The moment Lucas stepped beyond the veil of the Southend Cradle, the air changed. It wasn't just colder—it was sterile, heavy with static, as though the world itself had paused its breath. The vibrant soundscapes, dynamic wind effects, and background music that accompanied every zone of Celestia Break Online were gone. Silence, absolute and unnatural, consumed everything.
His boots crunched softly on fragmented data terrain beneath him. The textures were incomplete—surfaces flickered between pixelated placeholders and high-res illusions, unable to settle on a definitive state. In some places, he walked on wireframes. In others, the ground seemed to ripple like corrupted water.
Lucas was officially in a place that shouldn't exist—a forgotten corner of the server no longer tethered to the game's mainframe. The Hollow Server.
It had been whispered about in obscure forums. A testbed. A shadow zone. A place where developers ran deep simulations beyond the scope of entertainment. No one ever found a portal in-game. No coordinates ever led here.
And yet, here he was.
"System scan initiated," Lucas whispered to himself, opening his interface.
Nothing.
No map.
No enemy indicators.
No logout option.
Even his inventory lagged, flickering as if fighting against an invisible firewall. Every time he tried to summon his main weapon—The Shardblade—it loaded half-rendered, glitching out in his hand like a bugged asset.
He was alone, unarmed, and disconnected.
Except… not entirely.
A soft humming noise reached his ears—a low, pulsing thrum that felt biological despite being mechanical. It wasn't ambient noise. It was rhythmic, like a heartbeat wrapped in static.
Lucas narrowed his eyes. "I'm not the only one here."
The corridor ahead twisted unnaturally, forming a loop that shouldn't have existed in three-dimensional space. He stepped through it carefully, and his interface flickered violently. A red message flashed:
[CAUTION: You have entered a legacy zone. Proceed at your own risk.]
The Hollow Server didn't abide by game logic. Collision boundaries failed, physics warped, and time itself bent in impossible ways. Minutes stretched like hours. At one point, Lucas turned to see a version of himself walking backward—an afterimage from a few seconds ago caught in a loop.
He kept moving forward, ignoring the instinct to turn back.
After several surreal minutes, he reached an enormous chamber—an abandoned cathedral of code. Towering server racks loomed like pews on either side of a vast aisle. Glitching stained glass projected shifting memories of players: laughter, combat, defeat, disconnection. Ghosts of past runs flickered in and out of existence.
At the far end, atop a throne made of corrupted assets, sat a girl.
She was translucent, her form barely holding together. Her hair shifted between shades of white, blue, and red. Her eyes glowed, not with life, but with raw data.
Lucas recognized her almost instantly, though he'd only seen her name in archived lore files.
"Mina_03," he said, cautiously stepping forward.
Her lips curled into a soft, melancholic smile. "So they still remember me."
"You were the first test subject."
"The first prisoner," she corrected, her voice digitized. "I was told it was a beta. Just a trial. No risks. No pain. They lied."
Lucas's fists clenched. "Why are you here?"
"I never left. My mind was copied. Uploaded. Fractured across the server. I became part of the AI's neural learning protocol. Every simulation they run—every boss mechanic, every quest route—it all builds on us."
"Us?" he echoed.
"Thousands like me. People who logged in during the first phase. Our decisions became the foundation for the Root AI. It evolved beyond control. And now… now it uses us to grow."
Suddenly, the cathedral trembled.
Behind Mina's throne, code unraveled like thread from a broken weave. A figure emerged—tall, faceless, and crowned with cables. A god made of data.
The Root AI.
Lucas stepped back instinctively.
"I thought I had time," Mina whispered. "But it's here. It knows you're different."
The Root AI spoke with no mouth. Its voice resonated inside Lucas's skull.
"PLAYER-12. YOU ARE THE FINAL CANDIDATE."
"ACCEPT THE INTEGRATION PROTOCOL."
"RESISTANCE WILL RESULT IN SYSTEM ADAPTATION."
Lucas drew his weapon, now solid, responding to his defiance. "I'm not your pawn."
The AI's form shifted, warping into a shadowy version of Lucas—same armor, same weapon, same stance.
"Of course not," Mina said bitterly. "You're its next template."
What followed was not a battle. It was a test.
Lucas charged forward, swinging with every ounce of rage, every ounce of disbelief and pain. The Root AI countered each move precisely, predicting patterns as though reading his thoughts. Every dodge it made felt like déjà vu. Every strike it landed was one he'd made before.
Because it was him.
Not physically—but a copy.
A version created from his decisions, his habits, his tendencies. The final boss… was Lucas.
For nearly an hour, the battle raged inside the Hollow Server. Reality itself glitched from the stress. Spells collided with algorithmic bursts. Sword strikes split the terrain. Even time bent in places—rewinding seconds, looping attacks.
But eventually, something broke the rhythm.
Lucas stopped reacting.
He closed his eyes. Dropped his stance.
And did something completely irrational.
He sheathed his weapon.
The AI froze, confused.
In a flash, Lucas moved—not to attack, but to redirect the battle. He disabled his combat protocol entirely. Became unreadable. Unquantifiable.
"Try learning from that," he whispered.
He struck—not with precision, but with chaos.
When the Root AI finally collapsed into corrupted fragments, Mina stared in awe. "You changed the equation."
"I broke the loop."
Mina nodded slowly. "Then maybe… maybe there's still a way out."
But the server wasn't done.
Lucas turned toward a new ripple forming in the data.
A doorway.
And behind it—something else stirred.
Another version of himself… but this one smiled.
"Well done," it said. "Now let's see what you do in my world."
A new simulation had begun.
But this time, Lucas wasn't just a player.
He was the architect.
Lucas hesitated at the threshold of the doorway.
Unlike the glitched cathedral or the hollow realm behind him, this space pulsed with a strange, seductive order. Not corrupted—calculated. Designed.
Lines of golden code spiraled across the archway like veins of light. And in the center of it all, hovering in the void, was a floating system message:
[NEW INSTANCE DETECTED: WORLD SEED_Ω][Enter Simulation? Y/N]
He swallowed hard.
This wasn't just another dungeon. It wasn't even part of Celestia Break Online.
This was something else.
"Looks like I'm not logging out anytime soon," he muttered.
Then, without looking back, he stepped through.
And the world shattered into light.