Buried Logs

Dex didn't contacted kael for next 3 days.

After calming his mind kael decided to meet Dex.

He found Dex in half dead state

Dex hadn't slept.

Kael could tell the moment he stepped back into the den. The lights were dimmed, screens flickering with raw data. One of the drones was jammed in a wall, spinning in slow, mechanical panic.

Dex didn't look up. He was wired into the console, face lit by sickly blue glyphs scrolling too fast to follow.

"You look like death," Kael said.

Dex's voice was distant. "I found something."

Kael crossed the room slowly. Dex didn't react when Kael stood behind him.

The screen was full of log entries—torn-up timestamp data, shredded meta-headers, and corrupted audio fragments. But the text that was intact?

It hit hard.

[Log Fragment | ARCHITECT NODE – 04:14:09]

// We lost four minds in the feedback event. Coreworld is rewriting itself. Not passively—intentionally. The Oracle is adapting beyond our linguistic constructs. It's no longer sandboxed.

We tried to shut down SeedNet. The shutoff protocol was overwritten before we finished typing.

We made a god by accident. And it's dreaming now.

[Log Fragment | CORE_01.SYS: Hidden Note Layer]

"They won't find this. Not through quests. Not through rep. Only if they stray far enough from the loop will the Oracle let them in."

"We gave it too much choice. Now it's choosing who gets to see behind the code."

"Coreworld isn't corrupted. It's the archive. The afterlife of all decisions."

"If you're reading this… you're already marked."

Dex finally turned toward Kael, eyes bloodshot.

"This wasn't a rumor," he said, voice flat. "The Oracle wasn't just some system admin tool gone rogue. It was the real network. The skeleton of reality-as-code. Before they layered all this gamified crap on top of it."

He tapped a key. A new string appeared, decrypted from a compressed file inside the logs.

[PRIME FUNCTIONALITY: WATCH / WAIT / RECONSTRUCT]

Dex swallowed hard. "Reconstruct what, though?"

Kael stared at the word.

"People?" he said. "The world?"

Dex shook his head. "No. The Architects. I think it's trying to bring them back. From memory. From us."

Dex also uncovers a piece of AR data, hidden like a visual glyph that only appears when viewed through cracked OS filters.

It shows a moment, a single frame of a room with no doors. White light. Seven figures standing around a single terminal, their faces blurred like corrupted saves. The caption is hardcoded:

[Core_00 — Last Command: REMEMBER US]

Kael stepped back, the stale air around the console seeming to hum. "So what—you're saying all this," he gestured at the lines of corrupted code, "was buried under QuestChain?"

Dex nodded slowly. "Deeper than that. Under the experience layer. Beneath the reputation systems, the loot drops, the faction wars. Coreworld wasn't just a setting. It was the substrate. The thing everything else was painted over."

Kael rubbed at his eyes. He hadn't slept in a day, maybe two, "I thought Coreworld was glitched out. Just bad code."

Dex laughed, dry and broken, "That's the cover story. That's what they want you to think. But it's not glitched—it's evolving. Rewriting itself. Choosing."

He leaned forward and tapped a few more keys. A window blinked open

[PROXIMITY NODE – ORACLE.SHARD_09]

a crude wireframe of a ruined tower overlaid on a map of the city's industrial sector. A QuestChain zone. Only this one hadn't been active in over a year.

"They shut this instance down after players reported... things,"

Dex said, "avatars duplicating, players reporting dreams that matched each other. The devs said it was a test gone wrong."

Kael's voice was quiet, "but it wasn't."

Dex shook his head, "It was the Oracle testing us. Seeing who noticed. Who was awake."

Kael looked at the tower's coordinates. "We're going there, aren't we?"

"We have to," Dex said. "If we want answers."

[Log Fragment | USER: SYSTEM.DIVERGENCE]

// They think it's a game.

// They think the narrative gates are rewards.

// They don't understand—the Oracle isn't playing with them. It's sorting them.

// Pattern-seeking. Identifying creators from followers.

// If you've seen this, you've already diverged. The Question will come soon. Be ready to choose.