The euphoria of breaking reality lasted exactly as long as my attention span, roughly about three minutes. Then the implications hit me like a server crash at 3 AM.
{Pattern analysis: Completed}
[Warning! Significant Threat Potential Detected!]
{System monitoring: High priority}
{Enhanced monitoring: All sectors - Priority target identified}
I could feel the weight of attention now. Not the casual background awareness from before, but focused scrutiny. Like having the cosmic administrators themselves suddenly decide to study me with complete intensity.
I sat cross-legged in the sand, my glitched double-scorpion Steve standing guard while my broken vultures continued their eternal aerial dance overhead. The defeated Sand Worm's corpse was already attracting more predators, but I barely noticed. I was too busy analyzing the system's responses, trying to understand exactly how deep I'd dug myself.
"Okay, Brand," I muttered, pulling up log after log of system alerts. "You've reverse-engineered bank security, government databases, and AI systems that were supposed to be unhackable. This is just another system. Everything has patterns."
I started with the obvious approach.
/admin monitoring_level status
{Current Administrative Attention: High Priority}
{Escalation Threshold: Approaching critical levels}
/admin monitoring_coverage status
[Access Denied: Admin Level 8 insufficient for monitoring controls]
Even though I'm unable to access the data, I realised there was a hierarchy of access in their system. This means there were levels above my current clearance and hierarchies always had escalation paths.
/help admin_levels
{
Administrator Hierarchy:
Level 1-5: Basic Reality Manipulation
Level 6-10: Advanced Entity Control
Level 11-15: Core System Access
Level 16-20: Cosmic Authority
Level 21+: [CLASSIFIED]
}
"Someone really went overboard on the permission structure." I whistled.
The question was: how do you gain admin levels when the system actively wants to delete you?
I opened my experience log, looking for patterns in how I'd gained levels so far. Most of my EXP had come from Atrice's dragon fight, but some had trickled in from my entity manipulation experiments.
{
Experience Sources:
Combat Victory (via minion): 1,678 EXP
System Exploitation: 347 EXP
Reality Anomaly Creation: 156 EXP
…
}
"Interesting," I mused. "The system is rewarding me for breaking it. That's either really good design or really bad security."
Time to test which one it was.
I started logging every exploit I'd found into my system notes.
— Exploit Log —
Stat Inflation Bug: Entity stats can be boosted beyond normal parameters without hard caps. Side effects include reality instability and ascension protocols.
Item Duplication: Coin generation appears to have no economic safeguards. Potential for market manipulation.
Entity Hijacking: Multiple entities occupying the same space while hijacking creates collision errors and merged entities.
Experience Farming: System rewards reality-breaking behavior with advancement points.
Ascension Triggers: Extreme stat modifications can trigger unscheduled ascension events.
As I typed, I noticed something interesting. Each documented exploit generated a small trickle of experience points.
{
Experience Gained!
System Analysis Bonus: +50 EXP
Vulnerability Documentation: +30 EXP
Pattern Recognition: +70 EXP
}
"You're rewarding me for finding your bugs," I said to the sky. "What kind of masochistic system are you running up there?"
That's when the sky decided to answer me.
The horizon pixelated into a mess of jagged error boxes, and the first voice hit like a server crash in surround sound:
{ATTENTION: ANOMALOUS ACTIVITY DETECTED}
The voice was different from before. Deeper. More official. Like cosmic middle management had finally been called in to deal with the situation.
{Reviewing Logs...}
{Unverified Coin Generation: 100 cases — low economic risk.}
{Entity Collision Errors: 3 — minor.}
{Stat Growth Violations: Contained.}
{Ascension Protocol Triggered By: ...Chicken}
A long pause. I could practically hear the celestial paperwork being shuffled.
{…Did that say "Chicken"?}
{Confirmed. Ascension anomaly.}
{Source of anomaly traced. Coordinates: [Sector 12-Δ, Desert Expanse].}
{Local administrator presence: None. Cause unknown.}
Multiple voices now, overlapping like a messy conference call.
{It's only one chicken. Why is this on priority alert?}
{Because chickens are not supposed to bypass ascension protocols.}
{Could be an isolated glitch. The other logs… coin trickles, stat inflation…}
{Maybe, but the ascension signature is spreading from one specific location. Someone there is tampering.}
{Tampering? Or exploiting?}
{Either way, we can't ignore a poultry-based ascension.}
I blinked. "They're having a meeting up there?!"
But the voices were already fading, replaced by a chilling new set of notifications.
[Warning! Critical Monitoring Initiated!]
{Administrative response: Enhanced protocols authorized}
{Escalation Threshold: Immediate Level}
[Achievement Unlocked: Graduated to Cosmic Priority Watch List]
[Title Gained: Cosmic Threat]
"Well, Brand," I said, watching my glitched minions while analyzing the escalating system responses. "You wanted a real challenge. Now you've got the universe's debugging team taking personal interest."
The desert began to shimmer slightly at the edges - not from heat, but from the weight of focused attention. Time to get creative about staying ahead of whatever came next.
I opened my exploit documentation again and started typing faster. If cosmic management was coming, I needed to understand this system well enough to either negotiate with them or find a way to crash it before they could delete me.
After all, the best defense against getting fired is making sure the entire company depends on you staying employed.
[System Analysis Bonus: +60 EXP]
[Level Up!]
{Level Up! Brand: 7 → 8}
The desert began to stutter around me. A cactus shivered like it was processing too much math. A nearby dune flickered, its polygons buffering into place with visible lag.
Then a new line appeared in my HUD that made my blood run cold:
—Administrative Trace Progress: 2%
The system wasn't just watching me anymore—it was actively hunting me down. And judging by the growing shadow that wasn't quite a shadow stretching across the sand, I was about to find out what happened when cosmic IT decided to make a house call.
The untextured void moved straight toward me like a glitch in reality itself.
{
Name: Brand
Level: 8
Job: Administrator Lv. 8
Status: Unauthorized User
HP: 1,200/1,200
MP: 1,500/1,500
AP: 40/40
STR: 44 (29 + 15)
AGI: 64 (29 + 35)
INT: 54 (39 + 15)
Title: Ascension Catalyst (+10 All Stats)
—You Look Divine
Title: The Idiot Who Ascended a Chicken (+20 Agi)
—Permanent Affection from Chickens
Title: Cosmic Threat (+5 All Stats)
—You Look Intimidating
Equipment: Sylph Sword
}