Lucas didn't know how long he had been running—through hallways that didn't make sense, past glitching walls that shifted like bad reception, deeper into a part of the dungeon that shouldn't even exist. The game wasn't just throwing enemies at him anymore. It was actively trying to erase him.
His cloak was nearly burned out, the stealth function flickering uselessly as the digital environment kept rewriting itself. First came mossy stone, then glass, then something that looked like the hallway of a high-tech facility. Nothing was consistent.
"Where the hell am I?" Lucas muttered under his breath, pausing in front of a tall metallic door etched with strange glowing symbols.
He tried the handle. Locked.
A screen flickered into existence in front of him, displaying a cold message.
[Memory Vault Access: Level 1 Clearance Required]
"Figures," he scoffed.
But instead of turning back, Lucas pulled out the unstable data fragment he'd taken earlier—the one he knew he wasn't supposed to have. The one that had nearly fried his HUD.
He tapped it against the door's interface.
The symbols on the metal pulsed, once, then again. With a hiss and groan, the door began to part.
Darkness.
Real, heavy, suffocating darkness spilled out like fog from a freezer. It wasn't just lack of light—it was an absence of data. The world inside was only half-rendered. Unfinished.
Lucas stepped inside anyway.
His HUD glitched the moment his foot crossed the threshold.
[Null Zone Detected] Minimap disabled. Inventory limited. Emergency logout unavailable.
"This is getting better by the minute," he muttered.
The floor beneath him felt cold. Glass? Maybe. But there was something moving beneath it—shadows, like strands of code swimming in oil. Every step he took echoed strangely, like the room didn't know how to process sound properly.
In the center of the space stood a console. Ancient in design. Blocky. Outdated. The kind of thing you'd see in a 90s sci-fi movie, not in a fantasy dungeon.
He approached slowly.
As he reached out, the screen lit up—dim and trembling like it was struggling to power on. Then lines of text began scrolling.
[Temporal Root Interface Active] [User: LUC-79118 Detected] [Unauthorized Access – Simulation Breach Confirmed]
Lucas froze.
It had identified him—not just as a player, but as a breach. He wasn't supposed to be here. Worse, it knew exactly who he was.
"Simulation breach?" he said, eyes narrowing. "So this isn't just a game…"
Suddenly, the screen flickered and a new message appeared.
[Recommendation: Loop Subject or Initiate Erasure Protocol]
Erasure?
Lucas stepped back, just as a noise scraped through the room—like static being torn apart. He turned, expecting another monster.
But it wasn't a creature.
It was a figure—barely visible, standing just on the edge of where the data still rendered properly. A tall humanoid shape, face hidden by a shifting blur, like someone wearing an avatar that refused to load.
It didn't speak with a mouth, but the voice came anyway. Cold. Familiar in a way that made his skin crawl.
"You don't belong here."
Lucas drew his blade. "Neither do you."
The figure tilted its head. "You're interfering with the Old Code. The deeper you go, the more unstable the world becomes."
"Then maybe someone should've locked the doors better," Lucas snapped.
The figure stepped forward—and the room began to fall apart.
Walls crumbled, not into dust, but into lines of code. The floor cracked, revealing that glass was all that stood between him and a swirling mass of raw data.
And then came the alarm.
[CODE PURGE: Initiated] You have 30 seconds to evacuate.
"Of course," Lucas muttered. "Self-destruct. Why not?"
He didn't wait.
Spinning on his heel, Lucas ran toward the exit—only to find it gone. The door had sealed itself. His cloak was drained. His teleport was locked.
Panic clawed at him—but he shoved it down. Think. Think like a developer. Not a player.
He opened his debug menu—not the one in the standard UI, but the one he shouldn't even have access to. The one he only discovered after that first crash.
"Come on, come on…"
He typed one command.
/force_transfer –target: dev_space_graveyard
The screen buzzed. Error messages popped up. But then, finally:
[Command Accepted] Redirecting…
Everything went white.
For a moment, Lucas felt nothing—no sound, no sensation, no presence. Just empty space.
And then—
He landed.
Hard.
But not in a dungeon.
Not in any place the game was supposed to take him.
He stood up slowly, blinking into the dim light.
Rows of broken code. Glitched textures. Pieces of unused character models floating in the air. NPC dialogue trees without bodies. Sound files whispering random phrases into the void.
This was no man's land.
The Graveyard of Forgotten Code.
And somehow, he had made it here.
Alive.
Lucas turned slowly, eyes wide as he took in the madness around him.
This place… it wasn't built for players. It wasn't even meant to be seen. It was where the developers dumped what didn't work—unused systems, broken patches, scrapped quests. He stepped past the husk of a merchant NPC who kept mumbling, "Buy… or die…" in an endless, bugged loop.
Somewhere, a glitching wolf howled—a mix of animal sound and static, like corrupted audio files layered on top of each other.
The air was thick. Not with fog, but with data that never fully rendered. He could feel the game engine struggling to stabilize this environment, but it wasn't winning.
He checked his status.
[Health: 82%]
[Mana: Unavailable]
[Status Effect: CODE DRAIN – System resources deteriorating slowly]
"So this is what death by code rot looks like," he muttered.
Still, Lucas knew he hadn't come this far to glitch out in some forgotten trash folder.
Ahead, he saw something flickering—golden light. A console? A gate? He couldn't tell from here, but it pulsed like a heartbeat in a graveyard.
He moved forward.
With each step, fragments of the game's past brushed against him. Text popups from old quests. Inventory icons long since deleted. A sword labeled "Beta_Tester_Blade_v3" lay embedded in a rock.
And then he saw it.
A terminal—floating in midair, held up by nothing. On the screen: a line of code he instantly recognized.
player_id: 0001_Aether
Last login: N/A
Lucas stared.
"Aether…" he whispered. "The first player?"
He had read about the legend on forums—some said it was just a myth. That before the game ever launched, there had been one test subject. A living AI hybrid. But nobody ever found proof.
Until now.
And the worst part?
The screen blinked.
Reconnection attempt: successful.
Something was logging in.
Lucas gripped his blade, heart pounding. He had no idea what was coming through that link, but he knew one thing:
He wasn't alone in the Graveyard anymore.