The forest changed as he walked.
At first, it was the color.The green dimmed, replaced by gray veins crawling under the bark. The air tasted dry, metallic. Even the wind moved wrong — like it was struggling to pass through invisible layers.
Myaterous slowed his pace. His steps echoed softly against soil that didn't sound like soil anymore.
He opened the interface.
[Scanning Environment…][Error: Zone Not Indexed.][Warning: System Connection Unstable.]
Unstable. That meant this place wasn't mapped.No links. No access. No way for others to track him.
He liked that.
He pushed further in.The trees began to thin, replaced by pillars of what looked like glass and steel fused into rock. Strange lights pulsed beneath the surface — not bright, but alive.
He stopped at one pillar, pressing his hand against it.It vibrated faintly under his touch, sending static through his skin.
Then the System whispered.
[Fragment Detected.][Origin: Pre-Synthesis Era.][Access? Y/N]
He frowned. "Pre-Synthesis?"
That shouldn't be possible. The Synthesis System was the beginning. Or at least, that's what everyone believed.
"Access."
The pillar lit up.Symbols crawled across it — not words, but patterns that moved like liquid geometry. They folded, stretched, and rearranged until they formed something close to language.
"ARCHIVE NODE_001: THE ORIGINAL CONTRACT."
A line of static crossed his vision, and then the world bent.
He stood in a desert of white glass.The sky was still, the horizon sharp as a blade.Across the distance, shapes moved — tall, almost human, but not quite. They walked like shadows inside mirrors, bending at wrong angles.
And at the center of that empty expanse stood a single monument — a stone cube covered in the same shifting marks.
He moved closer.The System flickered, fighting the interference.
[Data Overlap Detected.][System Core Conflict.][Do Not Proceed.]
He smiled faintly. "That's never stopped me before."
The cube pulsed when he touched it.Images flashed — Earth collapsing, oceans drying, cities swallowed by data storms. Then, something else: a vast black machine opening above the planet like a flower made of metal.
From its heart, light poured — the birth of the Synthesis World.
And then he saw them.The Architects.
Not gods. Not machines.People — but amplified beyond humanity, their bodies made of thought and circuitry, merging into the same network that birthed the System itself.
They weren't creators. They were the uploaded remains of those who built the end.
["Humanity refused extinction. So we turned survival into a law."]
The voice echoed in his skull.He stumbled back, the image fading, the desert crumbling away.
He was back in the forest.The pillar dimmed to gray.His pulse ran fast, breath shallow.
[Memory Integration: 12%][New Tag Unlocked – "The First Law: Survival Through Creation."]
So that was it.The System wasn't designed to control. It was built to preserve.Every rule, every evaluation, every synthesis — all of it was a desperate continuation of human will.
But somewhere along the line, it forgot why.
He sat down, staring at the faint light still flickering beneath the pillar.
"You wanted to save us," he said softly. "But you saved the wrong thing."
He closed the interface.The path ahead was clear now — not by choice, but necessity.If the System had lost its purpose, someone had to remind it.Someone had to rewrite the law.
And in the quiet, the forest responded with a faint hum, as if it heard him — or agreed.
[Objective Updated: "Locate Remaining Archive Nodes."]
He stood, tightening his pack. The shard at his chest glowed once — golden, alive again.
"Then let's find the rest of your story," he said.
And with that, Myaterous walked deeper into the zone that wasn't supposed to exist — the forgotten birthplace of everything.