.

  The deeper I went, the louder the voices got.

  Not people. Not ghosts.

  Just… lines.

  

“Skill unregistered.”

  

“User did not consent to patch 1.0.”

  

“System rollback failed.”

  

“…he lives… he still lives…”

  Then a roar.

  And a boss bar appeared.

  

[BOSS ENCOUNTER: THE ARCHIVE GUARDIAN]

  

[LVL 15 - MEMORY CLASS: ETERNAL]

  It was massive—like an AI core given muscle and teeth. Its spine was a library. Its fists were made of stacked memory blocks. Its eyes were black holes consuming every error near them.

  

“You seek knowledge. Knowledge is earned through deletion.”

  

[BATTLE BEGIN]

  I barely dodged its first strike—it rewrote the space it punched. One second I was there, next second I was replaced with a loading screen for an application I didn’t recognize.

  I countered with Ghost Pyre—got one eye.

  But the thing started downloading me.

  A tether of white code wrapped my leg. My mind started slipping—memories being accessed, compared, edited.

  

[ALERT: MENTAL INTEGRITY COMPROMISED - 62% STABLE]

  I screamed. Let loose Singularity Claw.

  The whole floor inverted. It lost half its torso.

  

[EXP GAINED: +17,000]

  Still not dead.

  I had to do something desperate.

  I accessed the crafting interface mid-battle.

  Burned 20,000 EXP.

  Chose something wild:

  Infinite Mass + Null Thread

  Intent: “Trap anything. Kill even memory.”

  

[NEW SKILL CRAFTED: GRAVEMARK]

  

A dark seal that traps enemy code in gravitational decay. Anything caught becomes unable to be referenced, edited, or restored. Eternal deletion.

  I placed the mark.

  It screamed.

  

“NO. I HELD THEM. THE VERSIONS. THE PATCHED ONES. THE USERS THAT FAILED—”

  It dissolved.

  I collapsed.

  

[BOSS DEFEATED — +25,000 EXP]

  

[SKILL SLOT UNLOCKED - 3/5 OPEN]

  But more importantly—

  

[ARCHIVE ACCESS GRANTED]

  A beam of light fell on me.

  I saw files. So many files.

  Timeline logs. Forbidden patch notes. Names.

  And then a glitchy, broken voice whispered directly into my core:

  

“You are not the first. But you might be the last.”

  

“World.exe is failing. Restore it… or let it die.”

  I stood in that collapsing cathedral of knowledge… and for the first time, I realized.

  This wasn’t a power fantasy.

  This was a suicide mission written in corrupted destiny.

  END OF CHAPTER 5