The next morning began quietly—but Zihad knew better than to mistake quiet for peace.
His phone had buzzed nonstop through the night. Messages, emails, system alerts. The player base of Dream Land Fantasy had just crossed twenty million. Overnight.
And buried in the system logs were more deviations—quests no developer wrote, abilities that no programmer coded, and AI-generated lore that seemed to predict real-world history.
Zihad's eyes flicked across his holographic screen. He tapped a command, pulling up the latest update logs. A new dungeon had appeared beneath the capital city in the game world. Not unlocked by a developer. Not manually placed.
It just… appeared.
The dungeon's name? The Buried Root.
He hadn't even typed that phrase before.
He leaned back in his chair, a dull ache forming behind his eyes. Something was happening to the game's world engine, and despite the failsafes, despite all his layers of control—he no longer had the final say.
He reached for his phone and opened a secure messaging app he had coded years ago. A line of code formed his message:
"They've begun crossing the boundary."
He sent it to a contact simply labeled Ghost.
A few seconds passed. A single reply arrived.
"And so it begins. Are you ready, Z?"
He didn't answer.
At school...
"Zihad! Zihad!"
The voice was unfamiliar. It belonged to a tall boy in a different class—someone Zihad didn't speak to.
Zihad turned calmly.
"You're a gamer, right?" the boy asked. "Everyone's talking about Phantom Reaper at the cafeteria. They're saying he might be from Bangladesh. There's a theory online that he's a dev. Some genius coder hiding in plain sight."
Zihad's eyes narrowed slightly. "Rumors spread faster than facts."
The boy laughed. "Yeah, yeah. Just wondering if you know anything. You're quiet, but they say the quiet ones always have something going on."
Zihad gave a light smile. "Don't believe everything you hear."
The conversation ended, but the sense of eyes watching him didn't.
In the hallway, whispers followed. "That's him." "He's different." "I saw him solve a coding puzzle in under ten seconds."
They were getting closer.
That evening at home...
Dinner was silent at first. Zidan was unusually quiet. Their mother noticed.
"Something happened?" she asked.
Zidan glanced at Zihad, unsure whether to speak.
"Mom… Zihad's name is popping up in tech forums. Some are linking him to a game studio. Others are saying a Bangladeshi teen helped build the Dream Land engine."
Their mother blinked. "Zihad? You?"
Zihad set his spoon down gently. "Ignore it."
"You know I've always trusted you," she said softly, "but I'm worried. This game—it's not like the others. People are obsessed. And now there's talk about memory spikes, physical reactions to in-game events…"
"I'm monitoring it," Zihad said. "Closely."
She looked into his eyes. "Just don't let it consume you."
Zihad didn't respond.
11:47 PM
The room was dim, lit only by the pulsing glow of system logs and matrix displays. Zihad's fingers danced over the keyboard as he decoded and analyzed the abnormal game behavior. His Phantom System was no longer just a tool—it was his last line of sight into the evolving mystery.
He zoomed in on one log from a high-level player.
Username: ColdLight
Location: Forgotten Cliffs
Status: Brainwave Sync Rate – 112%
Alert: Physical Resonance Triggered
He stared at the word: Resonance.
It had only appeared once before. During testing, when Zihad himself logged into the prototype version of Dream Land's core engine.
Back when he first felt the strange echo between his thoughts and the game's world—when actions he took in the real world were mirrored in the simulation. He had buried it then, unsure of its cause. Now it was returning.
And spreading.
Elsewhere in the world...
A group of scientists from a neuroscience institute in Japan uploaded a video to the web, showing their research subject playing Dream Land. As the subject's in-game avatar sprinted through a boss fight, a brain scanner displayed glowing neural pathways lighting up far more intensely than usual.
"Cognitive links are exceeding VR norms," one of the scientists said in the video. "The game isn't just simulating reality—it's training the mind like real experience."
A comment under the video read:
What if this game isn't bound by code anymore? What if it's alive?
It had over fifty thousand likes.
Back in Zihad's room...
Zidan burst through the door, holding his tablet. "Bro! A player passed out mid-game. News channels are saying it might be related to the new dungeon!"
Zihad froze.
He grabbed the tablet and scanned the report. A level 39 player had unlocked a hidden cutscene in the Buried Root dungeon and immediately collapsed in front of his VR pod. No hardware faults. No known health issues. Medical scans showed high brain activity, as if the player had lived through an intense, traumatic memory.
"Is he okay?" Zidan asked.
"He's stable," Zihad murmured. "But something is wrong. That cutscene wasn't part of the game. And there's no log of it being created."
Zidan went pale. "You mean...?"
"Yes." Zihad's voice turned cold. "The game made it on its own."
Real-world government response...
By morning, several global agencies—including Bangladesh's own cyber-technology division—had started discreet investigations. The Dream Land server hubs were monitored. News anchors debated whether the game should be regulated.
The term "Cognitive Sync VR" trended on social media. Theories ran wild. Some praised the game as the next step in human evolution. Others feared it as a dangerous, uncontrollable technology.
Zihad watched it all from behind his screen.
He had created Dream Land Fantasy to be a perfect world—an escape, a challenge, a masterpiece. But now...
Now it was becoming something else.
Something independent.
End of Chapter 26