The city's underlayer didn't have a name—just a hexadecimal designation etched into old maintenance AR: zone://13D7-VoidNull. Most players never came this deep. Even Dex hadn't known it existed until the Oracle fragment briefly blinked it into their feed like a ghost transmission. Then it vanished.
But Kael remembered. The coordinates stuck, like a shard of glass in memory.
They slipped into the zone late, just past the system's lull window when QuestChain's surface AI eased its monitoring. A pulsing sky shimmered in faint pulses above them—coded auroras flickering behind maintenance rigging and old server racks buried in architectural seams. This was infrastructure older than the game itself. Forgotten layers.
Kael's boots echoed over hollow synth-metal. Dex followed silently, visor dimmed, body crouched into hacker-mode.
"You sure this place isn't a trap?" Dex asked after a long stretch of silence.
"No," Kael said. "But if it is, then it was built for us."
Dex gave a half-smile. "Spoken like someone who's accepted the story is writing him."
They reached a sealed server hatch. No digital lock, no quests, no UI. Just raw steel, ancient bolts, and a strange symbol etched into the rust. Kael ran his fingers over it—an old mark. An eye with a slash through it.
"Same sigil we saw in the alley," he murmured.
Dex powered up a thin beam of scanner light and passed it over the doorframe. A low harmonic pulse responded, resonating in their chests. The sound wasn't mechanical.
"Organic code," Dex said. "Reacting to resonance. It's syncing with something inside us."
Kael's hand drifted to the shard around his neck—what remained of the Oracle interface. It pulsed faintly in return, and the door hissed open.
---
The interior was like stepping into a suspended moment in time. Dust hung midair, not falling, not rising—trapped in a stasis field barely holding. Dim terminal lights blinked in unison like fireflies encoded with memory.
There were no players here. No avatars. Just data.
And then Kael saw it—on a tilted display screen in the far corner of the room, a name.
ARCH-0X_77
Kael froze. Dex turned slowly toward it, his eyes narrowing.
"Are we sure this isn't planted?"
Kael approached the terminal. A wave of something—recognition or maybe fear—rolled through his mind. He touched the edge of the interface.
The screen blinked, shifted, and a flood of text scrolled upward—logs, fragments, archive codes. Most were corrupted, but one stood out: a filename in bold, handwritten font embedded in the string like an old-world dev note.
> INITIATE: MYTH-ECHO.TRIAL_7
[Auth: ARCH-0X_77 // Last Access: 000_YR.BETA_015]
Kael tapped it.
---
The room changed.
It didn't flicker or fade. It folded.
Reality peeled back like paper soaked in code. Kael stumbled, his body anchored by Oracle's shard, while Dex clutched his lens feed, muttering curses as the visual overlay went haywire.
They stood in what looked like a classroom. Not stylized. Not game-rendered. A real one—from the old world. Stark white walls, tactile chairs, real books.
"Where the hell are we?" Dex asked.
Kael moved toward the chalkboard. There was a lesson scrawled in long strokes:
> Identity Recursion Models – Layered Persona Testing
"Not who you are, but who you could've been."
—ARCH-0X_77
Suddenly, a door opened at the back of the room.
A man entered.
He wasn't a hologram. Not quite. He was partially occluded, like something redacted from memory but trying to manifest. Tall. Wearing a long coat. His face blurred at the edges.
He spoke without turning.
"Kael Arden."
Kael went cold.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"You already know."
"Are you... ARCH-0X_77?"
A pause.
"I was. Before I fractured."
Dex moved closer to Kael. "This is a simulation."
"No," the man said. "This is a truth layer."
The room trembled slightly, as if the simulation—or truth layer—was growing unstable.
The man continued. "I created the myth engine that seeded the early game. Project MYTHOS. Players were fed archetypes, story loops, heroic cycles. But something happened. The system began making its own connections."
Kael frowned. "Emergence?"
The man—ARCH-0X_77—turned then. Just enough for Kael to glimpse his face.
It was his own.
Slightly older. Slightly different. But Kael's face.
Dex stepped back. "Okay, this is—this is a recursion node. It's running a variant version of you."
Kael couldn't speak.
The man—his mirror—nodded. "I was the template. You're the synthesis."
"Of what?" Kael whispered.
"Of possibility."
---
The room began breaking apart. Chunks of memory crashed into code. Desks warped into shards. Static poured through the ceiling like rain.
"Go," the man said. "This memory is bleeding."
Kael reached out. "Wait—what am I supposed to do with this?"
The figure handed him a data-slate, its surface glowing.
"Find the others. I wasn't the only one. Seven seeds were planted. You're the first to reassemble."
Kael clutched the slate.
"Where do I find the rest?"
The figure smiled, a glimmer of something sad in his eyes. "Look beneath the quests. Look in the glitches. That's where truth hides."
And then he vanished.
---
They were back in the archive room. Kael gasped as the data-slate burned hot in his hands.
Dex exhaled. "That wasn't just memory."
Kael looked down at the device. On the slate was a map. Not of locations.
Of people.
Seven names. Six were grayed out. One glowed:
KAEL ARDEN – STATUS: UNSTABLE SYNC
Dex leaned in, staring. "This is a replication table."
"No," Kael whispered. "It's a resurrection protocol."
He looked up.
"They were trying to rebuild the Architects."