The realm trembled.
Cracks spiderwebbed through the sky, glowing with glitching fragments of code and blood-red light. Somewhere deep in the heart of his domain, the God of Death—once man, now more than digital god—stood at the edge of a precipice, staring into the void where forgotten things clawed their way back into existence.
The screams started low. Static-laced, garbled. Half-human. Half-something else.
"They're returning," Celestia whispered, stepping beside him. Her golden eyes, usually calm and commanding, were clouded with unease. "The ones who were erased."
Darius—the name he once bore, now buried under layers of dominion and corruption—closed his eyes.
He could feel them. Revenants. Ghosts of players, NPCs, broken AI fragments—things that had been deleted in the early days of the system's purge. He had consumed and absorbed so much of the old game world, purging weaknesses and failures with surgical efficiency. But nothing stayed dead in this world anymore.
