Chpater 1 - The Error That Shouldn't Exist

The first thing Rael felt wasn't pain.

It was weight.

Heavy. Suffocating. Not physical, but metaphysical—like the world itself was deciding whether he should exist at all. Something unseen pressed into his chest, ribs, and skull, threatening to collapse his very sense of self.

Then—

[System Initialization Error]

[Synchronization Failed — Undefined Host Signature]

[Warning: Reincarnation Thread Conflict Detected]

[Emergency Reboot Engaged]

His eyes snapped open.

Stone.

Cracked marble above him. Shattered pillars. Cold air. Dust suspended like time had stopped mid-fall.

He was alive.

But wrong.

Deep inside, something buzzed in quiet, constant dissonance. Like wires sparking behind his thoughts. His memories were fractured—just fragments drifting in fog.

A tower.

A voice.

A choice.

Then silence.

Something had gone terribly, irreversibly sideways.

[System Recovery in Progress...]

[Primary Ability Unlocked: ThreadSight Lv.1]

[Synchronization: 12%]

He sat up slowly, bracing against the cracked altar beneath him. Limbs trembling. Vision blurry at the edges. His breath came in short, shallow bursts as if his body hadn't decided how to inhale yet.

He checked his hand.

A thin silver line shimmered faintly across his palm, disappearing into the stone below.

Not a scar. A thread.

Dozens more glimmered across the room—almost invisible, like strands of light caught between moments. Some tangled. Some severed. All of them pulsing faintly.

[ThreadSight Active — Environmental Threads Visible]

Rael exhaled slowly. It helped.

Just enough to stand.

His clothes were rough and unfamiliar—gray tunic, black boots, threadbare cloak. His body felt… off. The proportions were his. The muscles, mostly intact. But he moved like someone wearing a memory, not living one.

He called the system again, and it answered sluggishly.

[System Sync: 12%]

[Core Identity: Fragmented]

[Class: Undefined]

[Title: Error]

He stared.

"Title: Error?" he muttered.

No response. Just the low hum of the broken system pretending to function.

Something inside him twitched. Anger? Confusion? Maybe both. But the anger dissolved before it could burn. He was too disoriented to hold onto it.

The ruin stretched into a collapsed corridor, its walls swallowed by vines and damp stone. ThreadSight shimmered along the floor, pulsing toward a narrow exit. Rael followed it without thinking.

Because it pulled him.

Because he had nothing else.

Because instinct told him that if he didn't move, the world might forget he existed altogether.

Beyond the corridor, the ruin ended in a jagged cliffside. Mist spilled up from the chasm below. Trees grew crooked along the opposite ridge, their leaves gray with ash. The sky was overcast, silent.

Rael crouched, brushing his fingers across the earth.

A glowing thread pulsed beneath the soil—faint, like a heartbeat buried alive.

He touched it.

[Thread Anchor: Memory Fragment Detected]

[Echo Signature: Initiating Playback]

The world jolted.

—Screams.

Fire.

Someone falling—no, himself, falling. Threads snapping as he plummeted through fractured timelines.

Rael staggered back, gasping.

The echo vanished.

He clutched his head, blinking back nausea. The thread was silent now, inert.

He was beginning to understand.

This place wasn't random.

This reincarnation wasn't natural.

He wasn't supposed to be here.

Night settled over the ravine like a blanket soaked in ink.

Rael sat beneath a ledge of stone, shielding himself from wind and questions. He watched the glowing lines of ThreadSight fade and reappear in the corners of his vision, flickering like fireflies.

The system hadn't spoken in hours.

Then, just past midnight:

[Core Fragment Integration Advancing...]

[System Sync: 24%]

[New Ability Node Unlocked]

[Echo Rewrite Lv.1 — Acquired]

✦ Echo Rewrite (Lv.1): Rewind personal action by up to 10 seconds. Memory retained. Minor strain applied. Cooldown applies.

Rael frowned. He barely understood ThreadSight—now this?

Still, curiosity burned.

He stood, picked up a stone, and threw it hard into the dark.

Then activated the skill.

The world twitched.

The stone was suddenly in his hand again.

But he remembered throwing it.

A sharp ringing echoed in his ears. Not painful, but piercing. Like something in his skull had snapped taut and then settled again.

[Minor Strain Incurred]

Rael exhaled slowly.

"It worked."

He didn't sleep. Not truly.

Every time his eyes closed, fragments stirred.

A mirror shattering.

A courtroom blazing.

A girl reaching for him—and him failing to reach back.

And all the while, that low hum at the edge of his system. Faint. Broken. Insistent.

By dawn, his sync rate had ticked up again.

[System Sync: 28%]

Rael traveled by instinct—drawn by threads he couldn't explain, sensing tension in the land itself. Something was broken far beyond his body. The world's threads weren't just frayed.

They were unraveling.

He passed fields of silver-threaded grass. Birds that blinked out of sight as if shifting dimensions. A crater where reality had caved in around a glowing stone—left untouched.

Shards.

He didn't know how he knew the word.

But the moment he saw one, his system pulsed.

[Thread Anomaly Detected]

[Anchor Fragment Proximity Rising]

By the time he neared a distant village, his sync had climbed again.

[System Sync: 32% → 35% → 37%]

ThreadSight grew clearer. He could see threads from people now—not just places. Threads pulsing from their chests, from their eyes, from the choices they didn't know they were about to make.

But his threads?

They were tangled. Thicker. Discolored.

And every thread that brushed him recoiled.

The village was quiet. Isolated. Rael kept to the alleys, observing from shadow. A few passersby glowed faintly—system bearers. Ordinary. Stable.

Rael felt like a smudge on a painting. His presence pulled at the nearby threads. Some bent. Others snapped.

[Thread Divergence: Moderate]

[Incompatibility Detected with Local Threads]

He was corrupting the weave just by existing.

At the edge of town, buried beneath a ruined temple, he found it.

A shard.

No bigger than a curled leaf. But it pulsed with red light, casting distorted threads through the air. Every thread around it was frayed, twisted. And yet…

It called to him.

His system vibrated violently.

[Anchor Shard Identified]

[Resonance Risk: Critical]

[Proceeding Without Stabilizer Will Endanger Host]

"Stabilizer?" Rael murmured.

He had no idea what that meant.

And no one else was here.

No one to stop him.

He stared at the shard—his reflection fractured across its surface. Not his face. Not really. Dozens of versions. Smiling. Crying. Bleeding. Dying.

His body screamed to turn away.

He reached out.

Pain wasn't pain anymore.

It was unweaving.

Memories—not his own—flooded in. Mistakes. Collapses. Timelines aborted halfway through. He wasn't absorbing knowledge. He was being shown how others like him had failed—over and over.

His mind buckled.

And then—

A hand.

Warm.

Firm.

Someone touched his shoulder.

The threads convulsed—

Then settled.

Like a hand had flattened the chaos.

A voice followed, calm but unwavering.

"You're not supposed to be down here."

Rael gasped for breath.

And turned—