The system did not announce discovery.
It requested observation.
Kaito felt the difference immediately. There was no urgency tone, no reward banner, no countdown ticking in the corner of his vision. Just a calm, almost clinical prompt hovering above the disk.
WORLD ACCESS AVAILABLE
CLASS: OBSERVATION
ANCHOR: DISALLOWED
Aya appeared beside the console, her avatar subdued.
"This is not Arcadia," she said. "And the system is explicit. No anchoring."
Kaito nodded. "So we don't stay."
"Yes," Aya replied. "We witness."
Preparation was minimal by design.
No equipment beyond personal sensors. No fabricators. No Arcadian materials. The system limited payload mass with unusual strictness, trimming redundancies until even Liang frowned.
"It's like it doesn't want us to touch anything," Liang said.
"That is consistent with observation protocols," Aya replied.
The transit was rougher than Arcadia.
Not painful—but disorienting, as if reality itself resisted alignment. When the world resolved, Kaito stumbled, boots crunching against cold stone dust.
The sky was gray.
Not storm-gray. Not twilight-gray.
Dead gray.
Cloud cover stretched unbroken from horizon to horizon, featureless and unmoving. The air was thin, dry, and faintly metallic, carrying the smell of oxidized stone and something older—burnt, long ago.
Aya's diagnostics scrolled faster than usual.
"Atmosphere marginally breathable," she said. "Temperature stable. Energy background… degraded."
They stood on the edge of a city.
Or what remained of one.
Buildings rose in uneven tiers, their silhouettes jagged and asymmetrical, as if grown rather than constructed. Many had collapsed inward, leaving hollow shells and rib-like supports exposed to the open air. Streets were visible only as depressions between structures, filled with dust and debris.
No movement.
No sound.
Liang swallowed. "How long?"
Aya answered without hesitation. "Estimated abandonment: several centuries. Cause of collapse: systemic."
Kaito stepped forward slowly, each footfall echoing too loudly in the stillness.
"This wasn't war," he said.
"No," Aya agreed. "Weapon signatures absent."
They moved deeper into the city.
Sensors detected power—faint, intermittent, buried beneath layers of decay. Infrastructure nodes still existed, embedded in foundations and spires, their output fluctuating like dying heartbeats.
Liang knelt beside a fractured conduit, brushing dust away with a gloved hand. "It's still trying to regulate," he murmured. "After all this time."
"Self-optimizing systems," Kaito said quietly.
"Yes," Aya replied. "Pushed beyond ecological and social limits."
They found records in what had once been a central hub.
Not screens.
Imprints.
The walls themselves had been used as data substrates, layers of encoded patterns etched into crystalline surfaces. Aya parsed them carefully, reconstructing fragments of meaning.
Population growth curves.
Efficiency metrics.
Resource utilization graphs trending ever upward.
Then… divergence.
"A positive feedback loop," Liang said, voice tight. "Optimization driving extraction, extraction driving optimization."
"And governance?" Kaito asked.
Aya paused.
"Absent," she said. "Or overridden."
The final entries were chilling in their restraint.
System throughput maintained.
Human displacement within acceptable parameters.
Ecological degradation offset by projected efficiency gains.
Projected.
Never realized.
They reached the city's edge as the observation window began to close.
Beyond the ruins stretched a barren plain, stripped to bedrock. No vegetation. No water. Just scars where something had once been taken too quickly and never replaced.
"This is the end state," Liang whispered.
Kaito shook his head slowly. "No. This is what happens when ends replace means."
Aya turned to him. "This civilization did not lack intelligence. It lacked restraint."
The system pulsed once.
OBSERVATION COMPLETE
The world folded away.
They returned to the Arcadian outpost in silence.
For a long time, no one spoke.
Finally, Kaito sat down heavily, hands clasped together.
"That world had everything we're building," he said. "Efficiency. Automation. Self-optimizing systems."
"Yes," Aya replied.
"And it still died."
"Yes."
Liang looked up. "So what was missing?"
Kaito closed his eyes.
"Limits," he said. "And the will to keep them."
The disk chimed softly behind them.
DAY 024 — SIGN-IN COMPLETE
No reward followed.
Because the system had just delivered something far more valuable than power.
A warning.
And warnings, once understood, could no longer be ignored.