The world didn't snap this time. It oozed.
One moment, the void. The next, the gritty, damp soil of the grave was pushing between his ribs, filling the hollows of his pelvis. He was being assembled from the ground up. Clatter-clump. Clatter-clump.
He pushed himself upright, shedding black earth. The fog was thicker, heavy with the promise of rain. The air tasted of metal and wet stone. He was different. Not in form, but in… awareness. The 1.6 points of stolen existence were a faint, blue ember in his core. A ledger. A promise.
He looked at his rusted sword. It was the same. He looked at the other skeletons shambling in their preset loops. They were the same.
He was not.
A voice, shrill with youth and bravado, cut the fog. "—total noob move, Frosty! A skeleton? Really?"
"It lunged weird! And I was low from the Revenant!"
His skull turned. Not a jerk. A slow, deliberate pivot. The grinding was less pronounced.
Two players stood by a broken mausoleum. One was FrostyWizard, the mage, alive again but back at Level 6, his robes slightly dimmer. The other was a ranger in green leathers, idly spinning a dagger. [Player: 'HawkeyeHal' - Lv. 9 Human Ranger].
"Guild leader's sending a squad," HawkeyeHal said, rolling his eyes. "Thinks it might be a glitch mob. Bug bounty if we bag it."
Glitch. Bug.
The words were new. They felt cold. They felt like the void.
"Whatever, let's just grind. I need to get my level back." FrostyWizard turned and cast a familiar [Minor Flame Dart] at a passing skeleton. It dissolved into bones.
He didn't move. He watched. He calculated.
The ranger's eyes swept the graveyard. They passed over him, then snapped back. Hal squinted. "That one's just… standing there."
FrostyWizard followed his gaze. "So? They bug out sometimes. Probably stuck on terrain."
A third sensation joined the taste of metal and the damp chill: a low, subsonic thrum that vibrated in his teeth. It came from the east, growing stronger. Footsteps. Heavy, synchronized.
From the fog, four shapes emerged. They moved with a purpose the solo players lacked. Armor gleamed under enchantments. Auras, visible as faint distortions in the mist, shimmered around them.
[Party: 'Rising Tides - Investigation Squad']
[Player: 'Stonewall' - Lv. 15 Human Warrior]
[Player: 'MenderLin' - Lv. 14 Human Priest]
[Player: 'SilentStrike' - Lv. 13 Human Rogue]
[Player: 'ArcanaLux' - Lv. 15 Human Mage]
The thrum was Stonewall's [Passive: Dreadnaught Aura]. It slowed enemy attack speed. It made the air feel like tar.
"Frosty. Hal." Stonewall's voice was a gravelly baritone, filtered through chat. "Point us to the spawn cluster."
FrostyWizard gestured vaguely. "Around here. Cluster 7B."
The priest, MenderLin, raised a hand. A pulse of white light emanated from her. [Skill: Detect Anomaly - Lv. 2].
The light washed over him.
It was a gentle warmth, followed by a sharp, staticky prickling that crawled over every bone. It felt like being seen by something that shouldn't have eyes.
MenderLin's brow furrowed. "I'm getting… faint irregular data echoes from several mobs in the cluster. Residual from the respawn algorithm. Nothing conclusive."
"Standard deviation?" ArcanaLux, the mage, asked, his tone bored.
"Within 0.3%. Not bounty-worthy."
Stonewall grunted. "Waste of time. Probably just lag. Clear the cluster. Standard sweep. If one behaves outside parameters, nuke it and we'll collect the corpse for analysis."
The party moved. It was a symphony of violence.
Stonewall charged, his shield glowing. [Shield Bash]. A skeleton shattered. SilentStrike blurred, appearing behind another, twin daggers flashing. [Backstab]. Instant death. ArcanaLux didn't even chant. He flicked his wrist, and [Magic Missile] bolts of purple energy auto-targeted three more, reducing them to piles of bone.
They were erasing his world. His kind. Mindless, but his.
He forced his feet to move, falling into the familiar, shambling charge towards Stonewall. It was suicide. It was camouflage.
Stonewall saw him. Didn't even raise his shield. "Mender, aggro check."
The priest cast another pulse. The static prickling returned, sharper. He kept charging.
"No anomalous threat rating. Standard Lv. 1 Skeleton," she reported.
Stonewall sighed, swinging his massive two-handed sword in a lazy arc. It was meant to bisect him.
He didn't try to block. At the last millisecond, he let his ankle joint buckle the way he'd learned when tripping over the root. He collapsed forward. The greatsword whistled over his skull, severing the air.
He hit the mud at Stonewall's feet. The warrior was momentarily off-balance from the missed swing.
"Clumsy fucker," Stonewall muttered, raising his sword for a downward stab.
From the ground, he looked up. Not at Stonewall, but past him. At ArcanaLux, the mage. The mage was already casting at another target, his back partially turned, his HP bar full but his mana bar down by a quarter from the spell spam.
His bony hand closed not on a weapon, but on a fistful of the damp, clinging soil from his own resurrection. With a jerk of his 1.35 Strength, he flung it.
It wasn't an attack. It had no damage value.
The clump of wet earth struck ArcanaLux square on the side of his ornate, pointed hat, smearing mud across his face.
"What the—?!" The mage sputtered, his concentration broken. He whirled, eyes blazing. "You little—"
He saw the skeleton at his tank's feet. He saw an insult.
"[Arcane Bolt]!" he snarled, firing a concentrated beam of pure force. It was a Level 10 spell. Overkill.
But Stonewall was in the way.
The bolt meant for a Level 1 skeleton slammed into the Level 15 warrior's plated back.
[Friendly Fire! Arcane Bolt hits Stonewall for 45 Force Damage!]
Stonewall's health bar dipped a visible chunk. He staggered forward with a roar. "LUX! YOU IDIOT!"
"It threw mud at me!" Lux yelled back.
Chaos. For two seconds, the symphony broke.
SilentStrike, the rogue, chuckled in party chat. "Nice shot, Lux."
MenderLin gasped. "Stone, your HP!"
And in that two seconds, he was moving. Not towards the players. Away. He scrambled, crab-like, through the mud towards a nearby thicket of dead, thorny brambles—a terrain feature players avoided because it caused a minor [Bleed] debuff.
"The skeleton! It's running!" HawkeyeHal shouted, pointing.
Stonewall, enraged, turned. "Running? They don't run! THAT'S THE GLITCH! GET IT!"
ArcanaLux, eager to make up for his mistake, began another chant. "[Chain Lightning]! That'll fry it and anything near it!"
The thrumming in the air spiked. The metallic taste became overpowering. Ozone crackled.
He plunged into the bramble thicket. Thorns scored his bones, scraping ethereal lines of red damage into the yellowed surface. [-0, -0, -0...]. His HP remained 1/1. The debuff couldn't kill him. It just made every movement a grating shriek of splintering wood on bone.
The lightning spell finished.
A blinding, forking lance of energy speared into the brambles where he'd just been. Electricity arced through the wet thorns, grounding out harmlessly into the soil. It missed.
"It's in the thorns! Don't let it get to the Revenant's patrol route!" Stonewall bellowed, crashing after him.
He pushed deeper. The world narrowed to the scrape of thorns, the damp earth smell, the pounding subsonic thrum of pursuit. He saw a clearing ahead, and at its edge, a worn stone path. The Revenant's route.
And standing in the center of the clearing, directly between him and the path, was FrostyWizard. The mage had circled around, a nasty smile on his face. "[Ice Patch]!"
A sheen of glistening ice spread across the ground at the bramble's edge.
He burst from the thicket, his momentum carrying him onto the ice. His feet shot out from under him. He fell, hard, skidding across the slick surface into the center of the clearing. His sword clattered away.
FrostyWizard stood over him, mana coalescing around his hands. "Got you, you glitchy piece of—"
A new sound. Not a spell. Not a voice.
A low, desolate groan that seemed to pull the heat from the air.
The fog at the edge of the clearing coagulated. A figure formed. Eight feet tall. Wearing the tattered remnants of ancient plate armor, fused to a body of solidified shadow and bleached bone. A single, pinprick of red light burned in its helmet.
[Elite Mob: Graveyard Revenant - Lv. 20]
[Warning: Patrol encounter.]
FrostyWizard's face went white. "Oh, crap. Revenant! Don't aggro it!"
The Revenant's head turned. Its gaze fell on the mage standing in its path, magic flaring from his hands. A clear threat.
It took one step forward. The ground trembled.
"I'm not aggro! I'm not!" FrostyWizard squealed, backpedaling onto the ice patch. He slipped, arms windmilling.
The Revenant raised a massive, corroated greatsword. It moved with deceptive speed.
FrostyWizard screamed, [Flame Dart] firing wild in panic. The spell fizzled against the Revenant's armor.
The greatsword came down.
[Graveyard Revenant uses [Soul Cleave]!]
[Critical Hit! Player 'FrostyWizard' HP: 62/62 -> 0/62.]
The mage didn't even have time to dissolve. He was crushed into the ice, then erased in a burst of black energy.
The Revenant stood over the stain, then slowly turned its head, looking for other threats.
He was lying five feet away. Motionless. His HP: 1/1. He made no sound. He held no weapon. He was, to the Revenant's scripting, part of the environment.
The elite mob's red eye scanned him, held for a heart-stopping second, and moved on. It turned and continued its plodding patrol down the stone path, vanishing into the fog.
The blue data strands erupted from the ground where FrostyWizard had died. They shot toward him, the nearest valid target for the Data Absorption. The killer was the Revenant, but the last hit on the player's existence... was his.
The torrent slammed into him.
[Data Absorption: Activated.]
[Killing Blow NOT secured. Proximity Absorption granted (25% Efficiency).]
[Target: 'FrostyWizard' (Level 6 Human Mage).]
[+0.15 STR] [+0.13 AGI] [+0.30 INT] [+0.11 VIT]
[Total Absorbed Stats: 2.29]
[Evolution Progress: 2.29 / 50.0]
The surge was weaker, but it was something. The blue ember in his core glowed slightly brighter.
Then, a new message. Not blue. Not a system alert. It was stark, white text, appearing in the center of his vision, devoid of any formatting.
Entity 7B-041.
Anomaly threshold: 4.7%.
Causal interference detected.
Continue.
The text hung for three seconds. The staticky, prickling sensation of GM observation spiked to an almost painful intensity, scanning him, the area, the data logs. Then, it faded. The text vanished.
The silence that followed was absolute. The thrum of the guild party was gone. They'd fled at the sight of the Revenant.
He lay on the ice, staring at the spot where the white text had been. It wasn't a warning. It wasn't a threat.
It was an acknowledgment.
Continue.
Slowly, he clattered to his feet. He retrieved his rusted sword. He looked toward the distant city spires, then at the path the Revenant had taken.
The ledger in his core now read 2.29.
He had a new objective. Not just survival. Not just evolution.
He needed to understand the rules of the game he was now truly playing.