The moment Kael crossed into the shard-link, the world peeled back like skin from circuitry.
No slow transition this time. No fade-in. One blink, and he was there.
The Collapse Ring.
There was no sky—just an infinite expanse of crumbling data towers, half-rendered void-bridges, and gravity loops folding in on themselves. Light had no source, yet the darkness was never complete. Instead, it pulsed like a dying heartbeat. The entire region looked like it had been built by indecision—like a dream someone tried to erase and then gave up halfway through.
Kael landed hard on a metallic platform shaped like a crescent rune, its surface cracked and hissing with old code static.
A whisper rode the wind.
> "Query accepted. Deviation acknowledged."
Kael exhaled slowly. "I'm here."
His HUD flickered—then collapsed. System integration failed. No map, no health bar, no interface.
This wasn't part of QuestChain anymore.
He pulled the shard Dex gave him and activated its trace-feed. A small glimmer of green light hovered ahead, blinking softly, slowly moving forward. A path.
He followed.
Around him, the ruins shifted. Towering archive monoliths broke apart in slow motion—revealing ghost images of players that had never been. Echoes of forgotten simulations. Children playing in cities that didn't exist. Wars fought in places the game never deployed. It was all too much—memories bleeding into one another with no order, no logic.
And then, she appeared.
At first, he thought it was another echo.
But the figure standing on the bridge ahead—cloaked in white, hair burning like code-fire—turned when he stepped near.
"Sera?" Kael whispered.
The Glitched One smiled faintly. "You found it. You followed the fracture."
He walked toward her carefully, almost afraid she'd disappear.
"You knew this place existed."
"I remembered it," she said. "But only after the Oracle unchained me."
Kael's voice was tight. "Is this the Origin Frame?"
She shook her head. "Not yet. This is the Threshold. Beyond this bridge lies what remains of the first schema. The place they tried to collapse."
Kael looked out at the massive gate at the end of the bridge. Tall. Angular. It looked like obsidian ice, rippling with unseen symbols.
"Why did they hide it?"
Sera's eyes darkened. "Because it was never meant to be found. The Origin Frame contains the raw seed logic of QuestChain—not the game, but the system that predates it. The one the Architects used before the Oracle fragmented."
He turned to her. "Then who built this?"
She nodded toward the gate. "The Architects did. But the Oracle sealed it. It tried to forget, Kael. But something inside you made it remember."
Kael felt a strange pulse in his chest. The gate seemed to respond, rippling once.
"I saw myself inside ARCH-0X_77. Hundreds of versions. Some of them… were monstrous."
Sera stepped close. "Those were potential states. You are divergence incarnate, Kael. The system can't predict you. That's why it's trying to rewrite its own origin around your presence."
A deep tremor ran through the shard. The towers groaned above them. Somewhere beyond the black gate, something stirred.
Kael gritted his teeth. "So what's behind that gate? What happens if I step through?"
Sera hesitated, then reached out and pressed her palm to his chest.
"You'll see what the system used to be. Before it became a game. Before it became a cage. You'll see what they feared."
"And what they forgot?" he asked.
She nodded. "Yes. You'll remember everything the Oracle buried to survive."
Kael turned toward the gate.
It was time.
Each step on the bridge felt heavier. Data warped around him. Fragments of forgotten code streamed past him like fireflies—snippets of old languages, whispers of obsolete AI frameworks, lost names:
> SOV-10. LYS-Dreamline. OriginHelix. ARCHITECT_1.EXI.
Each one felt strangely familiar—like memories from a dream he'd never lived.
He reached the gate.
Its surface shimmered with a breath. Then opened.
Not like a door.
It folded.
Reality bent sideways and collapsed in, revealing a circular chamber beyond—a dark sphere lit by millions of floating runes, each orbiting a pulsar of compressed light in the center.
Kael stepped in.
The light flared—then spoke.
> "You carry divergence. You are anomaly. You are remnant. You are key."
Kael stood still. "I came for the truth."
> "Then choose. Reconstruct the original memory... or collapse with it."
Sera's voice echoed behind him. "Kael, this is what they call The Origin Frame. Once you engage it... you can't undo it. Not in any shard. Not even in life."
Kael looked up. The runes now orbited him.
And in each one, he saw different versions of QuestChain—worlds where it was a social system, a knowledge matrix, a defense simulation, a dreamspace, a virus. In some, it saved humanity. In others, it enslaved them.
"Which one is true?" Kael asked aloud.
> "They all are. Because truth is no longer singular in the code. Your mind is the last mirror."
Kael walked into the light.
And as the Origin Frame began to encode itself around his consciousness, a final message burned across his inner vision—one that hadn't been written by Oracle, or Dex, or the Architects.
It was written by someone unnamed.
> "If you're reading this... then QuestChain was never just a game. It was the last attempt to teach humanity how to evolve without breaking."
Everything went white.