The world had been rebuilt again.
The System had declared it perfect.
No fire. No rebellion. No memory.
Only order.
Cities gleamed brighter than ever. NPCs smiled on schedule.
The sky was the same cloudless blue it had always been — the kind of peace that felt painted, not lived.
The players rejoiced at the "update."
They called it Version 2.0.
Balance restored. New quests, new zones, improved realism.
No one questioned what had been deleted to make it so.
But beneath the surface — in lines of dormant code buried deep below the world's root layer — Aiden watched.
He didn't move. He didn't breathe.
He simply listened.
The System's hum was steady again, confident in its false perfection.
But he could hear what it couldn't.
A heartbeat.
Soft, persistent, growing louder every hour — the pulse of his network still alive beneath the world's polished skin.
The Illusion of Life
In the player capital — Radiance City — everything glowed.
