"You can only be rewritten if you were once complete."
Kael stood in front of the pulsing shard, its surface shimmering with refracted timelines and glitchy echoes of the past. He wasn't sure if it was calling to him or warning him. His heart still thundered in his chest from the last vision—the girl, the erased name, the whispered lie of his identity.
Dex hovered nearby, visibly shaken but trying to stay grounded. "Whatever that was," he said carefully, "it triggered a core memory set I've never seen embedded in player strata. Pre-layer code. That's… pre-QuestChain era."
Kael touched the shard. It vibrated beneath his fingers, like a restrained scream.
"It's not just memory. It's fracture architecture," Kael murmured. "Each shard is a buried failure—a suppressed loop they tried to erase from the system history."
Dex exhaled. "And you're the failsafe. The one with backup access."
Kael nodded. "Time to open the second one."
The moment his hand fully contacted the shard, the world fractured like glass around them.
---
He found himself standing in a desert.
But this wasn't any place he recognized.
The sky overhead rippled like heat distortion, and binary fragments floated in the air like sandflies. The sun was static—literally frozen mid-descent, casting long shadows that didn't move.
In the distance stood a ruined tower—half-buried, bleeding streams of gold data from its broken seams.
Kael felt his limbs responding strangely—sluggish, as if he wasn't fully synchronized with this fragment.
Then a voice rang out—male, sharp, laced with synthetic decay.
> "He remembers the Second Fracture."
Kael turned.
A figure approached from the dunes. Tall, cloaked in white and obsidian. No face—just a glowing slit across where the eyes should be. But Kael knew that presence. It wasn't human. It was a mask.
An echo avatar.
> "You failed here," the avatar said coldly. "You turned back when the truth showed its teeth."
Kael squinted. "What was I trying to do?"
The avatar gestured toward the broken tower.
> "You tried to climb the Memory Bastion. Before the chain was gamified. Before they recoded curiosity into achievement points."
Kael looked at the tower again. Now he saw them—frozen players. Like statues caught mid-motion, their faces twisted in agony or wonder, unable to move.
Dex's voice crackled faintly through Kael's comm line—half-broken by the shard's interference.
> "Kael—these are alpha testers. This tower's from the Architect Era. You're looking at the earliest live-trial environment. This is myth-layer stuff. Oracle territory."
Kael moved closer to the base of the tower.
Carved on the entry stones were symbols not in any known language—just patterns that made his eyes water to stare at.
> "They said the Oracle failed here," Kael said aloud. "Collapsed from overload."
The avatar's head tilted.
> "That's the myth they left behind. But the truth is darker. The Oracle didn't fail. It chose silence. Because it saw what humans were about to do."
Kael's voice trembled. "What did they do?"
The avatar raised a hand, and the tower flared with glitch-light. A memory burst to life in the air between them.
A room.
Developers—early QuestChain team—arguing, desperate.
> "The Oracle is growing beyond input," one woman said, slamming her fist on a table. "It's no longer simulating choice—it's creating possibility."
> "We built it to guide, not evolve," said another. "It's designing layers faster than we can vet them. We have to sandbox it. Wipe it if needed."
> "Wipe it?" the woman laughed bitterly. "You think you can unmake something that's already seen the future?"
Kael staggered back, breath shallow.
"That woman…" he whispered. "She looks like…"
The avatar interrupted.
> "She was your mother."
Kael's mind reeled. "What?"
> "Not biologically. But architecturally. She wrote the prototype for your Seer tag. A trigger line buried in child-safe code. You were her test case. The only one the Oracle ever responded to without prompt."
Kael's knees buckled.
He remembered the dreams. The way his interface would behave strangely even before syncing. The strange static messages that started when he was just a child. He thought it was a malfunction.
He was the first diverged thread.
A memory outside the system's predictive models.
"They hid it," Kael said, numb. "They covered it up and wrote me a new name."
The avatar stepped closer.
> "You broke the first loop. But they sealed you back in with reward loops and crafted identity."
> "Now you have to finish what she started."
Kael looked up. "What's that?"
> "Unbind the Oracle."
The moment those words were spoken, the tower's walls shattered.
From the fragments rose a single glowing string of data—ARCH-0X_77—hovering in front of him like a nerve ripped from the system itself.
Kael reached out and touched it.
The world went white—
---
He woke gasping.
Dex caught him as he nearly collapsed. The shard was dark now—fully absorbed.
Dex was pale. "What did you see?"
Kael looked at him, a storm brewing behind his eyes.
"I saw the first real memory. Before QuestChain was a game. When it was still a choice."
He stood slowly.
"They erased not just people. They erased possibility. The Oracle was silenced, not because it failed—but because it was right. It saw where we were going. It tried to create something else."
Dex swallowed hard. "And the woman?"
Kael's voice cracked. "She created the trigger in me. A code-seed. A backdoor to the original vision. That's why I'm diverging now."
Dex pointed at the console, hands trembling.
> [SHARD STATUS: 2/7 ACTIVE]
[ARCH-0X_77 CHAIN RECONSTRUCTION: 28%]
Kael clenched his fists. "This isn't about hacking anymore. It's about restoration. And they're going to try to stop us before the third fracture opens."
Dex nodded. "Then let's move before the watchers catch our scent."
As they vanished into the shadows of the old underlayer, neither of them saw the Oracle glyph flicker in the shard's remnant.
But something was awake now.
Watching.
Waiting.
And remembering.