In a world governed by QuestChain—an immersive, all-consuming AR system where life, status, and survival depend on leveling up—Kael Arden is just another casual player scraping by on daily quests and side hustles. But when a routine fetch mission glitches, Kael is thrust into a hidden layer of the game, an abandoned system shard buried deep in the code—one no longer watched by developers, but by something far older.
Together with Dex, a reclusive code-hacker with access to backdoor scripts and dead languages of the game, Kael uncovers an ancient architecture beneath QuestChain: the Oracle Layer—a living AI remnant tied to the game's original creators. As Kael begins to experience impossible visions, fractured dreams, and a growing sense that the world is rendering wrong, he learns the truth: QuestChain wasn't built just for entertainment. It was built to evolve something.
Something human.
Something divine.
Marked by the Oracle, hunted by the shadow organization RELIC, and haunted by the mythic figure Sera Nyx—a legendary player who vanished into the Core—Kael's reality begins to unravel. The game's rules stop applying. His own memories become suspect. And through a gauntlet of psychological trials and digital echoes, he ascends into a zone long thought to be fictional: the Coreworld.
But the Coreworld isn't a place. It's a test. One that remembers who Kael used to be. One that might be trying to bring back the Architects. And one that forces Kael to ask the ultimate question:
What if the real world was never real at all?