The morning came gray.The air smelled of ash and wet metal.
Myaterous opened his eyes to silence.His body ached like he'd been buried in static all night. Every nerve hummed. The shard beside him was cold now — colorless, lifeless, dead.
He sat up slowly. The stream nearby had turned black, its surface reflecting fractured light.Where the Cleaner had stepped, the ground was scorched into glass. Trees bent inward, their bark twisted as if they had tried to turn away.
No birds. No wind.Only the faint hum of residual code drifting like dust.
He looked at his interface.
[SP: 0][Firewall Status: Stabilized – 43% Integrity][Entity CLEANER_01: Status Unknown.]
Unknown.That word stayed on the screen a little too long.
He tapped the shard again, even though it shouldn't respond.To his surprise, it blinked — once — a faint spark of gold deep inside.
[Residual Memory Detected.][Play Trace? Y/N]
He hesitated. The trace of a system-born entity could be anything — data poison, illusion, trap.But curiosity was a habit he never managed to unlearn.
"Play it."
The world folded inward.
The forest dimmed, colors bleeding out until everything was the same dull gray.Then a voice — low, distorted — began to form in his head.
"Do you dream?"
He froze.It wasn't the Cleaner's voice. It sounded softer, almost… human.
"When you ended the link, I saw something. A reflection.""Not of you. Of what you could be."
The words trembled through his mind like echoes from somewhere deep inside the system itself.
"You think you're fighting us. But every time you rewrite, every time you merge, you make us more like you.""And yourself, more like us."
The sound fractured again — a ripple of static that cracked through the air.Then silence.
The gray forest returned to color. The shard dimmed.
[Trace Complete.][Residual Memory Stored.]
Myaterous exhaled. His reflection in the black stream was trembling — not from fear, but realization.
"So… the Cleaners evolve too."
He stood, brushing dirt off his hands, his eyes sharper now.Each battle wasn't just survival — it was contagion.Every interaction changed both sides.
By noon, he'd begun to move again.He needed to find a safe point to rebuild his SP — but something in the air felt off.
The system's hum, always present, was quieter.Like it was watching him differently.
He passed through the forest's edge where light filtered through the leaves. The old barrier line still shimmered faintly, fractured but holding.And carved into the trunk of a tree, burned into the wood with impossible precision, was a single mark — a thin spiral of gold light.
He leaned closer.
[Encoded Fragment Detected.][Accessing...]
The mark pulsed.
A voice — faint, mechanical — whispered through the air:
"You are not the only one rewriting."
Then it vanished.
He stood there for a long time, staring at the empty air.For the first time since he'd arrived in this world, he didn't feel alone — and that terrified him more than the Cleaner ever did.
"If you can learn…" he murmured, "…then so can I."
He picked up the dead shard and placed it against his chest, feeling its faint warmth pulse once in response.Then he walked toward the deeper forest, where the ground began to glow with threads of unseen circuitry.
"Let's see which of us becomes human first."