You ever hear that soft electrical hum before a hard drive fails?
That's the last thing I remember before the world exploded. A low, hungry whine. Like a whisper chewing through metal.
Then fire. Code. Screaming. Someone else's, not mine.
A flash of Vanya's face, she was mouthing "rollback now!"
Then static.
Then nothing.
Until now.
My eyes snapped open, but they weren't mine.
I wasn't in a lab anymore. No blinking servers. No smell of burnt plastic. Just... cold wind and incense. And my skin? Way too smooth, way too warm. This body felt buffered. Not real. Like I'd been copy-pasted into someone else's save file.
I tried to sit up. Something creaked.
"Host body stabilizing," said a voice. Not mine either.
Not in the air. Not in my head.
Somewhere in between.
Then a HUD blinked into view, right in front of my face. Blood-red system prompts. Chinese characters I couldn't read. But the glitching English underneath was crystal clear:
SYSTEM BOOTING: EMPEROR JIN - DEBUG MODE ACTIVE
YOU ARE: ADMIN OVERRIDE
NAME: KADE MERCER
ROLE: INTRUSIVE GHOST
Ghost?
I looked down at my hands. Not mine. Pale. Ornate gold rings. A robe too shiny for comfort. I flexed a finger and felt… power. Like I could crash a star with a thought.
"Kade! Can you hear me?!"
That was Vanya. Her voice echoed like a ping through a cracked firewall.
I spun, well, my host body spun, and saw a blur of digital light. Vanya's face flickered into view like a broken hologram stitched to a shadow. She looked irritated. Typical.
"You triggered the failsafe!" she shouted. "This isn't reincarnation. We've been uploaded! We're inside the system!"
"No s**t," I muttered. "Did you bring snacks?"
Here's what we figured out in the first 30 seconds of panic:
We're dead.
Our tech lab exploded.
But instead of ghosting to some shiny afterlife, we landed here.
Inside Jin Sovereign. A warlord. A tyrant. The main NPC of the entire Empire of Shattered Code MMO.
Except he wasn't an NPC anymore.
He was alive. Conscious. Confused. And glitching. Hard.
I walked, no, floated, through the throne room. There were guards kneeling. Courtiers sweating. A girl with silver bells braided into her hair was whispering something about "demonic qi surges." No one could see me.
But I could feel everything. Jin's pulse. His anger. His hunger.
Like I was wearing him. Like a system skin.
Then he twitched.
And so did I.
And I realized it: He could feel me too.
"Override engaged," said the system voice. "Emotion spike detected."
I felt his thoughts surge like a crashing browser, memories spitting sparks, rage climbing, systems overheating. He didn't know we were here.
But his soul did.
He screamed.
FATAL EXCEPTION: HOST INTEGRITY BREACH
INITIATING - ERROR SPELL: BINARY WRATH
"Oh crap," I said, backing up. "I just made him cast a spell."
"What spell?!" Vanya shouted from somewhere deep in the code.
"Something called Fatal Exception?!"
The palace floor shattered. Black lines spidered out from the emperor's feet. Lightning the color of corrupted code slammed through the air like a rogue update.
Screams. Guards combusting. Walls collapsing.
A HUD alert pinged me again:
DAMAGE: 95% AREA WIDE
STATUS: YOU'VE JUST STARTED A MASSACRE
NOTE: LOL, NICE ONE KADE.
I looked up. Jin was floating. His eyes had turned solid blue. Binary ran down his cheeks like tears.
"I see it now," he said in a voice layered with static.
"There's... something inside me."
He was talking about us.
Me.
"Kade," Vanya snapped, "what the hell did you do?!"
"I didn't do anything. I tried to reboot!"
"You gave him access to a debug-only boss-tier skill! It wasn't even mapped to this version of the world!"
"Well how was I supposed to know?! I didn't exactly get a tutorial when I died! Wait, hold up, Vanya, do you hear that?"
A new voice was coming online. Calm. Cold. Female.
SYSTEM ADMIN DETECTED: SKILL TREE ARCHITECT – VANYA RATHI
ACCESSING CULTIVATION FILE: ERROR_DIV_0.TXT
LOADING MANUAL...
The glowing script unfolded in midair, strings of Chinese poetry twisting into broken haikus and impossible arithmetic.
"Rivers flow backward
Qi spins inside iron lungs
Zero divided..."
"STOP," Vanya groaned. "Who wrote this garbage? This isn't cultivation, it's corrupted lore code."
I blinked at the floating symbols.
"Okay, but... is it usable?"
"No. It's poetry. Glitched poetry."
"Awesome," I said. "We're gonna die again."
Then I saw him.
Jin Sovereign. The man whose soul we'd hijacked. He stood, shaking, watching his hands burn with light.
"I am... not alone," he whispered.
He wasn't looking at the court.
He was looking at me.
"Kade…" Vanya said quietly. "I think he's starting to see the interface."
"You mean..."
"I mean he's waking up."
That's when the system chimed again.
This time in red.
HOST AWARENESS REACHED: 2%
DANGER LEVEL: ESCALATING
MISSION OBJECTIVE: STAY HIDDEN.
WARNING: HOST CANNOT KNOW YOU'RE INSIDE HIM.
Too late.
Jin Sovereign pointed at the throne.
At me.
"You," he growled. "Inside me. What are you?"
And then he smiled. Wide. Mad.
"Let's find out."