Before following coordinates of suspicious origin, I did what any paranoid extra would do:
spy on the system.
---
I knew I couldn't trust official maps.
Nor voice records or the memories of nearby NPCs.
So I dug deeper.
Into the quiet core of my ability.
Where the three moons flickered in shadow, like corrupted lines of code.
> Eclipse of Three Moons — [Internal Access: Trace Detection]
A function I'd never used before.
It let me see residual traces of anomalies...
like fingerprints left behind by system errors.
---
I activated the trace.
The world turned to stained paper.
People became blotches of ink.
Trees, unstable brushstrokes.
And the envelope I'd received… was a hole.
A perfect void in the world, like reality instinctively avoided it.
But on the edges of that void…
there was something.
A signature in code. Not a real name.
Just an internal system tag.
> [S000-13-REINSTALLED]
My heart skipped a beat.
I knew what that meant.
---
"Reinstalled" only appeared next to entities that had been deleted and then forcibly returned.
Not revived.
Not summoned.
But forced back into the script after being discarded.
And that… was only done for critical errors.
Entities that knew too much.
Or tried to rewrite the world on their own.
---
Who the hell were you, "S"?
Why leave a clue in the form of a letter, when the system erases even the names of those who break the rules?
Why did you know my name?
---
That night, I gathered supplies:
a map with no official data,
shards of unrefined magical minerals,
and a list of words the system hated.
Among them: "free," "author," and "unscripted."
I wrote those words on my arm.
In case I got reformatted before I arrived.
---
I would leave at dawn.
But this time, not as an escaping slave.
As an anomaly hunting another.