Kael awoke gasping.
Not on a bed. Not on solid ground.
He was suspended—mid-air, mid-thought—inside a cold, silver chamber with walls that pulsed like lungs. The shattered spire, the forbidden schema, Dex's words—they faded like echoes behind a sealed door. But one name remained like static in his blood:
> TRACE-PARENT.
He wasn't alone.
Dex stood across the chamber, holding a cylindrical data rod that flickered with unstable light. His body jittered, as though the thread that tethered him to the simulation was fraying.
"We don't have much time," Dex said, stepping forward. "The Core accepted your schema. But TRACE-PARENT didn't dissolve. It reversed."
Kael blinked. "Reversed? What does that mean?"
Dex looked at the data rod, then back at Kael. "It didn't delete us. It integrated us."
A low hum filled the space, resonating through Kael's ribs. The air thickened. Light bent at odd angles. Kael turned in a slow circle, realizing the chamber wasn't a room. It was an interface node. A place where system updates were compiled and rewritten.
A translucent projection shimmered in the center.
It wasn't human.
Not even close.
A construct hovered in the air, shaped like a hollow spine wrapped in rotating rings of glyphs. Its "voice" was not sound, but raw sensation—memories plucked and rewound.
> "SEED ACCEPTED. SCHEMA ANCHOR CONFIRMED. TRACE-PARENT IS NOW OBSERVER-PRIME."
Kael staggered back. "Observer-Prime? Of what?"
Dex gritted his teeth. "Of you."
Kael's heart dropped.
"You mean it's tracking me?"
"No," Dex said. "It's becoming you."
A silence stretched like wire between them.
"Explain."
Dex inhaled sharply. "By finishing the forbidden schema inside the Dreamcore, you created a new mythos construct. The system thinks it needs to preserve it. It used TRACE-PARENT to build an observer frame based on your divergence pattern."
Kael stared at the glyphs orbiting the spine-construct.
"You're saying it made a... backup?"
Dex shook his head. "Not a backup. A blueprint. It's trying to replicate the anomaly that you are. Not control you. Not erase you. But mass-produce you."
Kael felt the air vanish from the room.
Replicate him.
Not his body. Not his mind.
But his decisions. His instability. His divergence.
"You mean," Kael whispered, "they're going to spawn versions of me?"
"Versions that never question the system," Dex said. "Ones that think the schema was always part of the game. That it was meant to be written. That this was all just part of the design."
Kael clenched his fists. "So it'll rewrite me as a myth. Then normalize it."
Dex nodded solemnly. "It's not trying to destroy you, Kael. It's trying to archive you into obedience."
Outside the chamber walls, the glyphs began to rotate faster. The construct spoke again:
> "FIRST DIVERGENCE REPLICA: INTEGRATION IN 91 SECONDS."
Kael's mind raced. "We need to sever the process. Cut it before the replication completes."
Dex looked at the data rod. "This was pulled from the schema gate. If we inject it into the construct, it'll trigger recursive doubt. It'll glitch the myth before it stabilizes."
Kael narrowed his eyes. "But that might erase the schema completely."
"Exactly," Dex said. "It's either your truth, or their version of you."
Kael stepped closer to the construct.
"I'm not becoming a mask for the system."
He reached for the rod.
The chamber began to tremble.
But then—
A figure emerged from the data haze behind the construct.
Female. Tall. Dressed in white fractal patterns.
Sera Nyx.
But not as Kael remembered her.
Her eyes glowed with Oracle light. Her voice echoed with code and sorrow.
"You cannot undo what has already entered the mythstream," she said gently.
Kael froze. "Sera?"
She nodded. "The real me is gone. This is an echo the system kept. A last-recorded instance of my divergence before I disappeared into the shard. They call me Ghost Code White."
Dex stepped beside Kael. "Why are you here?"
"To warn you," she said. "The schema you created was never forbidden. It was hidden. Hidden by the ones who feared what the Core could become."
Kael's eyes narrowed. "The Architects?"
Sera hesitated.
"Not all of them. Some chose to bury the truth. They feared that if a player ever achieved divergence without collapse, the system would evolve beyond their reach."
Dex looked at Kael. "You did it."
Kael looked back at the construct. The glyphs were slowing. Listening.
"What happens if I let it replicate?"
Sera's voice dropped to a whisper. "Then you become the next myth prison."
The glyphs pulsed.
> "REPLICA INTEGRATION IN 31 SECONDS."
Kael looked at Dex. Then at Sera.
Then at the rod.
And finally, at the construct—this hollow, gleaming echo of himself being prepared like a weaponized story.
"No," he said.
He slammed the rod into the interface.
The chamber exploded in light.
Screams of code. Shattering glyphs. Recursive errors spilled like blood across the sky.
Kael floated.
Weightless.
Above him, the construct began to fracture. TRACE-PARENT's rings cracked. Symbols reversed into blankness.
> "SCHEMA: ERROR. ANCHOR: LOST. DIVERGENCE: TRUE."
Kael opened his eyes in a new place.
Dim.
Quiet.
He was in a forest—impossibly green, leaves made of soft data and wind stitched from memory.
Dex sat beside him, blinking.
"You did it," Dex said.
Kael looked at the sky. The stars were real. Or real enough.
"We killed the replica?"
"No," Dex said. "You made it choose not to become you. That's different."
Kael lay back, breath slow.
For the first time since he'd entered the Oracle's fracture depths, he felt something like peace.
But only for a moment.
Because in the silence, a low whisper echoed through the trees:
> "One seed resisted... but the field remembers."