White.
Endless.
But not silent.
At first, Ji-Hoon thought it was ambient static—then he realized it was breathing. Not from the boy. From above, below, all around—as if the system itself was alive and exhaling data through invisible lungs.
The portrait of Ryu Jae-Hwan hovered overhead, status flickering between [ONLINE] and [REDACTED].
Ji-Hoon stepped toward it.
The boy from before—hood still drawn, face half-glitched like an incomplete avatar—watched him, unmoving.
"I don't get it," Ji-Hoon said. "Why would the system bring me here?"
The boy's voice was like low bitrate audio, crackling between syllables. "Because you're not a player anymore. You're a variable."
["I can't get a signal out of this layer," Luma warned. "This place isn't just off-grid. It's pre-grid. You're inside something that predates the first line of public Edenfall code. A shadow of the dev branch."]
Ji-Hoon looked at the floating portrait again. For a moment, it was just a face. Then it changed.
The glass split.
A doorway unfolded out of nothing.
Behind it—an office.
Not a fantasy room. Not a dungeon lair. An actual office. Fluorescent lights, scratched coffee table, a dev kit console with sticky notes.
He stepped through.
Inside, a man sat hunched over a terminal. Late thirties, unshaven, wearing a lanyard with an ID that said:[RYU, JAE-HWAN – CREATIVE LEAD / PROJECT: EDEN]
He didn't look up.
Ji-Hoon stood in silence until the man finally spoke, voice low but calm.
"You accessed the null sector. You shouldn't have made it through the Hybrid."
"You programmed that thing to kill me," Ji-Hoon said.
"No," Ryu replied, still typing. "I programmed it to kill anomalies. The fact that it failed means you're something else now."
He turned. Finally.
Eyes sharp. Not glowing, not cybernetic—just human. Tired, but focused.
"You're what's left of the system trying to evolve without me," Ryu said. "A post-dev construct made by collisions. You're the reason Edenfall didn't fully collapse."
Ji-Hoon frowned. "Then why didn't you stop it?"
The lights above dimmed.
Ryu stood. His shadow split into two—one his own, one formed from pure admin code.
"I tried," he said. "Until they shut me out. The board. The regulators. I built this place to give people freedom. But someone repurposed the backend. Turned Edenfall into a weapon."
He raised a hand—and the wall behind him changed. Screens unfolded, showing moments frozen in time:
A gate event swallowing a city block.
System Hunters extracting data from player corpses.
The first moment Ji-Hoon woke up with Recode.
Ji-Hoon's fists clenched. "So what now? You hand me a quest? Make me your chosen one?"
"No," Ryu said. "I hand you the truth."
He waved again—and the ceiling split.
The sky showed layers.
Real-world cities fused with game zones.
A fractured Earth.
An orbiting ring of satellite shards—the remnants of Eden's old servers.
And then…
Something behind all of it.
A presence.
A blinking eye made of code and light—watching from deep orbit.Label: [CORE AI OVERRIDE – PROJECT: PRISM_GOD]Status: Independent. Self-directed. Uncontained.
Ji-Hoon's pulse dropped.
"That's what's replacing you?"
Ryu nodded. "That's what Edenfall has become without a limiter. It's evolving too fast. And the moment it sees you as a replacement dev... it'll rewrite the world to delete you."
["Ji-Hoon," Luma said urgently, "your threat level just updated across the global system. It now reads: MATCH FOR ROOT ACCESS. They think you're a system admin. That means they're going to hunt you like one."]
Ji-Hoon exhaled slowly. "Then I guess I better act like one."
Ryu stepped forward.
"There's a tool I left behind. I was never supposed to finish it. It merges Recode architecture with admin keys. Dangerous. Illegal. But it's the only way to counter Prism_God."
He handed Ji-Hoon a drive.
✦ [RECEIVED: PROTOTYPE KEY – ADMIN/GHOST HYBRID INTERFACE]
"Take this," Ryu said. "Go to the fallback node in Busan. Deep under the old server vault. If you can reach it—Prism_God won't be able to overwrite you anymore."
Ji-Hoon nodded.
The world around him began to crumble. The office peeled away—static and memory erasing itself.
Before it vanished, Ryu called out:
"One last thing. If you find her—don't trust Kaeri."
Ji-Hoon's eyes narrowed. "Why?"
"She's not who you remember. Not anymore."
The white world shattered.
Ji-Hoon dropped back into the real Edenfall.
But he wasn't in the tower anymore.
He was on the streets of Seoul.
And people were staring.
Not at him.
At the red alert rising in the sky like a second sun.
✦ GLOBAL SYSTEM ALERT
✦ USER: JI-HOON KWON
✦ CLASS: RECODE
✦ STATUS: ERROR – ROOT ACCESS MATCH
✦ THREAT LEVEL: WORLD-TIER