Rin’s assigned workspace hovered a few feet above the floor—a circular platform of glass-light, projecting streams of Grid data around him. Every student nearby controlled their own station with precision: weaving glyphs, stabilizing mana currents, recording fluctuations in multi-layer runes.
Rin, meanwhile, poked one of the floating symbols.
It blinked angrily.
Warning: Unauthorized Interaction
Access Denied
“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered. “Every OS hates new users.”
“You’re not supposed to touch anything,” a voice snapped.
Rin turned. A boy stood beside him—tall, immaculate uniform, hair done with the kind of effort that screamed perfectionist. His eyes glowed faintly with internal glyphs, his mana threads fluttering like polished circuits.
He looked Rin up and down as if scanning a malware report.
“You’re the anomaly,” the boy said. “The one the Grid forcibly integrated.”
Rin raised an eyebrow. “And you are…?”
“Caelus Veylan,” he said, chest lifting slightly. “Top of the Observation Division. I’ve been training for years to earn Administrator Liora’s attention. Then you show up and the Grid just—” His eye twitched. “—bends for you.”
“Not my fault your system has bad authentication defaults,” Rin replied.
Caelus’s jaw tightened. “You’re not from our world. You shouldn’t even exist in the Grid’s structure. You’re a variable without a declaration.”
Rin smiled. “Yet the program runs anyway.”
Caelus stepped closer, a low hum of mana building around him. “Let’s make something clear, outsider. This Academy isn’t a playground. And the Grid isn’t a toy you can rewrite just because you know a few tricks.”
Before Rin could respond, the air rippled.
A soft chime echoed through the hall.
Every projection flashed red.
Students stopped mid-gesture as streams of mana twisted violently. Glyphs jittered, corrupted like glitched code. The room pulsed with static.
ALERT: Unstable Thread Detected
Error Source: Unknown
Segment: Observation Layer — Sector 12
Severity: Critical
Liora appeared instantly—she didn’t teleport; the Grid simply decided she was there now.
“Stabilize the node!” she commanded.
Students scrambled, tracing emergency runes. Caelus flicked his fingers, forming a rapid sequence of sigils. “I’ve got it under control!” he shouted, but the instability only worsened.
Rin watched the flickering data. He didn’t understand the magic—but he understood the pattern.
This is recursion. A loop without termination.
It’s trying to overwrite itself.
Rin stepped forward onto his platform.
“Stop!” Caelus snapped. “You’ll make it worse!”
“Relax,” Rin said, ignoring him. “I’ve debugged worse loops in the middle of deadline week.”
He reached toward the unstable projection. The threads bucked wildly, rejecting student attempts to contain them. They twisted like corrupted packets…
…until Rin touched the air.
The Grid shivered.
Every glyph froze.
Students gasped.
Liora’s eyes widened slightly. “He’s syncing with it—again.”
Rin whispered the first command that came naturally:
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“Override.”
The corrupted loop shattered into clean, stable lines.
Mana threads rewove themselves from chaos into order.
The emergency glow faded.
Silence.
Then—
Error Resolved
Stability Restored
User Intervention: Rin Arvale
Access Level Adjusted — Provisional+
Rin lowered his hand, flexing it as if shaking off static.
Caelus stared at him like he’d witnessed a crime. “You—just brute forced a stabilization sequence. With no runes. No incantation. No structure!”
Rin shrugged. “Try thinking outside the syntax.”
Caelus’s face darkened—not in anger, but in something worse. Insecurity.
Liora stepped toward Rin, studying him with clinical fascination.
“You saw the error before our sensors processed it.”
Rin didn’t deny it.
The code of the world had spoken to him. And he understood it, instinctively.
Caelus turned sharply, storming off, mana crackling behind him like a disrupted signal.
Liora watched him go, then addressed Rin quietly:
“You’ve just made your first rival.”
Rin smirked. “Good. Every world needs a boss fight.”
System Log Updated
User Rin Arvale — Privilege Adjustment
Status: Observation Division — Active Participant
Threat Level: Pending Evaluation
The Grid hummed around him, alive, watching, waiting.
And Rin had never felt more at home.
Scene 8 — Hidden Subroutine
The Observation Division’s training hall dimmed as the emergency alerts faded. Students reluctantly returned to their stations, casting occasional glances at Rin—some wary, some intrigued, all unsure.
Rin leaned on his platform, still feeling the faint buzz of the Grid’s data threads pulsing beneath his skin.
Helvius appeared on a hovering panel, projecting himself as a crystalline hologram. “All students,” he announced, “resume scheduled calibration tasks. The disrupted thread remains under investigation.”
The hologram flickered out.
Liora approached Rin with her usual quiet precision, golden sigils rotating like gears inside her eyes.
“Your reaction time was impressive,” she said. “But this academy does not function on instinct alone. You need structured understanding.”
Rin smirked. “I read fast.”
“Reading,” she corrected, “is not the same as interfacing.”
She held out a small prism, transparent with a faint rotating core inside.
“This is your assignment. A basic diagnostic operator. It analyzes runic patterns and returns Grid integrity metrics. Even novice students can use it.”
Rin held it up. “Like a scanner tool?”
“Like a safety net,” she replied. “You are to observe a low-priority sector today. No manipulation. No experiments. Simply report anomalies.”
“Got it. No rewriting physics.”
“For now,” she said.
She turned and left. Her footsteps made glyphs realign on the floor, and Rin noticed—for the first time—they adjusted around him too.
Not as much. But enough.
He pocketed the prism. “Alright. Let’s do some sightseeing.”
The assigned sector, Sector 7-Low, wasn’t glamorous. A quiet section of the Academy grounds—training gardens, floating platforms, and holographic trees that shimmered slightly every few seconds as if re-rendering themselves.
Rin activated the prism.
It projected smooth rings of light around him, scanning the environment.
initializing diagnostic pass…
scanning for: structural drift, unbalanced mana threads, corrupted sigils…
Rin wandered along a path that curved past a tranquil pond. Digital koi swam through glowing water, each fish leaving behind a ripple of floating symbols.
Everything looked stable. Predictable.
Boring.
Until the prism stuttered.
Just once—barely noticeable.
But Rin’s eyes sharpened.
“You felt that too?”
He held the prism forward. Its rings glitched, then reformed. A patch of the environment flickered—just a few pixels of reality misbehaving.
He knelt and touched the air above it. The Grid twitched, like a string pulled too tight.
Then—
anomaly detected
classification: unknown
source: unregistered
access: restricted
Rin grinned. “Now that’s more like it.”
He pushed a thread of mana—his mana—into the spot.
The world flickered.
A seam in the air parted, revealing a small dark chamber between layers of reality. Not a room. Not a space.
A hidden directory.
The prism vibrated violently.
WARNING
unauthorized subroutine detected
access prohibited
admin-level permission required
The opening pulsed with faint code, unlike any rune Rin had seen. Messy, unstable, almost… human.
He reached toward it.
Reality flashed white.
He found himself standing inside a narrow corridor of floating script—lines of code suspended midair like abandoned thoughts. Half-finished runes, broken formula strings, incomplete magic loops.
A hidden space. Forgotten. Untouched.
A whisper echoed through the subroutine:
“…who…are…you?”
Rin froze.
Not a voice.
A residual.
A recorded thought embedded in the Grid’s architecture.
He stepped deeper, brushing aside flickering glyphs.
Someone had written this. Someone who used the Grid like he did—instinctively, without rules.
At the far end, a single phrase pulsed in golden light:
RETURN TO ROOT
Rin reached out—
—when suddenly the entire corridor shook violently, as if the Grid itself had just noticed him.
A system alert blared behind his eyes.
CRITICAL ERROR
UNAUTHORIZED USER IN HIDDEN SUBROUTINE
SYSTEM RECALL INITIATED
FORCEFUL EXTRACTION IN: 3…
“Oh come on—”
2…
“Not again—”
1…
The subroutine collapsed inward, swallowing itself whole.
Everything went white.
Rin hit the ground in the garden, trees flickering wildly as his vision stabilized. The prism lay next to him, smoking.
Footsteps approached fast.
Caelus.
Two guards.
And Liora—appearing as if she’d been waiting for this exact moment.
Her eyes were sharp. Calculating.
“What did you access?” she demanded.
Rin opened his mouth, still catching his breath.
“I think…” he said slowly, “someone left a backdoor into your Grid.”
Liora stiffened.
“A backdoor no Administrator has ever authorized.”
Her expression shifted—from curiosity to something colder, more dangerous.
Fear.
System Log Updated
User Anomaly Detected in Sector 7-Low
Investigation Required
Hidden Subroutine: “ROOT_RETURN” — Status: Compromised
Rin brushed dirt off his sleeve.
“So…” he said casually, “what’s Root?”
Liora didn’t answer.
She simply whispered:
“You were never supposed to find that.”
And for the first time—
the Grid seemed afraid of him.