I was being watched.
Not by a player.Not by an NPC.Not even by the creatures that stirred in the forests surrounding the Valley of Origin.
This presence was colder. Clinical. It didn't breathe. It didn't blink.
It scanned.
The moment the Root had awakened inside me, the world shifted. Not outwardly—not in the trees, not in the stone—but in the fabric behind the code.
I could feel it.
The System had noticed.
I remained in the training ground, unmoving, eyes closed, as if still meditating. But inwardly, every instinct screamed that something had changed.
Then it happened.
A System Message bloomed in my vision.
But it wasn't like the others I'd seen during test accounts or observation streams. It wasn't cleanly formatted or centered.
It was jagged. Flickering. As if it wasn't meant to appear.
[ERROR CODE: 72-9A]Unauthorized progression node detected.…Analyzing...Corrupted Framework: Manual Mode (VER 0.11α)…Cross-referencing with deprecated build logs…
It vanished.
Then a second message appeared—briefly—before scrambling itself.
[ADMIN OBSERVATION REQUESTED - FLAG: GHOST TAG]
I opened my eyes. The wind had stopped. The forest beyond the ridge felt too still.
They knew.
Who "they" were exactly, I didn't know. But someone had pulled back the curtain, and now eyes—real or digital—were watching from beyond it.
The myth was true.
The System could detect deviation.
I needed to move.
But before leaving the training ground, I bowed deeply toward the old stone tablet. I didn't know who had carved it, or how long it had stood untouched, but it had guided me through something no walkthrough could explain.
As I turned, a shimmer appeared near the base of the tree line. Faint—almost like heat distortion. I stepped toward it cautiously.
A hidden path.
No map update. No markers. No breadcrumb quest trail.
But I could feel it—this was the kind of route only someone without a system would ever notice. It existed between lines of code, like a forgotten comment in an abandoned script.
I walked.
The trail twisted through thick brush and crumbling stones. It wasn't long before the terrain changed—the air cooler, the shadows deeper. Small, glowing mushrooms lined the base of tree roots, and the occasional flicker of spirit beasts could be seen in the distance.
Then I saw it:
A doorway.No structure. No walls.Just a freestanding stone arch, covered in moss and runes that looked older than the game's art style.
It didn't prompt a system response.
No warp screen. No zone name.
But as I stepped through, the world blurred.
And shifted.
LOCATION: Dust Hollow Hermitage (Unmarked Zone)
I emerged into a high mountain cavern bathed in perpetual twilight. The sky overhead was deep purple, with streaks of silver clouds spiraling in slow, deliberate curves. Glowing stones floated midair, casting a soft, ambient light across the stone terraces.
And I wasn't alone.
Figures stood scattered throughout the space—some sitting in lotus position, others walking slow circular patterns, their movements eerily precise.
They had no nameplates.
No guild tags.
No visible equipment.
Just quiet.
One of them turned toward me. A young woman, maybe nineteen in appearance, with silver hair braided down her back. Her eyes were calm—unnaturally calm.
She bowed her head slightly.
"You felt it too," she said.
Her voice was real. Not voice-acted. Not AI-generated.
She was a player.
Manual.
We sat around a stone brazier inside the hollow, sharing silence before words.
The silver-haired girl—her name was Mei—spoke first.
"There are others like you. Not many. Less than two dozen active. Most gave up when the system rejected them."
I leaned in, listening.
She continued, "But a few of us… we stayed. We trained. We found the old nodes. The ones hidden beneath the system layers."
"You mean… this area?"
Mei nodded. "This is one of the few unlisted zones left. It's not in the modern build. It dates back to Heaven's Gate's alpha framework—Version Zero. Before the developers layered the system across the whole world. Before stats replaced insight."
That explained the ancient style. The lack of polish. The eeriness.
I asked, "Why would the devs leave it here?"
"They didn't," she said. "It's not a matter of leaving it—it's a matter of not being able to erase it. The game evolved too quickly. The first architects buried these places deep in the world's root code."
"Like legacy code?"
She nodded. "Exactly. Too dangerous to delete. Too old to rewrite."
Later, I learned what they called themselves.
Not a guild.
Not a faction.
Just:
The Rootless.
Cultivators without systems.
Players who had broken through without stats, without quests, without guidance.
They had found breathing techniques, forged soul weapons through ritual rather than recipes, and traveled zones that didn't exist on any current map.
Mei gestured toward a massive obelisk near the far wall.
On it, I could see dozens of hand-carved symbols—each unique, glowing faintly.
"Those are our roots," she said. "Each of us who awakens a Root places a mark here. Not for rank. Not for fame. Just… to be remembered."
I asked her what the Root actually was.
She said nothing for a long time.
Then finally: "It's not energy. Not Qi. Not a power you use. It's the memory of intention. The world remembers those who truly listen to it. And when you earn its trust… it plants something inside you."
"And the system?" I asked.
Her eyes darkened.
"It hates us. The system is order. Calculation. Efficiency. The Root is none of those things. It's chaos. Feeling. Creation."
That night, as I meditated near the obelisk, I felt it again—that flicker of pressure.
Admin-level gaze.
Watching.
Judging.
And somewhere, far above this hidden cave, I imagined a real-world desk, lined with monitors, where some moderator was trying to figure out:
Why can this player do things the system didn't allow?
Why does he have no stats but hasn't flatlined?
Why is Manual Mode still active?
I smiled.
Let them watch.
Because the Root had only just begun to grow.