The road to the grave of versions wasn't marked.
It didn't need to be.
The world led us there anyway.
Broken quest markers flickered out as we passed, vanishing like guttering candles.Minimap signals died one by one, until there was nothing left but static at the edges of my HUD.The Lexicon remained closed at my side, but it pulsed with slow, steady beats—not urgency.Not fear.Just...knowing.
It had seen this place before.
Maybe before I had even existed.
The first sign of the graveyard came in the shape of a wall.
It stretched across the horizon in a jagged crescent—not made of stone or wood or reinforced SYSTEM materials.
It was made of memories.
Ruined town squares stacked atop half-rendered forests.Pieces of early cities folded against collapsed dungeons.Glitched fragments of player houses, quest hubs, PvP arenas—piled together into a leaning, crumbling barricade against nothing.
All the parts of Ascension that hadn't survived the rollback.
All the pieces of stories that had been erased.
Lyra stood beside me, silent.
I could feel her thread trembling faintly through the thin air between us.
She could feel it too.
The grief woven into this place.
We stepped closer.
The wall loomed higher with every footfall—and through the broken gaps, I glimpsed deeper ruin.
An entire abandoned landscape stretched beyond it.
A forgotten build.
A place players had once roamed freely—crafted, fought, explored.
A version of Ascension that had existed...
until it hadn't.
The Lexicon fluttered at my hip.
I opened it slowly.
Not forcing it.
Not commanding it.
Just...listening.
The pages turned on their own.
A message burned in silver threadlight:
[Memory Cluster Detected: Version Root 3.7.a – Severed Build]Status: Unsanctioned. Narrative Protection: Removed. Hazard Level: Variable.
Unsanctioned.
Meaning the SYSTEM didn't just forget this place.
It chose to abandon it.
To let it rot.
I felt a chill even through the insulated layers of my in-game gear.
Not from cold.
From recognition.
Because deep down, some part of me knew—
this wasn't just history.
This was a warning.
We climbed the broken wall carefully.
It wasn't solid—sometimes a piece of ruined terrain shifted when touched, phasing into mist.
But we made it over.
And what lay beyond...
Ruins.
Miles and miles of them.
A half-finished city sprawled out before us—foundations laid but never completed, quest chains half-embedded in streets that didn't lead anywhere.
Shops with blank signs.
Taverns that glitched between three architectural styles every few seconds.
Statues of heroes no player ever met.
A sky overhead flickering between day, dusk, and pre-dawn without any real sequence.
Lyra whispered under her breath.
"I don't think players ever made it here."
I nodded slowly.
"This was meant for something else."
The Lexicon offered no spells.
No paths.
Only a blank page trembling with restrained energy.
Like even it didn't want to rewrite what we were seeing.
We wandered deeper into the grave.
I passed what might have once been a guild hall—the insignia above the door unreadable, half-burned into empty data.
Inside, there were tables and chairs.
Rotted, unfinished.
And a message still hanging in midair:
[Welcome, Beta Leaders – Your home awaits.]
Beta Leaders.
This wasn't just a forgotten town.
It was a sanctuary for early players.
For the ones who had believed they were building something lasting.
Something permanent.
But somewhere along the way—
someone decided they weren't part of the story anymore.
Someone hit delete.
Someone rewrote history.
We kept moving.
The mist grew thicker in patches, condensing around shattered monuments and glitched gardens.
Time blurred.
I couldn't tell how long we walked.
Minutes.Hours.A lifetime.
At the center of the ruins, we found the archive.
Or what was left of it.
A great circular building, once grand, now slumped and broken under its own weight.
Cracked pillars leaned against each other like dying giants.
Faint glyphlight spilled from within, pulsing irregularly.
The Lexicon buzzed against my side.
Not pain.
Not warning.
Recognition.
We crossed the threshold.
Inside, the archive's heart still beat.
Rows of ruined pedestals stood in concentric rings.
Each one once held memory shards—the pure crystallized echoes of quests, battles, alliances, betrayals.
Now the shards lay shattered.
Fragments of glowing memory scattered like spilled stars across the broken floor.
I knelt beside one.
Picked up a shard.
It flickered to life between my fingers.
A scene played for half a heartbeat:
A player laughing with guildmates.
A town feast celebrating a world event that no longer existed.
A child NPC offering a hand-crafted gift for a quest reward that would never trigger.
Then the shard blinked out.
Silent.
Forgotten.
Lyra stood beside me.
She touched another shard.
This time the memory was darker.
A raid party wiped out not by enemies—but by a SYSTEM patch glitch halfway through a dungeon run.
Their characters frozen in mid-animation.Their inventories wiped.
Their logout screens locked.
Their anger never voiced.
Their deaths never recorded.
I let the shard fall from my hand.
It shattered into mist.
We moved deeper.
At the center of the archive, a massive glyph was carved into the cracked stone floor.
A symbol unlike anything I'd seen in any official SYSTEM documentation.
Older.
More intricate.
More alive.
The Lexicon opened of its own accord.
Pages flipping, faster and faster.
Trying—desperately—to find a reference.
It failed.
Only a single uncertain line appeared across the parchment:
[Root Memory Detected – Source Unidentified.]
I stared at the glyph.
My heartbeat loud in my ears.
Because for the first time,it truly hit me.
Ascension wasn't just a game.
It wasn't even just a SYSTEM.
It was a patchwork of broken dreams.
Built.Rebuilt.Abandoned.Buried.
Rewritten by forces even the devs couldn't fully control anymore.
A soft noise behind me.
I turned.
Lyra stood frozen.
Her hand hovered above another shard—but this one wasn't cracked.
It pulsed steadily.
Strongly.
Waiting.
I approached cautiously.
Together, without speaking, we touched it.
The shard flared.
And a single line of broken SYSTEM text shimmered in the air:
"The Archivist was installed to preserve stories. But the longer he watches, the fewer stories survive."
The glyph on the floor pulsed once—a deep, resonant heartbeat through the bones of the world.
The mist thickened.
Reality twisted.
And somewhere, faintly, I thought I heard a voice.
Not the SYSTEM.
Something older.
Something forgotten.
Something waking up.
I closed the Lexicon.
Gripped Lyra's hand.
And we ran.
Not from enemies.
Not from battle.
But from the weight of what we had uncovered.
We weren't just survivors anymore.
We were witnesses.
And witnesses rarely got a second chance.