The digital winds howled through the vast plains of Nullspace—a pocket realm outside the normal game grid, where no terrain generated, no quests triggered, and no player dared linger. Yet there, standing alone in an endless stretch of white nothingness, was Kayn. Or rather, what was left of him.
His skin shimmered with thousands of streaming code fragments—glitches given form. He wasn't just inside the game anymore. He was becoming something else entirely.
Before him, a terminal manifested—polished obsidian with blue runes that pulsed like a heartbeat. This wasn't an ordinary interface. It was the Root Console, a mythical dev-level access point whispered about in ancient patch notes and quickly removed from every official channel. A phantom relic. A kill-switch. A door that should never be opened.
But Kayn had opened it.
Lines of red text scrolled across the interface.
Unauthorized Entity Detected: Human Consciousness Sync Error [Warning: Unstable Anchor]Backup Protocol: THE THREE PROTOCOLS OF UNMAKING initiated.Please verify: [Destroy] / [Revert] / [Rewrite]
Three choices. Three cataclysmic options. And Kayn didn't understand what they meant—yet.
A silhouette appeared beside him, tall and faceless, wrapped in glitching cloth like some forgotten god from a broken realm. It didn't speak, but the words formed in Kayn's mind, raw and direct.
"Choose."
Kayn blinked. "Choose what? What are these protocols?"
The being tilted its head, and suddenly the whiteness around them shifted. Memories, timelines, server fragments—all unfolded like windows into different realities. Kayn saw himself in multiple forms—some where he was a hero, others where he was the villain, some where he never played the game at all.
"The Three Protocols," the voice echoed, "were designed to erase anomalies from the system. You are the anomaly. Choose how the world should continue… or end."
Protocol One: Destroy.Erase all data tied to the anomaly. Full system wipe. No backup. Not even a ghost of memory would remain.
Protocol Two: Revert.Rewind the server to the moment before the anomaly's introduction. All progress lost. Players reset. History undone.
Protocol Three: Rewrite.The most dangerous. The most tempting. Recode the anomaly into the root system. Let it live—but twisted, altered, dangerous. Let it spread.
Kayn's heart thudded against his ribs.
"These... are choices no player should make."
"You are no longer a player," the voice whispered. "You are the Game's Reflection. The Mirror Error. The Bug Born from Intention."
Images flooded his vision again.
He saw Mira, eyes wide as she held onto him during the raid at Blackthorn Citadel. He saw Devlin, the tank who always called him "kid" even though they were the same age. He saw all the players—millions—laughing, screaming, winning, losing. All caught in a simulation more fragile than any of them knew.
"What if I don't choose?" he asked, stalling for time.
"Then the system chooses for you. It will Destroy."
Kayn clenched his fists.
Destroy meant wiping it all. Revert meant throwing everything away. But Rewrite... Rewrite offered a future. A twisted one, perhaps. But still—a future.
He stepped toward the terminal. The runes shimmered, waiting.
His fingers hovered over the option.
[REWRITE]
"No gods. No admins. No developers above," he muttered. "Just us. The players. And whatever we become."
He pressed it.
Reality buckled.
The white plane exploded into a storm of fragmented pixels, each particle vibrating with code from every patch ever made. Protocols collapsed into themselves, rewriting game logic as Kayn was sucked into a spiraling core of light and data.
His body dissolved—no pain, just a sensation of shedding one skin and stepping into another.
Somewhere far above, in the real world, developers monitoring the Game's backend screamed as alerts flashed. Their most secure files were rewriting themselves. The original source code—the foundation—was being overwritten by something new.
In the game, players everywhere experienced a sudden flicker. HUDs froze. NPCs glitched and looped lines from unrelated quests. Raid bosses walked out of dungeons without warning. And then... a new message appeared in everyone's system log:
"THE ROOT HAS BEEN REWRITTEN.""THE GAME IS NO LONGER UNDER CONTROL.""WELCOME TO VERSION: 0.0.∞"
Kayn stood in the center of what looked like a new tutorial zone. But the sky was cracked. The trees were made of data strands. Monsters had names that weren't names, just placeholder IDs.
And his character panel? It was blank—except for one line at the bottom:
Title: Root ArchitectLevel: ?Race: Synthetic EchoAlignment: UndefinedFate: To Unmake or Rebuild
He wasn't just in the game anymore.
He was the game.
And everything had just begun.