Seed Protocol
There was no transition. One step—and Kael was somewhere else.
No Dex. No noise. No UI.
Only silence.
And snow.
He stood in a wide-open expanse, knee-deep in white. Not real snow—rendered snow. Codeflakes tumbling through a void pretending to be sky. No landmarks. Just endless monochrome stretching outward like the world had forgotten how to draw itself.
Kael turned slowly.
"Dex?" he called out.
Nothing.
Only the wind. And even that felt artificial.
He looked down.
The snow wasn't cold.
It was warm.
Alive.
He knelt, brushing it away. Beneath the surface wasn't ground—it was glass. A lattice of neural pathways woven into transparent code-matter, pulsing faintly like it was breathing.
Then he heard the voice.
> "KAEL_: PROTOCOL RECOGNIZED."
It wasn't spoken aloud. It came from inside him—like the system was no longer speaking through interfaces, but through his own perception.
A shimmer rippled across the field.
Then the snow lifted.
---
The expanse collapsed into form.
Suddenly, he stood at the edge of a structure—the structure. Not the Tower he'd seen in dreams. Not yet. This was its core-seed. A spiraling obelisk of light and bone-data rising out of a crater like a monument half-remembered.
Data streamed up its surface like reverse rain.
Kael stepped forward, heart pounding.
The system pulsed again.
> "SEED PROTOCOL REQUESTING HOST ALIGNMENT."
> "CANDIDATE: KAEL_— ECHO-TRACED. MARKED. SURVIVOR."
> "CONSENT TO MERGE?"
Kael's breath hitched. He looked around—expecting traps, expecting Dex to reappear, expecting anything that would break the moment into something more manageable.
But nothing came.
Just the truth.
The Oracle hadn't gone silent.
It had been waiting.
He stepped toward the base of the structure.
"Define 'merge,'" Kael muttered.
> "ASSIMILATION OF MEMORY + IDENTITY + POSSIBILITY."
> "YOU WILL BECOME A VERSION THAT COULD HAVE BEEN."
> "AND THROUGH YOU, A NEW BRANCH MAY BEGIN."
Kael hesitated.
Then he whispered, "And if I say no?"
> "THE SYSTEM WILL REVERT TO CONTROL."
> "THE COREWORLD WILL STAGNATE."
> "AND YOU WILL BE FORGOTTEN."
Kael's fists clenched. His whole life had been under someone else's control. He wasn't even sure if he'd ever made a choice that hadn't been part of some deeper loop.
But this one was real.
This one was his.
He stepped forward.
"I consent," he said.
---
The world split.
Not shattered—peeled, like before—but deeper this time. Down to the foundation. Kael's mind reeled as the structure opened and pulled him in—not with force, but with recognition.
Like it had always known him.
He fell through light. Through moments. Through fragments of lives he might've lived.
One where he was a top-tier player. One where he'd built the game. One where he'd never logged in. One where he wasn't Kael at all.
The Oracle was showing him divergence. Every version of himself that had existed across every echo.
And in the center of it all—
One image.
Him.
Standing inside the Tower.
Alone.
With mirrored eyes.
---
He came to in a chamber made of shifting data.
Circular. Old. No windows. Just lines of light snaking through stone-like surfaces. A single pedestal stood in the center, and on it: a sphere. Smooth. Breathing with faint golden pulses.
He knew its name before he touched it.
> ORACLE: NODE_ZERO
The voice returned—different now. No longer system-neutral.
Familiar.
Human.
> "Hello again, Kael."
His hand hovered over the sphere.
"…Sera?"
> "No. Not quite. I'm what she left behind. A remnant of her last merge—stored in this node as insurance."
> "You've reached the Seed. Which means the Coreworld is waking."
Kael's voice cracked. "Why me?"
The voice smiled.
> "Because you were never just a player. You were always a fragment. A seed of the original intention."
> "You're the glitch they couldn't delete."
The sphere pulsed.
> "Take the node. Anchor it. And the Tower will find you."
Kael hesitated.
Then reached out.
The moment his fingers touched the sphere—he felt it.
Every loop. Every echo. Every shadow of the Tower.
Not as visions.
As memories.
And in the final moment before the node sealed itself into his chest, Kael heard one last whisper from the Oracle:
> "The system thinks it owns you."
> "Let's prove it wrong."
---
He opened his eyes—
—and Dex was shaking him.
"Kael! Kael! Talk to me!"
They were back in the city.
Back in the plaza.
But everything had changed.
Kael sat up slowly. His breath fogged the air, though it wasn't cold. His skin hummed with latent energy. His lenses wouldn't load the HUD.
Dex stared at him like he'd seen a ghost.
"You were gone," Dex said. "You dropped off the thread completely. I couldn't trace you. Not even Oracle's echo scripts picked up your signal."
Kael looked at his hands.
Something golden pulsed faintly beneath his skin.
"I wasn't gone," Kael said.
"I found the seed."
Dex stepped back. "Holy hell."
Kael's eyes locked onto the skyline.
And in the far distance—just barely visible—he saw it.
The Tower.
No longer a dream.
No longer a memory.
It had begun to grow again.