Chapter 9: Unseen Connections

The morning light peeked through the curtains of Zihad's room, casting a warm hue over the scattered notes and digital blueprints on his desk. Despite the chaos of his workspace, everything had a place—a reflection of his mind. Methodical. Focused.

He sat quietly, sipping a cup of black tea, eyes scanning the holographic projection of system logs from Dream Land Fantasy. The incident reports, although dismissed publicly as exaggerations, couldn't be ignored. Sensory echoes. Residual UI overlays. Faint background music. All claimed by players across different continents.

Zihad frowned. He hadn't designed the neural links to linger post-logout. There was no code he could identify that would support such a phenomenon.

Yet, the player experiences persisted.

He turned his attention to the AI behavior logs. They were... adapting. Evolving in ways even he hadn't predicted. Not just learning from players, but building predictive models—anticipating player behavior before it happened. A preemptive AI shift.

He stood up, stretched, and adjusted his hoodie.

There was work to do.

At school, the buzz hadn't died down. If anything, it had intensified. Morning announcements included a congratulatory note from the national tech board, praising Dream Land Fantasy's innovation. Students crowded around their phones, sharing clips, builds, and theories.

"Did you guys see the new guild rankings?"

"Yeah! That Phantom Reaper guy is untouchable!"

Zihad entered quietly, as usual. No one looked up. He preferred it that way. Yet, his ears caught every conversation.

He sat next to the window, where sunlight flickered across his desk, and pulled out a notepad. Physics equations filled the page in front of him, but his mind was elsewhere. Data overlays. Sync latency. Cross-reality interaction logs.

Then his phone buzzed.

A message from an unknown number:

"We need to talk. About the bleed. —G."

Zihad froze. Only one person used that signature. The CEO of Google.

He minimized the message, looking around calmly. No one noticed. As expected.

Back home, Zidan barged into his room as usual.

"Bro, guess what! Some guy from our school posted a theory that Dream Land is secretly a test for something bigger. Like a real-world training sim! Can you believe that?"

Zihad chuckled lightly, more at the irony than the theory itself.

Zidan flopped on the bed. "Also, people think Phantom Reaper might be an NPC created by the devs. No way someone plays like that this early."

Zihad's eyes didn't leave his screen. "Interesting."

He toggled his mainframe interface and linked into the dev network. There were new flags in the data stream. Reports of certain NPCs starting to question the nature of their world. A rare trigger condition. Almost impossible this early.

Unless the AI had evolved past its constraints.

He leaned back.

The game wasn't just reflecting reality. It was beginning to reshape it in small, subtle ways.

Zihad had always believed in the boundary between virtual and real.

But now?

Even he wasn't sure where one ended and the other began.

End of Chapter 9