The white text had been a door. Now, the world had hinges.
He stood in the clearing, the [Minor Bone Abrasions] from the thorns like pale scratches on his frame. The air still held the ozone-tang of ArcanaLux's lightning and the deeper, colder emptiness where the Revenant had passed. But beneath that, a new layer: a faint, sourceless hum, like a trapped insect in the back of his skull. Magic. Active and searching.
[Passive Perception Check: Success.]
[Environmental Alert: Area is marked with low-grade detection magic. Traversal increases Anomaly Rating.]
The hum was everywhere. It clung to the brambles, pulsed from the cobblestones, hung in the fog. The guild had salted the earth. They weren't just hunting anymore; they were farming him.
He looked at the path the Revenant had taken. The stone flags were worn smooth by its eternal, plodding tread. The hum didn't touch the path. The detection magic stopped at its edge, as if repelled.
Of course. Why waste resources warding a zone where the Elite Mob instantly deletes any player?
The logic was flawless. Player logic. It created a blind spot.
He stepped onto the Revenant's path. The hum vanished, replaced by a deeper silence. The fog seemed thicker here, colder. He moved, not with his old shamble, but with a deliberate, quiet caution. The 0.13 points of stolen Agility made the difference between a clatter and a click.
He followed the path away from the clearing, away from the spawn clusters. The graveyard grew older. The tombstones became grander, more eroded. Statues of weeping angels watched with hollow eyes. The metallic taste of rain was gone, replaced by a dry, parchment-like scent—air that hadn't been breathed in centuries.
The path ended at a hill, its face carved into a monumental, crumbling mausoleum. The entrance was a dark archway, ten feet tall. Scorch marks and deep gouges scarred the stone around it—the remnants of ancient player raids that had failed. This was the lair.
From within, a deep, resonant creak echoed, like a giant's footstep on old timber. The Revenant was home.
His 1 HP glowed mockingly in his vision. A single touch from that thing would not just kill him; it would shatter him into dust, perhaps beyond respawn. This was madness.
But the white text had said Continue. The system itself had acknowledged his interference. This wasn't part of the game's story. This was a story under the game.
He pressed his bony back against the cold stone beside the archway and waited.
The creak sounded again, closer. A shadow filled the archway. The Revenant emerged, its greatsword scraping on the stone floor with a sound that set his every bone vibrating. The pinprick of red light in its helmet swept over the entrance, passed over the stone he hid behind, and moved on. It began its patrol down the path, the ground trembling faintly with each step.
He counted to thirty in the hollow silence of his mind. Then he slipped inside.
Darkness. Not the gray of the fog, but total, absorbing black. His perception—10 points, unaugmented—meant nothing. He was blind.
Then, a flicker. A strand of violet light, no thicker than a thread, spidered across the floor ahead. It pulsed once and faded. It wasn't a light source. It was a crack. A fissure in the world's code.
[Heightened Intelligence (2.00) allows perception of low-level data-stream anomalies.]
He followed the memory of the light, moving by touch and the increasing dryness of the air. The chamber was vast. His feet scuffed against piles of debris—shattered armor, old bones that were not his kind, the tarnished hilts of broken swords.
In the center of the chamber, the Revenant's resting place was a simple stone dais. And above it, suspended in mid-air, was the source.
A heart. Or the idea of a heart. It was made of crystallized violet light, swirling with trapped, darker motes. It beat with a slow, sickly rhythm, each pulse sending out those hair-thin cracks of violet light across the stone floor before they faded. It cast everything in a morbid, pallid glow.
[??? : Corrupted Core Fragment (Unique)]
[Data Stream Unstable. Analysis Risky.]
This was the catalyst. It hummed with a power that made the guild's tracking runes feel like child's play. It was also clearly broken. Wrong.
How? His inner voice was a whisper of logic. The Revenant is Level 20. It's part of the world. This thing… isn't.
He approached the dais. The violet light played over his bones, making the scratches gleam. A notification, stark and red, flashed.
[Warning: Direct interaction with unstable core data may result in: Data Corruption, Immediate Deletion, or Unforeseen Evolution.]
[GM Scrutiny will increase exponentially.]
The cost. The system was laying it out. This wasn't a hidden treasure. It was a landmine that might also be a key.
He reached out a bony hand.
The world dissolved into mathematics.
Not the void. This was worse. The tomb was gone. He was a point of consciousness adrift in a raging sea of numbers, symbols, and screaming error messages. [NULL_POINTER_EXCEPTION] scrolled past like a shooting star. [MEMORY_LEAK_DETECTED] bloomed like a rotten flower. Through the storm, he saw fragments:
A battlefield, not of a game, but of realities. Knights of light clashing with beasts of shadow.
A shriek of tearing fabric—the sky ripping open.
A single, perfect crystal heart, shattering. One large piece falling here, into the code of this MMORPG, embedding itself in the graveyard's boss mob… creating the Revenant.
Smaller fragments, scattering elsewhere...
The vision ended. He was back on his knees before the dais, his hand inches from the Corrupted Core. His HP was still 1. But his mind felt… bruised. Stretched.
[Forbidden Knowledge Acquired: The Sundering.]
[GM Scrutiny: 5.1% -> 11.3%]
The cost had been paid. Not in HP, but in attention. The GMs were now very interested.
The Core Fragment pulsed, as if in invitation. He understood now. This wasn't just a stat boost. It was a piece of a higher-tier system, broken and integrated into this low-level zone. Consuming it wouldn't just give him points. It would change the type of points he could earn.
He closed his bony fingers around it.
It was cold. Not the cold of ice, but the cold of absence. It flowed into him like liquid shadow, filling the hollow places in his ribs, his skull, his limbs. The violet light erupted from his joints, his eye sockets.
[ALERT: Unauthorized Data Integration!]
[Assimilating: Corrupted Core Fragment...]
[WARNING! Evolution path override detected!]
[Calculating...]
Agony. A real, searing, digital fire that raced along every data-string of his being. He was being unmade and rewritten. His form collapsed into a pile of bones on the floor, then reassembled, not by the game's gentle respawn, but by the violent, violet logic of the Fragment.
When it was over, he was still a skeleton. But the bone was darker, like old ivory. Faint, barely visible violet lines traced arcane patterns across his skull and major bones. His rusted sword was gone. In his hand, a shard of the same dark material, sharp and humming with latent power.
[Evolution Progress: 2.29/50 -> 25.0/50.]
[Core Fragment Assimilation Complete.]
[New Evolution Path Unlocked: Skeleton Mage (Corrupted Variant).]
[Stats Adjusted by Core's Inherent Logic.]
[STR: 1.50 -> 2.00] [AGI: 1.43 -> 3.00] [INT: 2.00 -> 15.00] [VIT: 1.36 -> 5.00]
[New Vital: Mana Pool Generated.]
[MP: 0/0 -> 30/30]
[Skill Unlocked: [Data-Siphon Bolt] - Lv. 1]
[Skill Unlocked: [Passive: Corrupted Core Sense] - Lv. 1]
The surge of power was dizzying. The world snapped into hyper-clarity. He could see the data-streams now—the lazy flow of the fog, the scripted paths of distant mobs like glowing golden threads, the angry, pulsing red knots of the guild's tracking runes outside. He felt stronger, faster. The dry air of the tomb had texture, temperature gradients.
But the greatest change was the new sense. A faint, discordant pull from the north-west. Another whisper. Another fragment.
[Corrupted Core Sense: Ping detected. Distance: Extreme. Bearing: 287. True.]
The ledger in his core had been overwritten. He wasn't just gathering stats to evolve. He was gathering pieces.
A new notification, white and urgent, slammed into his vision.
Entity 7B-041.
Anomaly threshold: 18.6%.
Assimilation of foreign object logged.
Survival is data. Gather more.
The Administrators are not your only enemies.
The message faded. The hum of the tracking runes outside suddenly spiked in intensity. They'd detected the energy surge from his evolution.
A voice, projected by magic, boomed through the entrance archway, shaking dust from the ceiling.
"WE KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE, GLITCH! THE WHOLE AREA IS WARDED! COME OUT AND BE DELETED, OR WE COLLAPSE THE ENTRANCE AND BURY YOU!"
Stonewall. The guild had set their trap. And he had just walked into the cage.
But he was no longer a Level 1 Skeleton with 1 HP.
He was a Level ? Skeleton Mage with 5 HP, 30 MP, and a shard of a broken world in his chest.
He looked at the archway, then at the dark, rear wall of the tomb. His new [Corrupted Core Sense] pinged against the ancient stone. There was a weakness there. A fissure in the geometry not meant for players.
He raised his dark shard. Mana, cold and violet, responded for the first time, pooling in the hollow of his palm.
Let's see what the data does, his inner voice whispered, a mix of fear and terrifying glee.