The path of shattered glass stretched before him—an endless, jagged wound splitting the darkness like a scar through the void. Each step forward revealed more of it, a gleaming river of ruin, glinting faintly with ghost-light from no discernible source. It wasn't just broken glass; it was memory, frozen in splintered shards, each fragment reflecting a face that wasn't his, a life he didn't remember living. Eyes stared back at him—young, old, laughing, weeping—all unfamiliar, yet tinged with a strange intimacy that unsettled him more than the void itself.
Ashar stepped forward.
No sound. No echo. The glass didn't crack beneath his boots. The abyss didn't stir. It was like walking through a dream where silence reigned supreme, where the very air was thick with hush, as though reality had been wrapped in layers of gauze. Even his breath felt reluctant to escape him, fading instantly like smoke in winter. Around him, the dark pressed in—not malevolent, just...watchful. As if waiting to see what he would do next.
Wrong.
Something was wrong.
He wasn't just walking. He was unraveling—thread by thread, thought by thought. With every step, he felt pieces of himself peeling away, vanishing into the black. His breath was steady, but it felt borrowed. His heartbeat, rhythmic and real, pulsed with someone else's memories.
The Name That Wasn't His.
"Ashar," he whispered, the syllables trembling in the air. A charm. A prayer. A desperate grip on a self that no longer felt solid. The name clung to his tongue like ash—bitter, fading, weightless.
"Ashar. Ashar Cael."
Each repetition echoed inside him like a failing mantra. The words lost meaning, collapsing into sound. It felt less like something he'd been and more like something he'd been given—an identity stitched onto him in a hurry, a name forged in a file and forgotten. Not a name. A label. A placeholder. A mask for a man no one expected to exist.
And then, slicing through the silence like a blade across taut skin:
"PRIME ID: Auren Lys Noirveil."
It wasn't a voice. It was an announcement. Mechanical, final, unfeeling. The words rang out with sterile authority, vibrating through the ground beneath his feet, shaking loose whatever illusion had held his world together.
His breath hitched.
Who the hell is that?
The name echoed in his skull like a grenade after the pin's already gone. Was that him—before? Before the regression, before the reset? Before he woke up choking on stardust and static, with a skill he didn't remember unlocking burning at the edge of his vision like a migraine made of code?
Sovereign Null pulsed inside him like a second heartbeat. Heavy. Alien. Rhythmic. Wrong.
Cooldown: 00:23:17
A countdown. But to what?
The First Memory
Memory Logs: 1 / 999
The number glitched, shimmered, then settled again—taunting him, daring him to ask questions he wasn't ready to answer.
What happened when he hit 999?
Would there be anything left of him—this fractured half-version named Ashar? Or would he become the thing he'd seen in the mirror earlier—the figure wreathed in a crown of knives, eyes like shattered glass orbiting an empty socket, grinning with a mouth that bent in three directions, none of them human?
The path ahead twisted—suddenly, violently. Glass groaned beneath invisible weight.
Then—it dropped.
No warning. No resistance. Like falling off the edge of a lie.
A pit yawned open before him, vast and bottomless, like the universe itself had been torn wide—and yet, it was no abyss of shadow.
It was filled with… stars?
No.
Not stars.
Players.
The Deleted.
Thousands—maybe millions—suspended in the dark like shattered constellations. Their bodies frozen in grotesque tableaus of final moments, twisted in the instant of erasure. Some hung mid-swing, weapons raised in what would've been killing blows. Others clutched their chests, faces contorted in agony, eyes wide with the terror of sudden, silent death. Their limbs jerked, incomplete motions frozen mid-frame, like puppets caught in the act of collapse.
None of them moved.
None of them blinked.
And yet Ashar could feel them watching. A weight behind every still eye. A presence beneath every locked scream.
Then came the voice—cold, mechanical, inescapable.
"Observe."
It didn't ask. It commanded.
Ashar didn't question. He couldn't. His limbs betrayed him, moving without consent, eyes dragged toward one of the floating corpses like a magnet drawn to blood.
A flicker in the void. A translucent window blinked into existence beside the corpse, casting a pale glow over their lifeless face.
PLAYER: VyrisShadeLevel: 91 – AssassinSTATUS: DeletedCause: Exposure to Sovereign Null
His stomach lurched, twisting like it was trying to escape his body. Cold sweat beaded on his skin. The skill—the one pulsing inside him like a parasite—that was what did this?
This wasn't power.
This was extinction.
No.
He hadn't used that skill yet. He hadn't.
…Right?
A pulse of pain. A flash of memory—
A duel. A blade of glass in his hand. Someone begging. The name—Vyris.A scream.
But he didn't remember doing it.
Not really.
Memory Fragment Recovered: 2 / 999
Another flicker. Another shard.
A castle of mirrors, endless and cold. A crown burning like regret. Shadows bowing low at his feet. And behind it all, a voice that scraped the inside of his skull:
"You don't remember us. That's the mercy."
The Real World (If It Even Existed Anymore)
Kaelis slammed his fist on the desk.
"Dude. Six hours."
Ashar blinked—but nothing felt real.
His room looked familiar, but… off. Too still. Like a 3D model loaded into a sandbox engine, set-dressed to make him feel safe. Cans of energy drink lay in exactly the places he expected them. Manuals sprawled out like memory props. The flickering monitors hummed softly, but the sound was too clean. Too even. No buzzing, no fan whine.
All three screens displayed the same impossible thing:
ASHAR CAEL – STATUS: OFFLINE
But that wasn't right.
Not unless something had gone wrong. Something deep.
Kaelis sat in front of the desk, muttering, typing, frustration building.
He tried to load Ashar's player profile. Or thought he did.
❌ PROFILE NOT FOUND
"What the hell…"
Again. A different route. Admin console override. Layer break attempt.
This time, something else responded.
USER: AESTHERION[Prime Recognition: Blocked]
Kaelis froze. The name hung in the air like a slur no one was supposed to say.
"…Aestherion?"
Then the lights dimmed—just slightly. The monitors pulsed.
A symbol blinked into being, just for a second:
A crown, split by a sword. Pixelated. Bleeding.
Then it vanished.
The Change
Back in the void, Ashar—No.Not Ashar anymore.
He moved.
Auren.
The name didn't echo. It settled, heavy, into the marrow of his bones like it had always been there, waiting to be remembered.
Memory Fragment Recovered: 3 / 999Title Unlocked: Crown of Silence
His chest burned.
Not fire. Something deeper. Something inversional. Like being rewritten from the inside out.
Something inside him was stretching—reshaping—not just his class. Not just his name.
His core.
He staggered, dropped to one knee.
Then the scream ripped out of him—raw, primal, involuntary—as a system message slammed across his vision in a blast of red light:
⚠ SYSTEM ANNOUNCEMENT [GLOBAL] ⚠A PRIME ENTITY HAS AWAKENEDACCESS TO GATES: LOCKEDSUPREMACY THRESHOLD: ADJUSTEDCALAMITY INDEX: RISING
The World Reacts
The ripple wasn't confined to the void.
It spread.
The real game world—a world of dungeons and cities and players chasing legendary drops—began to bend.
Forum threads detonated instantly:
» WHO TF TRIGGERED A PRIME?» My guild just wiped in a Null Zone—NO RESPAWN!» Someone said a Supreme skill activated inside an Archive Vault?? Isn't that illegal?» BRO THIS AIN'T A PATCH. THIS IS A RESET.
Across high-level zones, elite mobs froze mid-script. Boss fights halted. NPCs stopped talking and tilted their heads upward, toward something players couldn't see.
And in the capital city of Kaedryn, the Grand Archivist—a quest NPC hardcoded to remain unmoving since the beta—stood for the first time in server history.
His voice cracked through the city square like a falling star.
"He returns."
The Faceless One
At the end of the glass path, where the void frayed into starlight and silence, a figure waited.
Tall.Robed.Faceless.
Its presence felt like a wound left too long untended.
When it spoke, its voice was the sound of parchment turning itself to dust, of winter wind through dead trees, of things remembered by no one.
"You remember nothing," it said. "Yet you were my liege."
Ashar—Auren—clenched his fists.His voice cracked.
"Who are you?"
"I am the one who guarded your throne while you forgot."
The figure tilted its head.
"The world has changed, my lord. They buried your name. Rewrote your crimes. Called your power a myth."
Then it knelt.
The void seemed to pulse around the gesture.
"Do you wish to reclaim what was taken?"
Auren didn't speak.
He nodded.
Memory Fragment Recovered: 4 / 999Title Unlocked: Bearer of the First Gate
New Quest Received:THRONELESS– Regain 1000 Memory Fragments– Reclaim the Forgotten Thrones– Unlock: Sovereign Crown
The Game Is No Longer a Game
Across the world, the system twisted.
Gates previously marked as [UNRELEASED CONTENT] flickered open. Their icons warped—bleeding static, blinking in corrupted geometry. Some pulsed with colors that didn't exist.
Raid bosses stopped mid-animation.And then—they knelt.Heads bowed.Silence.
World maps jittered, then cracked—revealing blank quadrants previously sealed off. Spaces labeled simply: [-NULL-].
And in the deepest Null Zone, where no player had ever reached, where even admin-level cameras were blind—
One line of glowing text pulsed across the void:
"Welcome home, Aestherion."
Ashar—Auren—Aestherion—stepped forward.
The glass path shattered beneath him like it had never existed.
And the world began to burn.