QUESTCHAIN: Reality Reloaded

Kael couldn't sleep.

Even with the broken fans humming above and the ever-present flicker of failing neon outside his window, his mind refused to shut down. Every time he closed his eyes, the shimmer returned the warped glitch, the thin layer of something else beneath the world. And the voice.

That voice from the dream, soft as static.

"You saw it. That means you can come in."

He tried to write it off. Quest fatigue, maybe burnout. Too many low-reward tasks, too little rest, too much synthetic protein cycling through his bloodstream. But when he finally drifted off for an hour and woke in a cold sweat, his lens greeted him with something new.

[UNREGISTERED VISUAL DATA DETECTED]

[Traceable Source: Unknown | Interference Level: 03]

That wasn't normal. Nothing came through the QuestLens without a trace unless someone wanted it that way.

Kael sat up in the dark, pulse climbing.

His lens had caught something during the glitch. Something real. Something the system didn't want logged.

And somehow, it had slipped through.

Kael's Little Lab

He didn't have much in the way of tech. His room barely qualified as private space. But hidden beneath his cot was a modified datapad Dex had helped him rig years ago. Black-market, barely held together by cracked plastic and borrowed code, but it could bypass the corporate OS and talk directly to system fragments.

Totally off-grid. And completely illegal.

He hooked his lens into the side port, ran a capture scan, and dug into the last recording log frame by frame.

The glitch hit at timestamp 04:12:56.

He froze the exact moment.

There it was.

For a single frame—less than a second—his lens had captured a doorway. Floating just off the ground. Not made of metal or matter, but pure structured code. A rectangle of faint blue glyphs, pulsing at the edges like it was breathing. The inside wasn't empty just impossible. Fog. Data fragments. A shattered skyline that shouldn't exist.

Kael enhanced the image. On the bottom corner of the doorway, barely visible in red:

CORE_01

His stomach dropped.

He'd seen the tag before in conspiracy threads, deep web myth-logs, ghost sites that hadn't been indexed in years. Stories about "Core Zones"—architect-level access points buried under QuestChain's skin. Leftovers from the first iteration. Code so old it wasn't just forgotten… it was buried on purpose.

He always thought it was trollbait.

But now?

Now he had proof.

Kael didn't hesitate. He threw on his gear, wrapped the datapad tight, and slipped out into the night. No quest active. No escort drone. Just instinct and adrenaline.

Dex's den was three zones away, behind a derelict datashop and protected by at least three dead-end alleypuzzles. Kael had to crawl over a broken tram rail and past a hibernating patrol drone to get to the door.

It slid open with a screech of static and light.

Dex was standing inside wearing two mismatched AR lenses and a hoodie covered in glitched company logos. Around him, five drones buzzed lazily, one sparking from a loose wire.

"Well, well," Dex said. "Did the system finally kill your soul, or did you grow a spine?"

Kael tossed him the datapad.

Dex caught it, curious. One glance at the image and his face changed.

He sat down without a word and jacked into his console. Fingers flew. Code windows opened like blooming flowers.

"Where'd you get this?" Dex asked, low.

"Zone 12. Mid-clean. I wasn't looking for anything."

"You weren't supposed to find it," Dex muttered. "But that's how these things work. The system always hides this stuff somewhere no one bothers to look. Not locked away just buried under boredom."

Kael stepped closer. "You think it's bait?"

"I think it's a door. And you just got the key."

He paused, eyes scanning strings of faded architecture logs.

"This tag—CORE_01—it's not just early code. This is root protocol. The original network. Before QuestChain. Before XP. Before reputation systems."

Dex looked up, his voice quieter now. "They called it the Oracle Layer. Not officially, obviously. But the people who built it? They left something behind."

Kael frowned. "What kind of something?"

Before Dex could answer, Kael's lens went dark.

The Oracle's First Message

A blank void overtook his vision. Cold. Absolute.

Then text began to write itself across the black:

[Welcome, Kael Virex.]

[You are now tagged: WATCHED.]

A beat. A pulse. Like a second heartbeat blooming in his skull.

"You've taken your first step."

Kael staggered, hands clenching instinctively. His breath came short and fast.

Then, just as suddenly—the world snapped back. Dex was waving a hand in front of his face.

"Dude. You good?"

Kael nodded, eyes unfocused. "Yeah. Just a lag spike."

A lie. He knew it. Dex probably knew it too. But he wasn't ready to say it aloud.

Because something had spoken to him. Not an error. Not code.

Something real.

Something watching.

"Who Are They?"

Later that night, Dex messaged him one line:

"You need to know something. They're not devs. They're not NPCs. They're not even from our layer."

"The ones watching you?"

"They're the ones who never logged out."