[Status: Unanchored]
[Warning: Vein Stability < 10%]
[No System Authority Detected]
[Core: Reacting to Lost Protocols…]
"You are outside of all mapped existence."
Cael Vox landed in silence.
No flash. No impact.
Just… absence.
He stood in a realm that wasn't.
The ground beneath his feet looked like a mirror, fractured and floating in void. Chunks of old ruins drifted weightlessly in the sky — broken columns, statues with no heads, shattered glyphs. Stars blinked above, but not in constellations. They pulsed like… errors, like system notifications waiting to be seen.
The air buzzed. Cold. Static. Familiar in a way he couldn't place.
His reflection didn't move.
[Echo Layer Decoupled]
[Temporal State: Dual]
[Warning: Core Instability rising — 8%]
"You are now walking between decisions you haven't made yet."
He stared at the reflection — and it stared back. But it didn't mimic his posture.
It smirked.
"You're early," the reflection said.
Cael blinked. "What?"
The mirror shattered beneath him.
---
He fell—
Not down. Through.
Through sound. Through thought. Through timelines.
Flickers. Visions.
A city on fire, people chanting his name like a curse.
A woman crying, holding a blade with his symbol on it.
A god-thing with no face whispering: "You should not have come back."
Then light.
Then silence.
Then… a whisper.
"Anchor located. Welcome, Cael Vox… to Realm: X-Null."
"Here, you are not forbidden."
"Here… you are remembered."
He gasped awake, lying in a shallow pool of glowing liquid that smelled like ink and memory.
Around him, towering monoliths floated in rings — cracked and humming with glyphs from no known language. In the distance, floating platforms spiraled upward toward a pale, broken moon hanging too low in the sky.
Everything felt… watchful.
Cael stood slowly. His boots left no ripples in the pool. The hum inside his chest had grown louder.
He wasn't alone.
Across the ruins stood a figure — humanoid, but shifting, pixelated at the edges. Its voice echoed directly into Cael's thoughts.
"You brought the Core here. Why?"
"I didn't," Cael said. "It brought me."
The figure stepped forward, its form glitching between frames — sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes both.
"You are the first to enter X-Null willingly."
"This place is memory. Discarded timelines. Broken rules. Things the System does not want seen."
"So I've noticed," Cael muttered.
"Then you must choose," the entity said, raising one arm.
"You may claim the first shard… or turn back and forget you were ever here."
A glowing object rose from the pool — a jagged crystal pulsing with fractured light, orbiting faint echoes of voices too damaged to understand.
Cael felt it draw toward him.
Like it belonged.
Or maybe like it was a part of him, left behind long ago.
[Shard of the Forgotten Path — Acquirable]
[Warning: Choosing this item will alter your fate permanently.]
[Proceed?]
[Y/N]
Cael didn't hesitate.
> [Y]
The moment he touched it, his vision broke into pieces.
---