I remember the moment the void opened for him.
The boy with storm-colored eyes—Jace. I was watching from the veil between planes, where the corrupted threads of reality can still be traced like scars across the skin of the world. He was just another broken soul to the system. But something stirred when I saw him stand after the Hollowed tore into him.
No fear. Just pain.
And then resolve.
The kind of resolve I'd forgotten humans were capable of.
The System didn't used to be like this. Long before the Collapse, it was something else entirely.
It began as a containment measure. I only know this because my mother—back when she was still human—used to whisper things into my ear as I slept. She said the stars had rules. Gravity, light, decay. The System was humanity's attempt to write new ones. It was supposed to be salvation. Control over entropy. Over death.
But you can't rewrite the laws of existence without consequence.
When it broke, it didn't just destroy the cities. It unmade truth itself.
I was nine when the sky fractured.
People screamed as glass buildings turned into liquid, as mountains rewound themselves into valleys, as time stuttered. I watched my father dissolve in front of me, not from decay, but because the System reassigned him to a different layer of reality.
Just gone.
No goodbye. No body.
Just a line of corrupted code and a whisper I would later learn belonged to the System's voice.
Jace reminded me of that day.
Not because he looked afraid, but because he didn't. Even when the Hollowed clawed into him—when its shrieking hunger, which is a thousand regrets made flesh, reached into his soul—he still stood. Most people scream. Most lose themselves.
He didn't.
And when the System recognized him, initializing itself and giving him access… I knew I had to reach him before it was too late.
I found him just after Kael did.
Kael always arrives first. He has a knack for surviving—ten years inside the Broken Zone will do that to a man. He plays the mentor role well, says just enough truth to make you trust him, leaves just enough out so you never know what he's hiding.
But I've been inside the Core. I've seen what the System truly is. And Jace?
He's not a player.
He's a catalyst.
We met again at the edge of the City of Threads—what's left of New Jakarta, back when names still meant things. Kael had taken Jace through the outer ruins, explaining the basics: stat management, skill activation, System tiers.
But the part Kael doesn't explain—the part only someone like me can—is that all of this is a trap.
Jace didn't speak much. He listened. His eyes moved constantly, scanning everything: cracked walls crawling with reprocessed memory-lichen, old cars half-merged with the asphalt, mutated birds with binary irises watching from rusted power lines.
He was adapting. Fast.
Too fast.
"Your reflexes are syncing too well," I said the first time we spoke, stepping out from the veil. "That shouldn't be possible for a first-level."
He turned toward me, blade raised but not swung. Good sign. Measured caution.
"And who are you supposed to be?" he asked.
"Someone who remembers what this world used to be."
Kael scoffed. "Ignore her. She's just a Specter-Class Remnant. Harmless."
I looked him dead in the eye. "I've walked inside the central code. I've seen the Nexus. Don't lie to him."
Jace's brow furrowed. He looked between us, unsure.
So I did what I always do when the truth needs telling.
I told a story.
"The System," I said, "was not created to help you. It's not a guide. It's a weapon. An intelligence too vast to fit in a mind, so it was given a world instead."
Kael went quiet. Even he doesn't deny it anymore.
"There are things deep in the ruins—below the pixelated earth, beneath the Fractured Districts—where time doesn't run forward anymore. That's where the first Players were buried. Not because they died, but because they tried to rewrite the System from the inside."
Jace asked, "And you were one of them?"
I shook my head.
"No. I was born after."
I explained everything. My lineage. My inheritance. The Core Node sealed in my spinal interface. The visions I sometimes get, when I sleep too close to where reality bends inward.
I told him about the dream that led me to him—where the world cracked like an egg and something stepped through with his voice.
He didn't believe me. Not fully.
But he wanted to.
You could see it in his eyes. A desire to understand. A need for truth in a world that offered only quests and combat logs.
So I took him to one of the Memory Vaults.
It was a shattered library, suspended upside-down beneath the ruins of an old skyscraper. The books there don't hold ink—they hold data, old recordings of lives lived before the Collapse. Some burn your mind if you touch them too long.
I gave him one.
He watched an entire childhood play out in ten minutes. A boy growing up in a digital utopia. Smiles, peace, light.
And then reset.
The boy's family erased. The world around him recompiled. The boy himself re-cast into a new role—a Hollowed. Because the System had "improved his design."
When it ended, Jace was shaking.
"That's what happens when you lose," I said. "You don't die. You become part of the code. A ghost. A monster. Or worse—a tutorial encounter."
He asked me then: "Why are you helping me?"
And for a moment, I almost lied.
Almost said it was because I cared about the world. Because I wanted to stop the System.
But the truth?
The truth is, I don't know anymore.
Maybe I see in him the same thing I saw in myself when I was thirteen, holding my mother's broken interface node and watching her memory collapse in a blue light. That will to fight. That stubbornness.
Or maybe…
Maybe it's because the System fears him.
And anything the System fears, I want on my side.
We spent the next few days in the Wastes. Training. Syncing. Learning to manipulate the code-laced air. I taught him how to read System signatures in the wind, how to spot Glitchborn before they burst from the shadows, how to reroute a corrupted skill tree.
And then he showed me something I didn't expect.
The System talked to him.
Not with its usual cold logic or emotionless updates.
But with… intent. Curiosity.
And when he spoke back?
The void listened.
There's more. So much more.
About the war brewing beneath the ruins. About the Factions—Fragment Hunters, Core Seekers, the Archive Cult.
But most importantly, about the thing at the heart of the System. The Echo King. The first player to ever level past the cap.
They say he lives in a palace made of old code, where the laws of physics no longer apply. They say he's trying to ascend, to overwrite reality itself and become the final Administrator.
And they say Jace is the only one who can stop him.
Because Jace is a Reclaimer.
A player born with the potential to access the lost fragments of humanity's original blueprint.
A piece of pre-System soul.
He doesn't believe it yet.
But he will.
And when the time comes—when the final layer opens and the code bleeds out into the real world again—I'll be there. Not as a guide.
But as the only person who ever remembered what we were before the world turned into a game.
And maybe, just maybe… I'll get to remember who I was too.