The silence that followed the hero's collapse was deeper than death.
No alarms. No system warnings. Just… stillness.
Yuto stood frozen. His threads retracted slowly, the blood still dripping from his claws evaporating into the static air.
Nyx didn't speak.
The body of Idris Thorne—once a Reincarnator, then a puppet of Orpheus—lay motionless on the obsidian floor. Freed. But broken.
Then, something changed.
[Emergency Protocol: Admin Authority Breach]
[Accessing Hidden Layer: Genesis Root]
[Coordinates confirmed. Initiating Drag.]
Without warning, the world shattered.
The chamber cracked open like glass under pressure. Pixelated light streamed upward, sucking Yuto into a spiraling vortex of code and ancient symbols.
"You're being pulled into the Root Layer," Nyx warned, voice distorted. "This is the system's core, Yuto. The place even Admins rarely access."
"Then let's see what they're hiding," Yuto hissed, just before his vision inverted.
He fell.
Not through air, but through logic, reality, and syntax.
He wasn't a body anymore. He was a concept. A ghost of code spiraling downward into a realm of prime commands and creator signatures.
And then—impact.
Yuto emerged in a space that defied comprehension.
The Genesis Root.
A place shaped like a black sun made of swirling data strands, orbiting thousands of glowing code-fragments—some intact, some shattered, some… locked.
And in the center, suspended in a crystal of null-light, floated a humanoid shape.
Him.
Or rather… his original body.
The one that died in the real world.
Earth Yuto.
Human. Frail. Untouched by bugs, threads, or monstrous hunger.
His old body was here—preserved.
"Impossible," Nyx gasped. "That… that's your Root Code Host. Your anchor to Earth. It shouldn't exist. It should've been consumed during reincarnation."
Yuto hovered closer, threads hesitating.
A small message pulsed at the bottom of the crystal.
[Origin Lock: Subject 000-Z: Rejected By All Systems]
[Backup Identity Preserved for Emergency Override]
"What the hell…?" Yuto whispered. "Why am I here? What is this place really?"
Then the voice returned.
Orpheus.
"You finally reached the basement, bug. Let's see how well you crawl through the bones of gods."
The Genesis Root began to fracture.
A countdown appeared in the sky.
[Root Collapse Imminent: 10:00]