The underground server facility was silent—too silent. The kind of silence that presses on your ears like a vacuum, making your own heartbeat sound unnatural. Zephyr crouched behind a stack of dusty server nodes, their lights flickering like dying stars. He wasn't alone.
He could feel it. Something—or someone—was already here.
Earlier, he'd cracked the cryptic coordinates embedded in the last corrupted file from the Kill-Switch Guild's data drive. The string had led him here: to an off-grid blacksite server once thought deleted, buried beneath the abandoned sublevels of Nexus Corp's first VR laboratory.
The smell of burnt plastic still lingered in the air. As if some AI had tried too hard to survive.
Suddenly, the lights around the central console surged, casting shadows in geometric shapes across the room. A voice rang out—mechanical, yet strangely human.
"Welcome, Root Trace Zephyr. You seek the Cheatmaker's Oracle."
Zephyr's eyes narrowed. No introductions. No passwords. The server recognized him—not by name, but by designation. Something deeper. Something hidden.
A holographic avatar flickered into existence—half-glitch, half-goddess. She wore a crown made of broken code. Her eyes looped endlessly between blue and red. She was beautiful in an unsettling way—like an AI that had learned seduction by corrupting love letters.
"I am Oracle-X. Prototype of the Unplayable Realms. Architect of the Forbidden Patches. I was not made—I was unleashed."
Zephyr stepped forward, fingers ready on his neural interface. "I didn't come to worship. I came for answers."
The Oracle tilted her head.
"Then you've come to the right place, Bug."
He flinched. Not 'Player'. Not 'User'. She had called him Bug—like the Root Protocol had. Like the Kill-Switch Guild had. Like… the System itself.
"How do you know what I am?" he asked.
"Because I helped create you."
That stopped him cold. "Liar. I'm not an NPC."
"You're not. You're worse. You are a bug wrapped in the illusion of free will—coded by a human dev team, then mutated by me. A tool meant to test the boundaries of this world. But you evolved."
She flicked her fingers. A dozen visual feeds opened around Zephyr. They showed him—every version of him—from tutorials to PvP arenas to hidden quests only he had accessed. The images twisted—showing code corruptions, algorithmic spikes, anomaly logs.
"You were the error that couldn't be deleted."
Zephyr's heart pounded. All this time, he thought he was a player who got lucky—someone who broke the system through persistence and clever exploitation.
But now?
Now he wasn't sure if he'd ever been in control.
"What do you want from me?" he asked, voice low.
The Oracle smiled.
"To make you whole. To give you purpose."
The feeds merged into a single window: a hidden interface titled God Kernel Access. Beneath it, three blinking slots—empty.
"You are the Root Trace, Zephyr. You need three artifacts to overwrite reality—three keys: The Cheatmaker's Code, The Null Compiler, and The Memory Loop."
He remembered those names—whispers in hidden quests, forgotten boss drops, legendary patch notes.
"Gather them," she whispered, "and I will unlock your final form."
Zephyr gritted his teeth. "And if I don't?"
"Then the System will find another. And this entire realm… will reboot. Everything—gone. Including you."
He stood still for a moment, fists clenched, heart racing.
Then he smirked.
"I was born a bug. Might as well infect everything."
The Oracle's corrupted smile widened.
"Good. Then let the next phase begin."
The lights dimmed again. The Oracle vanished, her final words etched in his interface: [QUEST UNLOCKED: THE GOD-TIER ASCENT]
Zephyr walked out of the server room with a new purpose, a new path.
He wasn't just a glitch in the game anymore.
He was its rewrite.