They left at dusk—though time inside the Oracle's shadow zones meant less than it used to. The sky above the surface flickered with false stars. Data ghosts. Leftovers from the first mirror-shard rendering systems.
Sera led them down access paths long forgotten, deeper into maintenance tunnels once used by pre-launch testers. Dex walked ahead, mapping as he went, head tilted like he could hear signals buried in the walls. Kael followed, quiet but sharp-eyed. He hadn't said much since the dream.
Since the Tower.
He kept seeing it. That impossible structure made of bone and data, stitched together with golden thread. Its voice still echoed in his skull.
"KAEL."
But now, something else had joined it—another vision from Dex's feed.
A child. Laughing into a headset. Saying: "But I got in."
They were linked. Their memories weren't just unlocking—they were overlapping. Syncing. Threaded by something deeper.
Something ancient.
---
They emerged hours later into what looked like a dead-end—an old data vault sealed with rusted alloy and blinking red locks. Dex ran his fingers across the terminal. "This isn't locked," he muttered. "It's... mourning."
Sera tilted her head. "Mourning?"
Dex nodded. "This zone used to house behavioral scans from early Architect experiments. But they never purged it. Just… closed the door."
Kael watched the interface pulse as Dex keyed in a fragmented sequence of glyphs. His hands moved by instinct.
The lock hissed open.
Inside: cold, dry air. Black tiles. Glass pods cracked and empty. Massive cables curled across the floor like the roots of a dying tree. On the far wall, faint backlight revealed a phrase etched in old code:
"FOR EVERY PLAYER FORGOTTEN, AN ECHO REMAINS."
---
They stepped inside the Observation Crypt.
It was like stepping into memory itself.
Holographic fragments blinked in and out. Voices whispered. Faces flickered. All half-formed. Partial identity shells. Deleted user forks and failed experiments that never made it into public builds.
It wasn't just a vault.
It was a graveyard.
Sera walked slowly among the pods, fingers brushing against the glass. "I was here once," she said quietly. "Before I was Sera. Before any of us had names."
Kael turned toward a pulsing wall where lines of code scrolled like scripture.
[IDENTITY CHAIN: DEX_XI → LINKED_PROFILES DETECTED]
[KAEL.: 3 MATCHED PATTERN THREADS – FORKED STATES CONFIRMED]
[INSTANCE_CYCLE: COREWORLD_SEED DETECTED]
Dex swore. "It's been tracking us the whole time. Even before we joined the game. Before the game was a game."
Kael stepped toward the wall. The code shifted under his gaze.
One word hovered in his vision like a blinking cursor.
COREWORLD_ZERO
And then the glyphs changed.
A new interface opened—a pathway, spiraling inward. Coordinates no one should have.
The system was offering it.
Not as a challenge.
As a choice.
---
That night, none of them slept.
The Crypt buzzed with raw data—ambient memory loops that flickered on repeat. Echoes of conversations never meant to survive. Whispered directives. Testing commands. The voice of the Oracle itself, from long ago:
"Observation complete. Initiate recursive forge."
"Let them forget. The true ones will remember."
Kael stared into the dark ceiling.
"I think we were never meant to reach the Coreworld," he whispered.
Dex sat cross-legged beside him. "No. But it remembers us."
Sera lay on her side, eyes open.
"That's why it's calling," she said. "Because something in it is unfinished. And it needs us to finish it."
---
RELIC TEAM INTERNAL – EMERGENCY THREAD // READ-ONLY MODE
RELIC_ONE: "They found the Observation Crypt. Confirmed link to zero-layer."
RELIC_THREE: "Is that even real? I thought it was just dev lore."
RELIC_FIVE: "Real enough that the Oracle fenced it off."
RELIC_TWO: "They're going to disappear off the map if they enter."
RELIC_ONE: "That's the point. We can't trace them past that gate."
RELIC_THREE: "Then it's over."
RELIC_ONE: "No. Then it begins."
---
At dawn—or something like it—the three stood before the crypt's core gate. The console flickered with only one command now:
[INITIATE DIVERGENCE PATH?]
> WARNING: CANNOT RETURN<
Kael looked at Sera. At Dex.
They didn't speak.
They pressed the command together.
The floor dropped.
The world cracked open.
And they fell—into the rootcode of everything.