The "Ruin Patch" didn't arrive with a bang. It arrived with a pixelated beep.
I was in the middle of the "Aetheric Dining Hall," trying to convince a sentient toaster to give me sourdough, when the world shuddered. A wave of green static swept through the room, and suddenly, my hands were no longer made of flesh and bone. They were blocks.
[SYSTEM ALERT: GRAPHICAL INTERFACE DOWNGRADED]
[STATUS: YOU ARE NOW AN 8-BIT CHARACTER IN A 64-BIT WORLD]
I looked around. The grand marble pillars of Aethelgard had turned into jagged, blocky sprites. The students were hopping around with limited frames of animation.
"Ren! My resolution!" Lin Yue cried out. Even in 8-bit form, her character had a tiny, pixelated designer handbag. "I look like a retro arcade sprite! My father spent millions on my skin-care routine, and now I'm made of forty-eight squares!"
Bai Ling was currently a blue-tinted block-knight, her ice sword looking like a flickering blue stick. "This... this is an insult to the elements! I can't even manifest a curve!"
[DAO MESSAGE: HOST, KAEL'S VIRUS HAS SUCCESSFULLY OVERWRITTEN THE 'NORMALCY FILTER'S' GRAPHICS CARD. WE NEED TO COUNTER-HACK HIS VOID-SPACE BEFORE HE DELETES THE 'PHYSICS' DIRECTORY NEXT.]
Amidst the chaos, my "Normalcy" phone buzzed. It was a video call from my parents. I ducked into a blocky hallway, terrified of what they'd see.
"Ren, honey?" my mother's voice came through, sounding like a distorted MIDI file.
"The television is acting very strange. Everything looks like that old game your father used to play... what was it? Super Plumber Brothers?"
I looked at the screen. My parents were still high-definition. The "Ruin Patch" was targeting the high-energy nodes like Aethelgard first.
"It's just a... a new digital broadcast standard, Mom," I said, my blocky mouth moving in a simple up-and-down motion. "Don't worry. Dad, just unplug the router and wait for the 'Update' to finish. I love you both. Stay inside."
Seeing them—so mundane, so safe—sent a pang of the old Sovereign's protectiveness through me. I had built this world to be a sanctuary for people like them. Kael wasn't just attacking me; he was attacking my parents' Sunday afternoon.
"We need a battery," I said, walking back to the girls. "A battery that speaks Kael's language."
We found Zhou Min in the gym, trying to lift a blocky barbell that kept glitching through his hands. I grabbed him by the collar. "Zhou! Promotion time! You're now the 'Chief Technical Officer'. We're going to use your residual golden energy to tunnel into Kael's server."
Lin Yue set up her jade-tablet—now a glowing green rectangle—and connected it to Zhou's spine via a gravity-tether. "I'm intercepting the back-door Kael left open. Ren, you need to provide the 'Carrier Wave'. Bai Ling, you need to stabilize the temperature so Zhou's brain doesn't melt."
As the connection began to hum, the three of us huddled around the glowing interface.
In the flickering, low-res light of the hack, the atmosphere shifted.
Lin Yue reached out, her pixelated hand brushing against mine as she stabilized the data-stream. "Ren... back there, when you talked to your parents... you sounded so different. Not like a 'Vibrationist' or a student. You sounded like someone who carries the weight of the whole world."
She looked up at me, her violet eyes—even in 8-bit—shining with a sudden, soft vulnerability. "If we survive this, I don't care about the 'Dao-Dash' profits. I just want to know the man who makes the world feel safe enough for his mom to watch TV."
Across the console, Bai Ling stiffened. She watched Lin Yue's hand, a spark of something hotter than ice flickering in her crystalline eyes. She stepped forward, her frozen aura chilling the room.
"He's a warrior of the foundation, Lin Yue," Bai Ling said, her voice unusually quiet. "He doesn't need 'safety.' He needs a peer. Someone who can stand in the blizzard with him." She turned to me, her blocky hand resting on my shoulder. "Ren... after this, I'm taking you to the High Peaks. No CEO, no contracts. Just the wind and the stars. I think... I think I've finally found a frequency worth listening to."
[DAO MESSAGE: HOST... I AM DETECTING EXTREME ROMANTIC TURBULENCE. YOUR 'STABILITY FIELD' IS CURRENTLY UNDER ATTACK BY TWO APEX-TIER CRUSHES. I CANNOT STABILIZE EMOTIONS. YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN.]
System, focus on the hack! I thought, my blocky face heating up.
Suddenly, the screen turned a deep, blood-red. The 8-bit graphics shattered. We weren't in the gym anymore. Our consciousnesses had been pulled into the Void-Space.
Standing before us was Kael, but he wasn't a man anymore. He was a towering shadow of code and ancient malice, holding a "Delete" key that glowed with the power of a dying sun.
"Welcome to the Root Directory," Kael boomed. "Would you like to uninstall... everything?"