The tower trembled. Not from impact—but from awakening.
Ji-Hoon stood before the wall of system portraits, his breath shallow. The portrait of Ryu Jae-Hwan no longer displayed [Status: Offline]. It flickered.
Now it read:[Status: Inherited – Transfer Complete]
["Your access level has changed. The tower has recognized you as a living system exception."]
The air buzzed. Lines of golden code began crawling along the walls, spilling from the portraits, spiraling toward the center of the chamber. Ji-Hoon stepped back instinctively, his upgraded boots shifting noise across the data-glass floor.
A low pulse echoed behind him.
The wall slid open.
A corridor revealed itself—longer than it should've been. It bent forward and down, like a spinal cord carved from wireframe geometry and ossified memory.
Ji-Hoon narrowed his eyes. "Another test?"
["No… This wasn't built for tests. This was buried. Whatever's at the end—no one was meant to find it."]
He entered.
The corridor stretched endlessly. The walls displayed corrupted logs from Edenfall's pre-launch dev environment. System conversations, rejected skill trees, rejected classes. One caught his eye:
[CLASS: Version Ghost – Rejected]
"Incompatible with Player Sync Framework. Causes temporal desync. Scrap all variants."
That same moment, he felt the floor shift.
And a voice whispered—not aloud, not in his head—but through the code itself.
"Are you… real?"
Ji-Hoon spun.
At the far end of the hall stood a girl, barely older than him. Pale, flickering. Her body existed in two timelines at once. Every time she moved, her figure stuttered—like an unstable video feed. Her hair flowed, black with silver seams, and her eyes were static-filled voids.
Above her:
[???: Aya – Version Ghost]
["Warning. She's a living inconsistency. A bug that survived deletion."]
Aya tilted her head. "You're not dev-side. You shouldn't be able to see me."
Ji-Hoon's system flared—defensive scripts prepping. But he didn't lift his hand. "Neither should you exist."
"I don't," she said. "Not properly."
Behind her, the corridor shook.
Another system presence had noticed their convergence.
A pulse unlike any before followed.
Then came the voice. Ancient. Layered. Mechanical—but wrong. Not built. Birthed.
"FORERUNNER PROTOCOL ACTIVE. DEVIATIONS DETECTED."
Ji-Hoon moved in front of Aya just as the corridor ahead twisted open like paper. A silhouette descended from the ceiling—seven meters tall, vaguely humanoid, but entirely composed of shifting algorithmic mesh. Its chest glowed with the first Edenfall kernel: [V.0.00 – Genesis Loop]
["That's a pre-deployment watchdog. A prototype admin built to guard system truth. It never went live—because it learned how to rewrite itself."]
The Forerunner raised an arm.
✦ Skill Detected: Prime Loop – Memory Rewrite
Ji-Hoon dodged on instinct, but the attack didn't hit his body. It struck his past—a temporal ripple that destabilized his last five seconds of movement. The Forerunner could undo his decisions before they happened.
["It doesn't just attack. It rolls back. Every action you take, it can cancel."]
"Then I won't give it just one path to cancel."
✦ Skill Activated: System Trace
✦ Skill Evolved: Recode Phantom [Tier 2]Description: While inside system anomalies or ghost sectors, Ji-Hoon can project cause-effect branches. If one path is erased, the system automatically shifts him to the next most probable route.
Ji-Hoon's body flickered forward. Three versions of him moved at once—slightly out of phase. The Forerunner tried to rewind one. Another took its place.
He leapt upward, pulled a rewritten blade of corrupted quest data from the wall, and plunged it into the Forerunner's neck mesh.
Sparks flew.
Aya flinched. "You can fight it?"
"Not win. Just hold it off."
The Forerunner's core pulsed again. This time, it looped itself, reversing the damage done and emerging whole.
But Ji-Hoon smiled faintly.
Because he had planted something else.
✦ Injected Payload: Phantom Thread – Logic Fork Initiated
["It won't stop the Forerunner, but it'll force it to process recursive futures. Every attack it makes will slow as it evaluates possible counters. You've given it too many choices."]
Ji-Hoon grabbed Aya's arm. She staggered like her body wasn't fully here.
"Can you still see the exit node?" he asked.
"Yes," she whispered.
"Then guide us through."
The Forerunner surged—but hesitated. For just a moment. That's all he needed.
They ran.
And behind them, the chamber of secrets shut tight once again, sealing the Forerunner in recursive battle with itself.