Timeframe: Before the main timeline began. Buried in Jay's subconscious.
> "Error detected. Subject 000 has exceeded synchronization capacity. Preparing emergency fallback…"
The lights in Prototype Room 0 flickered violently. White walls trembled under the strain of corrupted code. A misty shimmer hung in the air, thick like static, making the entire space feel suspended between simulation and nightmare.
Jay, younger and unrefined, stood at the center, no system window hovering in front of him. No 999x passive cheat. No Lazy Genius title. He wasn't even a "candidate" yet.
Just a bored boy who'd volunteered for a psychological aptitude trial at the academy, back when everything still seemed… normal.
And then he saw her.
A girl curled in the corner of the padded room. Pale limbs. Short black hair messy with dried artificial ink. Her eyes blinked open, not quite glitching, not quite real, twinkling like two pieces of cracked glass trying to reflect the world again.
