Ji-Hoon stepped through the threshold.
The door didn't close behind him—it vanished, rewritten from reality. As if the system didn't want anyone else to follow.
The hall continued, no longer made of data-fractured stone but obsidian glass, smooth and alive. Each step echoed with a pulse beneath him. Not sound. Code.
["The inheritance path is initializing, but something's wrong. The creator's signature... it's fragmented. This isn't a clean handoff."]
He didn't respond. Ahead, the corridor bent around a spiraling core of suspended memory—holographic ghosts of past players flickering in and out of view. Failed heirs. Terminated access.
Ji-Hoon's fingers twitched. The air felt heavier. Not in pressure. In weight of consequence.
A final door awaited.
It was shaped like a command line prompt, and it blinked slowly:
> ACCEPT INHERITANCE? [Y/N]
But another prompt glitched beneath it, flickering into existence and then corrupting itself with red overlays.
> ACCEPT CORRUPTION? [Y/N]
["That's not supposed to be there. Someone injected foreign code into the inheritance process. This is a trap layered on top of a gift."]
He stared at both prompts.
Two choices. Neither honest.
He selected both.
The system reacted violently.
The lights flared, code screamed through the walls, and his interface rebooted mid-sync. He dropped to one knee, blood leaking from his nose. Not from pain. From overload. Two system layers, both incompatible, were being shoved into the same slot.
✦ Class Update: Recode — Branching Conflict Detected
✦ Attempting Merge...
✦ Warning: Foreign Signature Detected [ANIMUS CLASS: ???]
✦ Proceeding with Adaptive Integration...
["Ji-Hoon—! This isn't just unlocking your next level. You're being rewritten in real-time."]
He didn't answer. He couldn't. The system gripped his skull like a vice, feeding dual data streams into his spine.
Then everything stopped.
And he opened his eyes.
His reflection shimmered against the obsidian glass. His face was the same—sharp, defiant, a hint of fatigue in the eyes—but his presence wasn't.
His coat had changed. The onyx fabric was darker now, almost reflective, embroidered with thin crimson threads forming ever-shifting glyphs—command lines written in a dead language. A second layer of modular plates had emerged across his shoulders and back, like vertebrae formed from collapsed server shards. His right arm shimmered with unstable energy—not armor, but raw executable code shaped like skin.
He didn't look like a player anymore.
He looked like something the system had tried to erase and failed.
✦ NEW PATH UNLOCKED: Recode [Glitched Heir]
✦ Class Type: Hybrid Override
✦ Passive Unlocked: Dual-Layer Runtime→ You now run two conflicting class protocols simultaneously. Stability: 43%
✦ New Skill: Command Injection→ Rewrite low-tier system behavior within 10m radius for 6 seconds. Cooldown: 10 minutes.
["You're not just Recode anymore... you're becoming a contradiction the system can't classify. That makes you dangerous."]
The tower shuddered. From above, the lights shifted—white to violet.
Something had noticed.
Then—an alert triggered without warning.
✦ ALERT: Unauthorized Layer Detected
✦ Anomaly Deployment in Progress
✦ Boss Entity: NULL HYBRID [LEVEL ???]
✦ Spawn Zone: 1F – Core Process Room
["They're sending a failsafe. You've triggered a kill protocol."]
He turned slowly.
From the obsidian window, he saw it descending—an amalgamated mass of corrupted Admin code, AI fragments, and dead player tags swirling into a monstrous form. Its limbs didn't connect. Its face had no symmetry. But it moved with purpose.
The system had one rule above all:
No one inherits without control.
Ji-Hoon dropped into a stance.
The air cracked with pressure.
And then he charged