"Don't move," Vanya whispered.
Which was funny, because I wasn't even moving. My host body, Jin Sovereign, was. And he was walking straight toward me.
Except again, not me. His eyes were locked on a shape only he could see, in a place no one else could perceive.
Me.
"Kade," she hissed again, "seriously. Don't. Move."
"I'm not even breathing," I whispered.
"Good. Because if you trigger another skill by accident, we are gonna fry like RAM chips on a barbecue."
Jin took one more step. His boots clicked on the broken stone. His robe dragged red across the rubble. And that smile, it didn't belong to an emperor.
It belonged to a man who'd just realized God was glitching inside his skull.
HOST AWARENESS: 3%
DANGER LEVEL: HIGH
NOTE: Vanya is going to kill you if Jin doesn't.
"Kade, listen," she muttered. "The only way we survive is if we stabilize him. He's a walking OS crash."
"Do we have a patch?"
She groaned. "No patch. But we've got something worse."
"Worse?"
She flicked open the corrupted cultivation manual. It shimmered in the air like oily water, flickering with symbols and haiku errors.
"We teach him this," she said.
I stared at her like she'd just tried to duct-tape a bomb back together.
"Wait, you want to teach him the glitched poetry file? The one with zero logic? The one that literally breaks brains?"
"Yes."
"Why?!"
"Because," she said, eyes flashing, "it's the only thing in this world he doesn't understand yet."
SYSTEM UPDATE: SKILL TREE FORCED SYNC
JIN SOVEREIGN - MANUAL INSTALL: ERROR_DIV_0.TXT
STATUS: ATTEMPTING COMPATIBILITY...
The lines of poetry shimmered brighter. They slithered across the air toward Jin, who stopped moving. His smile froze.
His pupils dilated. His fingers trembled.
He felt it.
"...what… is this?" he whispered. "A... dream?"
The words in front of him pulsed.
"Qi flows like static
Between zeros and heaven
Breathe in recursion"
Suddenly, snap, his body dropped to one knee.
The palace floor rumbled. Wind cracked through the throne room like a system fan losing control. Glitches danced in the candlelight, red cubes flickering in and out of existence.
Jin groaned. He clutched his head. "My… dantian is… singing."
Vanya muttered, "That's not singing. That's the codebase screaming."
"Kade," she said fast, "link to me."
"How?"
"Think the words: //Join: SkillTree.Architect@Thread:NOW"
I did.
And then...
WHAM.
I was yanked sideways into her perspective. Her view. Her space. We stood together in a kind of no-UI limbo. Floating. Light bleeding around us. Above us: the broken skill tree like a weeping bonsai made of wire and fire.
"It's more corrupted than I thought," she said. "We need to redirect the flow. Break the branches. Force a logic loop."
"Won't that crash him?"
"Exactly. But if we control the crash, he might reboot clean."
I pointed at the central node. "What's that?"
"That's the 'Core Breath' slot. It's blank."
"So?"
"So we rewrite it."
"With what?"
She grinned. "With this."
She held up a single line of text:
"All things end where they begin: in glitch."
Back in the physical world, Jin screamed.
Not a war cry. Not rage.
A data-corrupted soul yell. The kind of scream you make when your lungs are rewriting themselves in real time.
He floated again, except now he was flickering. Like he couldn't decide if he was Jin Sovereign, or a god, or a broken bootloader file.
His shadow split. His body pulsed.
He spoke in my voice:
"Hey," he said, "get out of my head."
Then in Vanya's:
"Stop tampering with my destiny."
Then… in a voice that didn't belong to any of us.
Just a low, grinding static hiss.
"I. AM. THE. FINAL. PATCH."
ALERT: SYSTEM WARNING
Jin's awareness is now at 6%
Unexpected personality layer detected
ROOT FILE NAME: GODMODE.DAT
Access Level: CLASSIFIED
Threat Level: OMNI
"Kade," Vanya said sharply, "he has a root file. He wasn't just an emperor. He was a containment node for some kind of admin override!"
"You mean like... like me?"
"Worse. You're the key. He's the vault. And something's waking up inside him."
Then Jin turned toward the court. His arms lifted.
The broken poetry symbols swirled around him like butterflies made of glitches.
He smiled again.
Only this time, it wasn't madness.
It was understanding.
"I see now," he said. "This world… is a broken line of code."
Everyone froze.
Even the wind.
Then he pointed to the sky.
And whispered:
"Let me rewrite it."
SYSTEM ALERT: NEW SKILL ACQUIRED
"Poetic Execution" - Type: Divine Glitch Technique
EFFECT: Rewrites logic fields with recursive damage
COST: Your enemies' minds
He raised a hand.
A monk in the back of the court screamed as words carved themselves into his skin. A farmer vomited binary. A guard stared into the air, reading invisible lines of code and whispering "we're in a dream we didn't write."
And me?
I watched it happen and said:
"Vanya, we've just given a glitching tyrant the power to rewrite fate using bad poetry."
She didn't reply.
Because she was staring at a new error popping up between us.
Bright red.
Flashing hard.
DEBUG TEAM TRACE DETECTED
HOST IS FOLLOWING THE SIGNAL
JIN IS COMING FOR YOU
I spun around.
And he was there.
Face calm. Hands bleeding poetry. Eyes knowing.
"You gave me this," he said.
"You taught me this."
"Now teach me everything."
He reached forward.
Not to strike.
To touch.
To download.