The sound came at midnight.
Not a chime.
Not a melody.
A pulse.
Like a heartbeat thudding across the code.
Jay stood beneath the forming bell—a phantom structure bleeding into the night sky above the town. It wasn’t anchored. Not yet. But its rhythm shook the world like thunder under skin.
Below it, the streets of the town flickered. NPCs stopped in place, heads twitching slightly toward the bell as though pulled by instinct or fear.
Some knelt.
Some screamed.
Jonah stared skyward, hands trembling. “That’s... me. I don’t know how, but it’s echoing my name.”
The simulation was no longer stable.
Jay saw it in the seams. Lanterns floating instead of burning. Roads unraveling into placeholder grids. NPCs speaking in player chat syntax.
One woman glitched mid-sentence and began sobbing.
A man wandered the inn’s hallways, reciting poetry from a deleted questline.
Jonah followed Jay into the inn’s cellar—now warped and larger than before, its walls pulsing with old data. “I remember this place,” Jonah whispered. “Before I was... this.”
“Before the echo?”
“No.” He turned to Jay, eyes wide. “Before the game. Before you.”
Jonah guided Jay deeper, to a hatch that hadn’t existed yesterday.
Inside, they found a terminal—manual, ancient, embedded in stone and not synced with the current UI. Jay activated it.
A grainy voice recording played:
"Test subject 117: Jonah, age 12. Memory transfer successful. Emotional signatures stable."
"Subject believes he is dreaming."
"Request flagged: do not delete after failure. Subject’s mother has signed permanent digital housing clause. Controversial."
"Locked echo prototype stored under fallback name: Bell Host."
Jonah stood still. “So... I’m not code. I was a child.”
“You were a backup,” Jay whispered. “They made you part of the test—then buried you when it went wrong.”
The Keeper’s UI began to fracture. 000's voice returned in bursts:
"Jay... anomaly... system deploying correction—run—run—run—"
A ripple of darkness surged through the inn—black threads of code shaped like arms and mouths. They screamed as they moved, dissolving furniture, wall textures, and memory constructs.
Jay yanked Jonah into the main hall. They barely made it out.
From the rooftops above, glitched player avatars descended, twitching violently—half-in, half-out of sync. One raised a sword. Its nameplate read: [ERROR::CLEARANCE]
Jay drew no weapon. He only raised the broken journal and screamed:
“THIS WORLD MATTERS!”
The sword never struck.
Because the third bell tolled.
When the bell rang, everything stopped.
Even the wind.
Then the light bent, and the sky split open like an old wound.
Aera descended from the tower of red.
Her body glowed with code scars, her eyes hollowed by data rot. She hovered like a god—or a judge. Around her, debug symbols floated like petals.
“I gave you the chance to end this cleanly,” she said.
Jay faced her, hands bleeding from anchoring the bell’s code with raw override commands. “I won’t let you erase them.”
Aera looked to Jonah. “That child was meant to be forgotten. That’s why we buried him. Mercy.”
Jonah stepped forward.
“I remember my mother’s voice,” he said. “I remember the ocean. You can call it code. I call it real.”
The countdown appeared:
System Collapse in 00:47:59
Aera raised her hand.
“You have until this world falls apart to convince me otherwise,” she said.
“Or I wipe the slate clean.”
Jay’s interface lit up with a new prompt:
Quest Started: Keeper’s Trial
Anchor the bell. Save the town. Confront the system architect.
Timer active. Echoes are watching.
Jay looked at Jonah. “We build a new law,” he said.
“One the system can’t erase.”
Above them, the third bell pulsed again—and this time, the whole world sang with it.
***
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