The day began with a mandatory zone maintenance quest. Kael and twenty other Level-10 or less players marched with glowing vests and old tech, brooms, scrap drones, patch kits.
[Zone Cleanup: Ring 12-S]
REWARD: +50 XP | +2 Chain Points | +Access to Food Stall Tier 3]
Kael moved mechanically. Swipe, bag, scan. Repeat.
The day began like all the others, under the humming lights of Ring 12-S and the stench of ozone and rot.
[MANDATORY QUEST: ZONE MAINTENANCE]
[PARTICIPANTS: 21 / 25 SLOTS FILLED]
[LEVEL RESTRICTION: ≤10]
Kael stood among twenty other low-level users, all clad in blinking hazard vests and equipped with junk-tier tools: cracked broomsticks, malfunctioning scrap drones, and patch kits that barely held a charge. Their HUDs glowed the same dull orange, casting a faint glow over grime-caked visors and bleary faces.
[Zone Cleanup: Ring 12-S]
REWARD: +50 XP | +2 Chain Points | +Access to Food Stall Tier 3]
The promise of "Food Tier 3" was laughable slightly less synthetic than Tier 2, maybe. Not that most of them had functioning taste sensors anymore.
Kael moved automatically.
Swipe. Bag. Scan.
Repeat.
Around them, digital banners stuttered through corrupted ads and propaganda. One blinked in harsh red above the maintenance bay gate:
"QUESTCHAIN — PLAY TO LIVE"
He didn't even react anymore. The slogan was burned into his brain from years of repetition. Everyone knew the truth: no play, no credits. No credits, no food. No food...
NPCs roamed nearby, throwing out trivial quests with canned enthusiasm.
"Cheer Me Up! (+2 XP)," chirped a synthetic woman with a too-bright smile.
"Scan Lost Dog Poster! (+1 XP)," mumbled an elderly model with static in its voice.
"Correct This Citizen's Grammar! (+3 XP)," popped up near a sweating teen clutching a poorly written protest sign.
Kael ignored them all.
Some of the quests were so degrading he refused them on principle. That was part of why he was still stuck at Level 8 after three years. He just couldn't bring himself to mime a dance routine or compliment a Corporate statue for a few measly XP.
The higher-ups called it "resistance to optimization."
He called it dignity.
He was mid-sweep his broom scraping grit and plastfoil flakes from the curb when it happened.
The First Flicker. A shimmer. Subtle. Like a heat ripple, but sharper. Focused.
It distorted the sidewalk five meters ahead, and Kael froze mid-motion. No one else seemed to notice. The other players moved like sleepwalkers, heads down, caught in the grind-loop.
He took a cautious step forward. The air buzzed faintly around the distortion. For a heartbeat, the pavement peeled back not physically, but visually. Like the environment was a skin stretched too thin, and something underneath was trying to push through.
It was dark beneath the flicker. Not like shadow more like code. Raw and jagged, pulsing faintly with unfamiliar symbols.
Runes?
Algorithms?
He blinked.
Gone.
[ERROR: DATA CORRUPTION DETECTED]
[REPORT TO YOUR CHAIN AGENT?]
[IGNORE?]
The cursor blinked.
Kael hesitated. Reporting meant questions. Questions meant visibility.
Visibility got you flagged, watched, "reassigned."
He pressed [IGNORE]. The message vanished like a guilty thought.
But something tugged at the back of his mind. The pattern—what little he saw of it—didn't look accidental. It looked intentional. Like it had been left there for someone to find.
For him to find.
That night, the dream came.
Kael wasn't in his room. He wasn't in the district. He wasn't in anywhere.
Just a void.
Endless black, silent and empty—except for the floor beneath him. It was made of code. Pure lines of glowing data, shifting and pulsing beneath his feet like a living thing. White and blue. Cool and ancient.
Each pulse came with a low, rhythmic thud.
A heartbeat.
His heartbeat, maybe.
He looked down—and the symbols from the glitch were there. Clear now. Arranged in spirals. Some moved. Some didn't. All of them felt older than the system. Older than QuestChain. Older than this entire simulation.
And then—
A voice. Not loud, not sharp. But deep. Intimate. Like a whisper in his chest.
"You saw it."
Kael's breath caught.
"That means you can come in."
He opened his mouth to speak, to ask something—anything—
But the floor split. A single line of code unspooled and reached upward like a hand.
He fell.
Kael jolted awake in his cot. Sweat soaked his clothes. His lens was offline, rebooting. He couldn't even check the time.
Outside, the district lights pulsed their usual cold amber. The world was still broken. Still green. Still false.
But now he knew something else.
There was a beneath to it all.
And someone—or something—wanted him to find it.
The dream didn't fade.
Kael expected it to unravel like the others just another brain-glitch from fatigue or bad synth protein. But this one lingered. It clung to the edges of his mind all day, like static under skin. Like something watching from the corner of his HUD.
He couldn't shake the voice.
"You saw it. That means you can come in."
The way it hadn't spoken to him, exactly, but through him. Like an echo in his own thoughts.
That morning, the filters were worse than usual. The sky looked like bile-stained glass, glowing green-yellow with city haze. Another heat patch was rolling in; his HUD kept blinking warnings about hydration, body temp, heart rate.
[SYSTEM HEALTH: MINOR DEGRADATION DETECTED]
[RECOMMENDED ACTION: Purchase MedPatch Lite (12 CC)]
He didn't have twelve Chain Credits.
Kael shoved a stale ration cube into his mouth and pulled on his boots.
Back to the street.
Zone 9A was quieter than 12-S. Fewer active quests, fewer NPCs. Just one slow-moving CleanSweep assignment and a bugged-out vending machine that kept offering a daily login reward Kael wasn't eligible for.
[QUEST: COLLECT LITTER (19/30)]
His trash drone hovered low, bumping into curbs and muttering audio errors to itself.
Kael moved slowly. Cautious. Eyes scanning for any sign of another flicker. His lens had fully reset overnight, but the diagnostic log was blank. Whatever he'd seen yesterday, it wasn't officially recorded.
Of course it wasn't.
The system only saved what it wanted you to remember.
Still, something felt off.
His UI elements kept jittering. Quest markers flickered. Text glitched mid-sentence. At one point, the world froze entirely for two seconds. Not lag. Something deeper.
Like the simulation paused to look at him.
He didn't tell anyone. Who would he tell? The other low-levels didn't talk unless they had to. There was no camaraderie at the bottom. Just silence and survival.
He finished the CleanSweep with seconds left and earned enough XP to bump to Level 9. No fanfare. No music. Just a cold notification and a +10 Energy Boost he didn't feel.
Then, at the edge of the zone, he saw her.
A woman in white.
Not an NPC. Not a user either. Her presence didn't register on the local feed. No level. No ID tag. Her face was turned away—just a silhouette beneath a rusted walkway, the wind catching the edges of her coat like static.
Kael blinked.
She was gone.
Just like the flicker.
No trace. Not even a footstep in the dust.
That night, the dream returned. Not the same—but connected.
He stood not on code, but on concrete. Ancient, cracked, worn by time. A corridor stretched before him, lit by flickering fluorescent strips that made no sound.
This time, no voice greeted him.
Only a symbol painted on the wall: a circle with a broken line through it.
He touched it.
Pain shot through him—sharp and bright and real.
Kael snapped awake, gasping.
His finger was bleeding.
A thin line across the tip, fresh and shallow. A perfect curve. The shape of a broken circle.
His lens booted a full 30 seconds late. No alerts. No errors.
No explanation.
Just one new notification pulsing in the corner of his view:
[CORE STATUS: INITIALIZED]
[AWAITING TRIGGER EVENT]
He stared at it, heart thudding.
"What the hell does that mean?" he whispered.
But the system didn't answer.
It never did.