Ji-Hoon didn't slow. The further he ran, the more the world peeled away.
Not in destruction—but in clarity.
Like Edenfall was showing him its bones.
Each step across the decaying bridge lit up glyphs beneath his boots—glyphs he'd never seen before in any public release. Hex-coded permissions. Deprecated tags. Root-level architecture. It wasn't just that the world had broken—it had been peeled open, and Ji-Hoon was running along the exposed spine of something never meant to be seen again.
Behind him, the tower imploded in silence. No debris. No dust. Just a line of red:
[LOCATION: /GHOST_SECTOR/INHERITANCE_NODE] - PURGED]
Then the ADMIN construct's signal returned.
Not close, but hunting. Not with rage. With protocol.
Ji-Hoon skidded to a stop at the edge of the bridge.
Below, reality fragmented into raw data—a chasm of unrendered memory. A loading zone with no assets.
["There's no path. The next sector hasn't been compiled. This part of the game was never finished. It doesn't exist."]
"It will," Ji-Hoon muttered.
✦ Skill: Fragment Engine – Activated
✦ Effect: Deploying Unreleased Feature Construct…
From his hand, swirling error particles surged forward—twisting, merging, fusing. In seconds, a platform appeared. Broken, flickering, but solid enough to step on.
["You're creating terrain. Ji-Hoon, that's developer-level manipulation. This isn't illusion or trace—it's real map writing. You're patching live data into an unstable sector."]
He took the step.
It held.
The bridge of ghost-code extended under each stride, forming as he moved. For the first time, Ji-Hoon wasn't following paths. He was writing them.
Then the system pushed back.
From the sky, white threads descended—strings of compiled firewall logic, forming into shapes. Shields. Walls. Constructs meant to contain code sprawl. Ji-Hoon didn't flinch.
✦ Subroutine Engaged: [NULL_ECHO]
His shadow detached, mimicking his movement—then surged upward into one of the firewall guardians, exploding into disassembly code.
The others hesitated, trying to recompile defenses against something they couldn't categorize.
Ji-Hoon clenched his fist.
["You're destabilizing core boundaries. The system's about to hard-reset this entire region if you don't exit the build zone."]
"Then find me the way out."
["Working on it—wait. There's a pulse. Someone's pinging you from the overworld. Not AI. Not Edenfall."]
Ji-Hoon blinked.
The ghost sector flickered.
Reality twisted sideways—
And suddenly he was falling.
Not down.
But up.
He crashed onto solid tile.
A real floor. Stone, wet with recent rain. The air tasted sharp—pollution and ozone.
He was back.
Or somewhere close.
But everything had changed.
The city skyline overhead was cracked in half. Buildings hovered mid-collapse. Glitched light fractured from every screen. The world around him was no longer separated from Edenfall.
They had bled together.
He stood slowly.
People ran in the distance—but they didn't look at him.
He wasn't visible.
["Ji-Hoon… you're in a sync field. A place where real world data and Edenfall code are fully merged. You're not spectating—you're the anomaly being run through both realities."]
Then a voice reached him.
Not synthetic.
A real one.
"Ji-Hoon Kwon."
He turned.
A woman in a deep green coat stood at the edge of the collapsed street. Her boots glowed faintly with Edenfall tracking lines, but she wasn't an avatar. She was human.
But her eyes had UI reflections embedded in them. Permanently.
"You came through the ghost sector," she said. "You survived a trace-level override. You're not supposed to exist anymore."
He said nothing.
"You don't know who I am yet," she continued. "But we've been waiting for someone like you. Someone the system couldn't predict. Someone it rejected."
Ji-Hoon's hands clenched slightly at his sides.
"And who are you?"
She smiled faintly.
"The people who refused Edenfall's first draft. The patch notes they tried to delete."
["Ji-Hoon... her system tag just resolved. She's not a player. She's from a pre-launch faction. Codenamed: The Reclaimers."]
Then the city groaned.
From the far end of the skyline, something massive shifted. A being—half-rendered, towering—stepped into visibility. Its arms dragged reality like cloth behind them. Its voice made nearby buildings ripple.
"UNAUTHORIZED INSTANCE DETECTED. PURGE REQUIRED."
Ji-Hoon activated his cloak.
The woman beside him cracked her knuckles.
And the sky above fractured into countdown timers.
Round two had begun.