The night didn't feel like night anymore.The stars were too still.The wind was gone.
Myaterous opened his eyes to a faint hum, low and constant, like electricity running through the bones of the world. He wasn't sure when he'd fallen asleep — if he'd even slept at all. His campfire was long dead, its smoke twisting in shapes that weren't supposed to exist.
Lines.Symbols.Words that glowed faintly before fading into dust.
He sat up slowly, heart steady, eyes scanning the horizon. Nothing moved. The forest around him looked calm. Too calm.
Then he heard it —a whisper, like someone talking through static.
"You are not the first to touch the heart of the world…"
He froze.That voice didn't belong to the system.
It wasn't flat. It wasn't mechanical.It felt… human.
"But you might be the last who can walk away from it."
The sound faded as quickly as it came, leaving only the steady hum beneath his feet.The ground pulsed once — faint but alive.
Myaterous closed his eyes and exhaled.He didn't panic.He calculated.
"Transmission source… unidentified," he muttered. "But not hostile."
He opened his system panel, and for the first time, a new notification flickered at the corner of his vision.
[System Notice: Unknown interference detected.][Signal Origin – Beyond Network Boundary.][Trace… failed.][Recommendation: Maintain observational distance.]
He stared at it for a while, then laughed quietly.
"Beyond boundary, huh? So there is someone watching."
He leaned back against the rock behind him, eyes half-closed. His mind spun through possibilities. An echo of the system. A test. A higher-tier Architect. Or… something else.
Whatever it was, it had chosen him.And that meant it had made a mistake.
Morning came like an afterthought.Gray light. Heavy air.The forest floor was damp with dew, but the usual sound of insects was missing.
He rose and checked his synthesis logs. Overnight, three of his auto-processes had failed. No data corruption — just refusal.
[Synthesis Error: Concept denied.][Reason: Variable instability.]
That was new.The system never refused before.
He tried again, just to test it.
"Synthesize: Structural Drone – Basic Tier – Catalyst: Iron Fragment."
[Processing…][Denied. Concept in flux.]
He frowned. "Flux?"
He tapped open the detail log. Lines of data scrolled across his interface — overlapping, rewriting, self-correcting. He read them all, then realized what it meant.
The world's logic was changing.
Something, or someone, was rewriting the foundation rules.
He looked up again at the still sky and whispered, "So you're already moving."
Later that day, Myaterous found something he hadn't seen since arriving — footprints.Human ones.Deep and erratic, leading downhill through the valley.
He followed them in silence, step by step, his mind reading the story in the dirt. The person was running. Not from him — from something bigger.
At the end of the trail, he found a broken communicator core. Not one from the normal player set.Older. Embedded with a strange white emblem — two intersecting rings, pulsing faintly with stored light.
He crouched and brushed off the dust. The moment his fingers touched it, the system flared.
[Accessing Lost Data…][Transmission Log Fragment Recovered.]
Static filled the air again, but this time the voice was clearer.
"Containment… breach… Western Archipelago… Do not—"[Signal lost]
The core dimmed.And beneath his hand, the soil trembled again.
He looked toward the west, where the sky had started to turn faintly gold — the same hue as the energy he'd seen in his dreams.
"Containment breach," he repeated softly. "So that's what you're hiding."
Night fell before he returned to camp. He didn't rebuild the fire. Instead, he sat quietly, staring at the system map.The grid lines had shifted again — subtle, almost invisible, but no longer aligned perfectly. The world's geometry was bending.
He whispered, not to the system, but to whoever had spoken to him through the interference.
"You watching me?"No answer."Good. Keep watching."
He closed his eyes, a small smile forming.
"I'll show you what real creation looks like."
Far away, in a chamber buried beneath the ocean, Eira's monitors blinked.The signal she'd sent — the message she thought would stay hidden — had bounced back.Someone had traced it.Someone had seen her.
She stared at the monitor and whispered, "So… you found me."
The hum of the world deepened.A resonance spread through the network like a heartbeat.
For the first time, the system felt afraid.