this is my first book, thank you for choosing my web novel as your next to read, please tell me how to improve my book, and enjoy.
The transition wasn't light or sound. It was computation a stutter in the machine of reality.
Alex had been hunched over his keyboard, eyes grainy from a marathon debugging session. The lab was silent except for the hum of fans and the electric buzz of tired fluorescence. On his monitor, lines of Python code spiraled into recursion a fractal analysis script that refused to converge. He'd been chasing the bug for days, his brain a knot of logic and caffeine.
Then he pressed Enter.
The code executed.And the world… crashed.
The monitors flared white, fans screamed, and gravity inverted. For a fraction of a second, Alex saw the text of his code not on the screen, but around him thousands of lines unraveling like divine syntax. Then the lab was gone.
Silence.
He woke on his back, staring up at a sky the color of oxidized metal. Vast, broken towers leaned at impossible angles, their surfaces carved with runes that pulsed faintly like dying circuitry. Wind moaned through hollow structures, carrying the smell of dust and iron. The air tasted old like it had been recycled through a thousand dying breaths.
Alex sat up. His heart pounded, but his mind ran its own diagnostic.No desk. No servers. No light.Just ruin.
He stood, legs shaky, shoes sinking into ash and grit. Around him stretched the skeleton of a city half-buried skyscrapers and broken glass spires that reached for a dead sun. Somewhere in the distance, something howled mechanical, deep, and wrong.
Okay, he thought, either I'm dreaming, dead, or this is the most committed psychotic break in history.
A faint sound chimed metallic, crystalline.Then, before his eyes, a translucent window flickered into existence:SYSTEM ONLINE
> User authenticated: [ALEX_HART]
> Environment: Unregistered Location
> Python Runtime Detected
Alex froze. His breath fogged the transparent interface. It hovered in mid-air, projecting faint blue light onto the gray ground.
"...No way."
The cursor blinked expectantly.
He hesitated, then typed into the empty field, fingers trembling: print("Hello, world.")
The text glowed then a ripple of air distorted reality itself. Letters materialized, burning for an instant in white flame above the ruins: Hello, world.
Alex stumbled back. The message hovered like a physical object before fading into smoke. His pulse spiked.
"That… wasn't an illusion."
The cursor blinked again. Waiting.
He typed another line, mind racing.
spawn("torch", flame_intensity=0.6)
A hiss answered him. A small sphere of fire appeared, hovering above his palm, warm and flickering a torchlight, real and humming with quiet energy.
His system window chimed again.
New Script Learned: [PySpell: Light()]
Magika Source: Internal (Cell = 97%)
Alex stared at the numbers. The logic in him the same mind that had built recursive algorithms and optimized chaotic systems began rearranging itself. Magic. Code. Runtime.
This was no dream.
And then the screaming started.
It came from behind a collapsed archway not human, but close enough to twist his gut. Alex turned, flame trembling in his hand. A figure crawled from the shadows humanoid, but desiccated, its skin stretched thin like parchment. Eyes burned faintly blue, and its mouth opened in a dry, static hiss.
He stumbled back, heart hammering."Stay away"
The thing jerked forward. Its bones cracked with each movement.
Alex's brain flooded with instructions.He had no weapon, no training, no time to think.
He brought up the console again, fingers flying on instinct.
for i in range(3):
fireball(power=0.3)
A line of code executed. Three orbs of compressed flame launched from his palm, striking the creature in rapid bursts. Each hit flared with violent light, splashing molten residue across the ruined stone. When the smoke cleared, the thing was ash and Alex was shaking.
His hand trembled, not from adrenaline, but from what came next: the smell. Burning meat.
The torchlight flickered lower. The system window chimed again.
Magika Cell: 64%
System Note: User exhibits high aggression efficiency.
Aggression efficiency.He stared at those words for too long.
The heat faded from his palm, replaced by a cold that bit through his fingers. Somewhere deep inside, beneath the fear and confusion, something clicked. He'd always believed in logic, in reason. But logic was about survival. And in this place this algorithm of ruin — reason demanded one thing: adaptation.
He moved through the ruins, following faint trails of light emitted by alien fungus and shattered glass. Everywhere, he saw the remains of civilization statues half-melted, murals of towering beings intertwined with circuits. A world that had merged its soul with machinery until both had rotted.
When he reached what might have been a plaza, his interface flickered again unsolicited this time.
SYSTEM ALERT:
Detected Residual Script Network
> Do you wish to integrate? (Y/N)
He hesitated. The ground beneath him was lined with symbols glowing runes that pulsed like dying code. He could feel their hum in his bones, whispering in data streams he couldn't parse.
"If I say yes," he muttered, "I might die. If I say no, I stay lost."
He hit Y.
The world shifted.
He wasn't in the plaza anymore. He was standing in a massive chamber once a cathedral, now gutted and filled with half-dead machines. Massive constructs hung from the ceiling like rusted angels, and lines of old code scrolled across stone pillars.
His system window spasmed, lines flickering wildly:
Integration Complete.
Access Level: Restricted Tier.
Spell Protocol: Root()
Warning: Memory Bleed Detected.
"Memory bleed?" Alex whispered. Then the pain hit.
Visions cascaded screams, collapsing towers, people rewriting reality with code and watching it devour them. A world that tried to become perfect through logic and tore itself apart in recursion.
He collapsed to his knees, gasping. The system window flickered out.
When he looked up, he wasn't alone.
A woman stood at the far end of the hall or what was left of one. Her body shimmered, made of fragmented holograms stitched together by light. Her eyes glowed faint blue, the same as the creature he'd burned.
"You shouldn't be here," she said, her voice fractured across a thousand frequencies. "This world is dead. It kills the living."
Alex rose slowly, shaking off the ash. "Then why am I still breathing?"
She tilted her head, glitching in and out of existence. "Because you're not alive in the way you think."
And then she vanished, leaving behind a faint trail of falling code that dissolved into dust.
Alex stared at the space where she;d been, then looked down at his trembling hands. The warmth of his fire spell had already faded. The ruins pressed in from all sides, cold and silent.
He understood, then, with a kind of terrible calm: this world wouldn't nurture him. It wouldn't teach or spare him. It would test him and if he failed, it would consume whatever version of him had survived the transition.
His reflection shimmered faintly in a shard of glass beside him pale, exhausted, eyes sunken but steady.
"Alright," he murmured. "Let's see how deep this code goes."
He raised his hand, summoned the console again, and began to write.