---
They didn't speak for a long time.
Kael stood at the edge of the deadzone rooftop, watching the city glitch beneath them. Every neon banner, every AI-looped pedestrian, every fabricated shadow along the glass towers of Neureel City shimmered with silent static. Like the system was holding its breath.
Dex finally broke the silence.
"You realize what you just triggered?"
Kael's fingers trembled as he retracted the interface port. "It wasn't just a vault. That chamber… it was a memory well. A loop containment. And I unlocked the whole thing."
Dex walked toward him slowly, the wind flickering faint bits of artificial snow across the rooftop—residual effects from a broken weather node. "Tell me everything. From the second you stepped through."
Kael recounted it all. The silent threshold. The chamber of the forbidden schema. The vision—himself, duplicated and twisted through futures that hadn't happened yet. The voice that claimed he was ARCH-0X_77.
And then, the message:
> Find the Origin Frame. It remembers everything. Even the lies.
Dex paced. "ARCH-0X_77 wasn't just a vault. It was a selector. Like… a trigger code embedded into the system itself. No wonder RELIC couldn't destroy it. It wasn't built to be erased."
Kael nodded. "They buried it deep and hoped the right player would never come along."
Dex looked up. "Except you did."
Kael's gaze darkened. "What even is the Origin Frame?"
Dex turned to his deck. "That's what I'm finding out. Give me a second."
His fingers moved like lightning. Nullspace code flickered across his lenses. Then—
He froze.
"Kael... the Origin Frame isn't just a location."
Kael tensed. "Then what is it?"
Dex slowly turned the display toward him. A grid of fragmented metadata hovered in the air. Faint. Ghost-like. Each datapoint was encoded with a timestamp from the earliest builds of QuestChain—pre-public access, when only developers and Oracle subprocesses were testing the lattice.
One file blinked in red.
> OFRM-0X: ECHO_00.ROOT://GenesisRun
Kael squinted. "That's not a location ID…"
"No," Dex said slowly. "It's a player ID. One that hasn't logged in for over seventeen years."
Kael's heart dropped. "You think it's... the first player?"
Dex whispered, "I think it's the first Architect—the one the Oracle mirrored when it began the convergence simulations."
Kael exhaled, stepping back. The wind stung his face, but it was the thought—the possibility—that hit harder.
"And the Origin Frame?" he asked.
Dex's voice was low. "If ARCH-0X_77 is a selector... then the Origin Frame might be the blueprint. The original pattern the Oracle used to build everything. The template for play, for choice, for reality logic inside the system."
Kael's head was spinning. "And I'm supposed to find that? Interact with it? Rewrite... what, the rules of the game?"
"No," Dex said, eyes narrowing. "You already are."
A loud buzz cut through the rooftop silence. Dex's screen flickered, overloaded. A pulsewave struck the skyline—faint, like a sonar echo—but the buildings responded. Windows flickered. Signs glowed blood-red for a single breath.
A shadow passed overhead.
Kael looked up. "What the hell is that?"
From the clouds, a descending arc of geometry began to take form. A massive, slowly spinning helix of obsidian code. It wasn't a vehicle. It wasn't even real in the physical sense. It was rendered, but the kind of render only the Oracle could process—data drawn directly into perceptible space.
Dex's voice cracked. "No. No, no—this isn't possible. That's a core object. A celestial-class construct."
Kael stared. "Is that the Origin Frame?"
"No," Dex said grimly. "That's the Vigil. The guardian they left behind to stop anyone who got close."
The city beneath them reacted instantly.
Skylights shattered into digital sparks. NPCs froze mid-motion. RELIC command feeds began flickering across their HUDs, scrambled.
Kael clenched his jaw. "They know I accessed it. They're deploying failsafes."
Dex swore. "They've activated WIPER logic. You'll be erased across nodes if they catch you. Every checkpoint, every memory thread—gone."
Kael turned, his eyes blazing. "Then we don't let them catch me."
Dex hesitated. "I might know how to reach the Origin Frame. But it'll take you off-grid. Fully. No respawn. No recovery."
Kael didn't blink. "Show me."
Dex sent him the coordinates. They weren't part of any map. They weren't even on code-space grids. It was an echo-path—something the Oracle left behind for those willing to deviate from quest logic entirely.
Kael read it once. Then twice.
"Coordinates lead to... the Collapse Ring?"
Dex nodded. "The deepest undeployed region in the system. An old test shard sealed after the first convergence simulation failed. No player's been there and returned."
Kael stepped to the edge of the rooftop. The city still trembled below.
"Then I'll be the first."
Dex reached into his pack. Pulled out a small crystalline node—etched with hand-carved runes.
"Here," he said. "Beacon shard. If you find the Frame—record what you see. No matter what it is. Truth, lie, dream... bring it back."
Kael gripped it tight.
"You're sure about this?" Dex asked softly.
Kael looked out into the distance, toward the coordinates now pulsing in his HUD like a heartbeat.
"I was never meant to be just a player, Dex. I think... I was designed to wake the system."
---
As he vanished into the glitchstream, leaping node by node toward the Collapse Ring, the city behind him dimmed—and from the clouds, the Vigil opened its thousand eyes.
Watching. Waiting.
And the Oracle, silent until now, whispered one final phrase in Kael's mind before fading again:
> "To remember the world… you must forget the game."