The first signs didn't come with warnings.
They came as reports people scrolled past.
A freight train in northern China derailed without impact marks. In Chile, a mining crew reported hearing voices underground, clear enough to argue with, then silence. An oil platform off the coast of Norway shut itself down after every sensor returned the same error value exceeds narrative limit a phrase no engineer could trace back to any known software.
Most of it was written off as ...
Bad data.
Hysteria.
Stress.
Then an incident in Brazil happened.
It was caught on three angles through Traffic cam, phone footage, and a livestream that cut out mid-sentence. A man stood in the middle of São Paulo traffic while a compact car pinned his leg. there was no screaming. No panic.
He bent down, fingers digging into metal like it was warm clay, and lifted. Not explosively like the way Superman may have rising it,Just enough to step out.
Later interviews failed to get what exactly happened as himself didn't understand at that time.
His blood pressure spiked until monitors flat lined, then returned to normal. Doctors said his muscle density didn't match his frame anymore. When asked how he did it, the man kept repeating the same sentence.
"It made sense when I touched it."
The clip spread.
Then it vanished.
Two days later, in Seoul, a woman collapsed during a subway delay. When she woke up, she described the tunnel walls as "unfinished," said there were symbols behind the concrete. She spoke calmly, switching between Korean, Latin, and something that sounded structured but wrong. Linguists couldn't place it. Neither could AI translators.
She disappeared after being transferred.
In Eastern Europe, a group livestreamed a ritual they claimed was fictional. They didn't finish it. The feed ended with screaming and something moving in the background that didn't obey perspective.
Nigeria didn't get headlines at first.
Just the usual noise of Africa lives, but some changes started happening around.
Power fluctuations across Lagos that didn't match grid failures. A preacher in Ibadan claimed an angel spoke through him then froze mid-sermon, eyes tracking something no one else could see. In the north, villagers reported animals refusing to cross certain roads, circling instead, as if avoiding lines drawn into the land.
A university student in Benin City posted a thread about "patterned coincidence" before deleting their account entirely.
People argued and debated
Governments denied any conclusions made as there were no actual proof.
But Life kept moving.
Then, months later, the thunder hit.
It was loud. Not exactly.
It pressed inward.
Everyone felt it on balconies, underground, mid-flight, mid-sentence. A deep vibration that lasted long enough for people to realize it wasn't normal and too short for anyone to react to it.
Seven seconds.
After that, nothing followed.
No damage reports. No aftershocks. No explanation.
The internet filled in the blanks anyway.
End times. Judgment. Reset theories. Some claimed it was God. Others blamed experiments. A few said the world had been updated.
Weeks passed and Nothing happened.
Fear burned out like bad fuel.
Then, a week later, the changes stopped pretending to be rare.
A teenager in Haiti walked through a house fire and came out coughing, skin untouched. In Texas, a man fired a gun that refused to discharge, the metal folding in on itself instead. In Tokyo, a woman swore a man stepped out of a billboard and vanished between crowds.
This time, some people saw something else.
At exactly 11:43 a.m., nothing happened and yet, everything changed.
Phones froze. Screens flickered. Words appeared, vanished, and appeared again, like reality itself was buffering.
Some people heard whispers.
Some felt heat crawl under their skin.
Some collapsed, crying, laughing, or screaming names that didn't belong to them.
And most people?
Most people felt nothing at all.
Invisible structures layered over reality, assigning meaning, roles, and potential. Systems that didn't announce themselves loudly. Systems that didn't care if they were understood.
They called themselves different things depending on who saw them.
Frameworks.
Registries.
Archives.
They all said the same thing, more or less.
One slot available.
Selection irreversible.
Out of billions, only a fraction were chosen with the so called systems at least Two percent or Five, at most.
The rest of humanity would live beside gods, demons, heroes, and nightmares
And call it coincidence.
Some attain heroes. Some saw demons. Others chose names pulled straight from fiction, fan stories, myths, things that were never supposed to exist outside imagination.
Out of billions, only a fraction received anything at all. While lucky few also went through evolution and mutation.
Aren Vale noticed. He was alone, late at night, in a rented apartment with thin walls and unreliable power. His mother was Nigerian, his father Haitian. He'd spent his life moving, adapting, never fully rooted anywhere long enough to call it permanent.
The lights flickered in the apartment.
Text crept into the corner of his vision, uneven, like it didn't fully belong in the world yet.
Origin Framework detected
Status: unstable
He waited for the rest.
It didn't hurry.
Character Slot: 0/1
Framework growth: passive
Aren frowned. "Passive?"
Outside, sirens started again, distant but layered, overlapping from different directions. His phone buzzed screenshots from friends, clean interfaces with clear labels, some already boasting names attached to them.
Somewhere outside, a man screamed then laughed like he'd just won the lottery.
Aren's phone buzzed. Messages flooded in...
"Bro I got a hero!"
"Someone just summoned a demon downtown!!"
"TURN ON THE NEWS NOW"
His heartbeat thudded louder with every second.
Others were chosen.
And whatever chose him?
His framework felt unfinished by comparison.
Growth method: self-adjusting
Feedback intake: delayed
That sounded worse.
Another line appeared, slower, like it was thinking.
This framework upgrades independently.
Upgrade speed: below average
Below average. Of course.
But the text continued.
Stability accumulation increases long-term output.
Aren leaned back against the wall.
Others were advancing fast with flashy power, immediate results. His system wasn't giving him anything like that.
Framework condition: early draft
Recommendation: endure
He didn't feel stronger at all with how he was seeing things.
He Didn't feel chosen like most protagonist in those crappy novels he reads.
But as sirens echoed through the city and the world outside started bending in ways no one could fully explain as chaos was installed into the world.