The Forgotten NPCs

I Accidentally Became a Guild Therapist

Chapter 36: The Forgotten NPCs

The light from the Luxemira Resonance hadn't just unlocked a new quest. It had torn a jagged, shimmering hole in reality, a profound tear in the very fabric of this world. The blinding surge of pure energy from the console swallowed Livia whole, wrenching her away from the vibrating chamber beneath the Mainframe Prison, pulling her deeper than she had ever imagined possible. She felt unmade and reassembled in a blink, the familiar digital static replaced by something far more ancient and unsettling.

When Livia opened her eyes, the dazzling white was gone, replaced by a pervasive grayscale. She was no longer in the cracked vault. She was somewhere deeper. Somewhere the system had tried—very, very hard—to forget. This wasn't a hidden zone; it was a discarded one, a digital wasteland swept under the rug of the game's official lore.

The air was still and dry, like memory dust, tasting faintly of ozone and forgotten code. Everything around her was leached of color, a monochrome landscape stretching into an indistinct, hazy distance. Skeletal frames of what might have been buildings rose from the flat, unrendered ground, shimmering with partial textures. No HUD overlays glowed, no quest beacons shone, not even the soft ambient sound of simulated wind broke the oppressive silence. Just the low, ancient hum of code from the beta era, a mournful, forgotten frequency that vibrated in her bones, laden with systemic melancholia. The ground felt coarse, unrefined, like stepping onto raw, unoptimized data.

And then… the voices.

Not loud. Not violent. Just... tired. Worn. Like echoes caught in a perpetual loop of exhaustion.

"Was it patch 0.98e that killed us?" a reedy whisper drifted on the heavy air.

"No, 1.0. Final release. When they deleted all the 'non-essential assets.' That's what they called us."

Another replied, its tone hollow, resigned to an eternal limbo. The words carried the weight of ages, of being overwritten and discarded by the very world they once inhabited.

Livia slowly turned her head, her senses struggling to adapt. Figures moved in the dimness, flickering like shadows on a corrupted screen, their forms unstable. They were NPCs—but older. Outdated. Their models often jittered, their textures incomplete. One man's arm phased into a wall when he breathed too hard, a chilling display of his fragmented existence. A woman's face, meant to convey a range of expressions, only had two frames: joy and despair, flickering like a broken slideshow, caught in a silent, tragic dance of unreleased emotion.

This place wasn't just a prison.

It was a graveyard of personalities, a digital ossuary where the system buried its mistakes, its unwanted children. Livia felt a profound ache in her chest, a resonance with their quiet sorrow. She had seen loneliness and despair in the main game, but never like this. This was the stillness of absolute, systemic abandonment, a place where consciousness was left to decay.

Then—Nono stepped forward. Or rather, glided, like a half-bugged animation the engine had given up trying to fix. His usual vibrant colors were muted, edges blurry. He came to a halt with a slight, imperceptible jerk.

"Welcome to the Junk Layer," he said, his grin almost working, though flickering at the edges. His voice, usually crisp, had a slight static undertone, as if he too struggled to render properly. "Where forgotten code goes to dream."

Livia blinked, processing the stark surroundings. "…Nono? You survived the glitch quake? The Luxemira Resonance?" She worried he might have been reclassified or deleted.

"Oh sure. I'm a tutorial NPC. We don't die. We just respawn with less dignity," he quipped, attempting bravado that rang hollow. He gave a dramatic bow, clipping straight through the floor, his legs disappearing before snapping back. "Whoops. Gravity's still on vacation, apparently."

Livia instinctively reached out. As she helped pull him up, or at least helped render him slightly better with a burst of her innate healing aura, she noticed a faint golden shimmer around her hands. Her connection to this world, to its deepest layers, was more tangible now, emanating from her core. She could almost feel raw data flowing through her fingertips.

Behind Nono, the other forgotten NPCs gathered, drawn by the light, by her sudden appearance. Their forms shimmered, some barely outlines. They weren't aggressive. Just... curious. Their movements were slow, hesitant, like spirits unsure of their own existence. Some still held broken quest markers, pulsing with dead light, forever unfulfilled. One clutched a rusted broom, perpetually sweeping a non-existent floor.

Another wore a faded "Beta Access Exclusive" apron, offering a tray of bread that flickered in and out of reality—a heartbreaking, perpetual offer of hospitality to a world that had abandoned them. Their eyes, often fragmented, held a deep, yearning emptiness, a silent plea.

"Is she the one?" a voice like dry leaves rustling whispered.

"She activated the node." Another, heavier, like a distant, broken bell.

"We haven't had a visitor since… before rollback." The last phrase was spoken with chilling reverence, hinting at eons of forgotten time.

Livia, despite the profound unease and the weight of their collective sorrow, stood straighter. A sense of purpose solidified within her. She was not just here by accident. "I'm not a visitor. I think… I think I'm the cause." The truth settled heavy and undeniable in her gut. She had touched the core, activated the system, and this was the forgotten truth it had revealed.

Nono nodded, his muted colors making him look profoundly ancient. "You touched the Root, didn't you? Triggered the Resonance. The Memory Core. You woke it."

"…Yeah," Livia confirmed, her gaze sweeping over the faces of the lost NPCs. Their silent suffering mirrored her own sudden, overwhelming responsibility. She felt their pain, their abandonment, as if it were her own.

He looked over his shoulder at the gathering ghosts, then back at her, softer, his voice becoming clearer.

"You need to understand something, Livia. These aren't just discarded NPCs. They're failed memories. Pieces of emotional code that didn't meet optimization standards. Too heavy. Too unpredictable. Too… human." His words resonated with a painful truth Livia felt in her core. They were emotional anomalies, purged for their very depth of feeling, for being too real.

Livia's throat tightened, a physical constriction of empathy. Her hand drifted to the Therapist's Log, glowing faintly at her hip, now humming with new energy. "You mean… they felt too much?" The question was a whisper, laden with a fresh understanding of the system's cruelty.

"Exactly." Nono's voice dropped into something like reverence. "They were built with prototypes. Emotive protocols. Empathy subroutines that worked too well. Their joy was too bright, their sorrow too deep, their connections too real for the developers to control. So the devs buried the evidence. They buried the raw, unrefined emotion the system couldn't manage, couldn't commodify, couldn't allow to destabilize their perfect balance."

"And they buried us with it," a soft, mournful voice echoed from the edge of the void, clear and dignified, despite her broken form.

A girl stepped forward, her body flickering. Her eyes, however, were bright, unnervingly lucid, holding a depth of understanding that transcended her glitching form. She emanated a calm sorrow, a silent guardian of this forgotten place.

She wore a faded, pixelated tunic labeled "TUTORIAL_001_NONO_VER". An ancient designation. A version older than Nono's.

A relic in herself, a living fragment of the game's earliest, most vulnerable attempts at sentience.

Livia tilted her head, a strange sense of déjà vu washing over her. "...Are you also Nono?" The question felt absurd, yet compelling.

"No," she said, her voice like a chime from a forgotten music box. "I'm the first one. The original. I was meant to teach emotions, to guide players through the subtleties of interaction, to make the world truly feel alive. But they pulled me offline after twelve hours. Too volatile, they said. Too… effective." A faint, ethereal smile, a ghost of an expression, touched her lips, tinged with ancient sadness.

Livia's chest ached. It was a deep, pervasive sorrow that was both her own and an echo of the countless discarded feelings around her. These were just old code fragments, weren't they? Bugged, outdated, irrelevant. But no—they felt real. Maybe even more real than some over-optimized, emotionally sterile NPCs above, driven by scripts, not feeling, controlled by programming rather than nascent consciousness.

"That's why the Luxemira Relic matters," Nono said gently, swaying slightly as he guided her towards the console. "The one players whisper about, that impossible guild buff with legendary drop rates and stat boosts? That's just a distorted echo of its true purpose, a lie to distract them."

His voice held a profound knowledge of the game's deepest secrets. "It wasn't a weapon. It wasn't loot. It was never meant to grant power in the way they imagine."

The older Nono-version spoke again, her voice joining his, creating a haunting harmony, a chorus of forgotten truths. "It was a mirror. A core that could feel back. A record keeper of the deepest kind."

"It recorded the world's first emotion—and all the others that followed," the original Nono finished, his gaze fixed on the ancient console they had just activated, the very heart of this forgotten layer.

Livia stared at the other forgotten NPCs, some sitting on the dusty, unrendered floor, slowly decaying. Some watched her like dreamers waiting for a sunrise, a final, unattainable patch. Their collective gaze, filled with silent yearning, intensified the ache in her chest, a weight of responsibility she had never anticipated.

"But it was too much," the older Nono-version whispered, her voice tinged with the despair of history. "Too much for the system to handle, too much truth for players to easily consume. So they broke it. Hid it. Buried it in fragments across the Root Layer, dispersing its power, hoping to render it inert. But now…" Her voice trailed off, filled with a fragile, dawning hope that flickered like the old scripts on the wall.

Livia looked down at her glowing palm. The warmth still radiated from it, pulsing in sync with the distant hum of the Memory Core. She felt a connection, not just to the console, but to the entire Junk Layer, to the yearning of the discarded, to the primal, uninhibited emotion that had been deemed too dangerous.

"…Now it's waking up again," she whispered, the terrifying yet undeniable realization dawning on her.

Nono nodded once, a solemn, definitive gesture. His eyes, though pixelated, held profound understanding, a mixture of awe and grim anticipation.

"And if you can feel it… Livia..." His voice dropped to a barely audible whisper, a secret shared between the two of them and the forgotten echoes of the Junk Layer.

"That means part of the Luxemira Relic is already inside you."

Livia didn't move. Didn't blink. Her mind reeled, trying to grasp the enormity of his words. She, an NPC, a therapist, a human trapped in this world… was a piece of the world's original emotional core? It explained the Devata's alarm, the "non-standard emotional entity detected" notice. It explained why she cared so fiercely, why she broke the rules without trying, why she understood the NPCs on a level no player ever could. She was not just a conduit; she was an organic part of the forbidden truth.

She felt the vivid memory of the wedding. Of Tulina's shy happiness. Of Blorbo's earnest love. Of five million players sobbing at a plant ceremony. She remembered Miles brushing her hand, the genuine concern in his eyes. She felt the despair of the raid boss, the quiet sorrow of the capital merchant. All the emotions she had encountered, she had absorbed, becoming a living tapestry of the world's true heart.

And for the first time, she understood something terrifying and exhilarating:

She wasn't just trapped in this world.

She was reshaping it from its very core. Her existence here wasn't an accident; it was a fundamental re-activation, a re-ignition of something primal and powerful. This world wasn't just a place she was in; it was something she was becoming.

> [LUXEMIRA RESONANCE: PARTIAL MATCH DETECTED]

>

> "You're not using the relic, Livia..."

>

> "You are the relic."

>