Chapter 40 – When the Clock Refused to Stop
[00:00:00]
The world froze.
No motion. No sound. No heartbeat from the system.
For one perfect instant, I thought this was it.
The end.
Then—
[00:00:01]
The timer ticked forward.
I blinked once, thinking I'd imagined it.
[00:00:02]
[00:00:03]
The numbers continued to move.
Slow. Steady. Certain.
"…HIME?" I whispered.
No response.
The frozen wind began to move again, brushing against my face.
It felt… wrong.
Too real.
I reached up instinctively and stopped—because the air brushing against my fingers wasn't just visual feedback. It was cold, biting, carrying the faint scent of iron and frost.
My heart skipped a beat.
Yggdrasil didn't have smell.
The full sensory module had been abandoned during the beta years because it was too taxing on the neural servers.
And yet, I could smell it.
The metallic tang of Helheim's frozen wind.
The faint, earthy musk of the tomb's entrance.
I drew in a slow, trembling breath.
The cold stung my lungs.
And that's when panic finally hit me.
"What the hell…" I murmured, voice shaking. "Am I—am I dreaming?"
There was no system lag. No interface flicker. No logout overlay.
The Yggdrasil UI—the menus, the chat channels, the health bar—was gone.
"System call: Menu!" I commanded. Nothing.
"System call: Log out!"
Nothing again.
The silence pressed in heavier than before.
> "HIME?" I said, louder this time. "HIME, status report!"
For a moment, nothing.
Then she moved.
The automaton beside me—HIME—slowly raised her head. Her eyes, once glowing in steady red light, now shimmered like living gemstones. For the first time in eleven years, they blinked.
> "Ren-sama…" she said softly, her voice trembling—not static, not synthetic, but human. "Something… has changed."
I stared, breath caught in my throat. "What do you mean, changed?"
She looked down at her hands—hands that no longer shone with metal gloss but pale skin laced with faint sigil lines that pulsed like veins. Her fingers trembled as she flexed them.
> "I can… feel," she whispered. "The cold. The texture of air. The weight of this place. Is this… what it means to have a body?"
Her tone carried something I'd never heard before—astonishment. Awe. Fear.
I stepped closer, uncertain whether to reach out or retreat. "That's impossible. You're an AI—your code shouldn't even register sensation like that."
> "Then perhaps I am no longer only code," she said softly, looking at me with eyes that reflected the shifting aurora above.
I swallowed hard. The logical part of me—the programmer, the analyst—scrambled to find reason.
Glitched neural feedback loop?
Server migration error?
Did the developers somehow succeed in creating full-sensory immersion during the so-called 'update'?
I forced a laugh, though my chest was tight. "Maybe the update really happened. Maybe they finished the full dive sensory interface after all. Smell, touch, breath—all of it."
> "Yet you sound unconvinced."
"I'm not sure what to believe anymore."
I tried again: "System call: Contact Game Master."
No response. Not even an error message.
"HIME, can you ping the administrator nodes?"
> "Attempting connection…"
She paused. Her gaze went distant, as if listening to invisible threads of data. Then she looked back at me and shook her head.
> "No response. All communication protocols appear… silent."
"Silent how?"
> "As if they no longer exist."
---
The air grew still again. Only this time, it wasn't digital silence. It was natural. Weighty. Alive.
The soft hum of system code that always underpinned Yggdrasil's world—the faint vibration every player subconsciously felt—was gone.
In its place, the sound of wind.
Actual wind.
And when I tilted my head upward, expecting the pitch-black Helheim sky filled with drifting soul mist, what I saw instead stole my breath.
Stars.
An endless, glittering ocean of stars stretched across a night sky that shouldn't exist in this world.
Helheim's atmosphere was a static void, coded to be eternally shrouded in grey fog.
But now, the sky above the Mausoleum of Nazarick shimmered with constellations—brighter, deeper, and more vast than any I'd ever seen, even in the real world.
I took a step forward, feeling the crunch of frost underfoot—the real, crisp resistance of ice breaking.
This couldn't be an update. No dev team could rewrite the entire sensory and environmental architecture in the middle of a server shutdown.
No, this felt… transferred.
As if something had copied Yggdrasil's data and rewritten it elsewhere.
> "Ren-sama," HIME said quietly, still staring at her hands, "if this is reality, then… what are we?"
Her words hit harder than I expected.
I didn't answer. I couldn't.
Instead, I clenched my fists and forced myself to breathe. Focus. Analyze.
The game interface was gone.
The logout command didn't work.
Server contact was dead.
The environment had rewritten itself into a version beyond the system's capability.
That left only one explanation, absurd as it sounded:
The world still existed—but no longer as a game.
---
I needed to test it.
If this was reality—or a simulation that somehow felt like reality—then every sense, every rule, could be measured.
I lifted my hand and summoned mana the way I'd always done.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the air shimmered.
Mana responded—slower, heavier, but alive.
"Still works," I muttered. "At least some systems do."
> "Ren-sama," HIME said suddenly, "your mana flow pattern has changed. It resonates differently than before."
I glanced at her. "How different?"
> "Organic," she said softly. "Not data streams. Not code. More like… blood."
That was enough to make my skin crawl.
I needed distance. I needed perspective.
If I couldn't rely on system displays, I'd have to use what I had—my racial traits and class instincts.
"Alright," I said, taking a steady breath. "Time to adapt."
> "Adapt?"
"Yeah. If this world's changed, then I'll change with it."
I brought up my racial memory manually—the Doppleganger matrix etched into my being. It pulsed faintly, as if waiting.
I reached for one of the stored templates—a humanoid form I'd saved years ago. But something in me hesitated.
No. If I was going to explore, I needed more than disguise. I needed perspective. Vision.
I scrolled through the mental library of forms until I found the one that fit best: Avian Template – Level 100 Birdman, specialized in Reconciliation and Tracking Magic.
The transformation surged instantly—light and code folding into muscle and feathers, limbs reshaping, senses flaring open.
A rush of wind filled my ears as my body expanded, wings unfurling with the crack of energy. My vision sharpened tenfold; I could see heat signatures, motion trails, and mana residue across the entire horizon.
The sensation was overwhelming—but real. Every gust of wind tugged at my feathers, every movement rippled through muscles I'd never truly possessed.
I flexed my wings once, twice. They responded like they'd always been mine.
"Alright," I said quietly. "If this is still Yggdrasil, it's not the Yggdrasil I knew."
> "Ren-sama," HIME said softly, awe in her voice, "your transformation… feels alive."
"Then let's find out just how alive it is."
I spread my wings and leapt from the cliff.
The air roared past me—cold, exhilarating, real.
Below, the Great Tomb of Nazarick loomed silent and eternal, its shadow stretching across the frozen plain.
And above me, the stars burned brighter than ever before.
I didn't know where I was, or what had happened.
Only that the world hadn't ended when it should have.
And that, somehow, the story of Yggdrasil—and of me—
was far from over.
---
End of Chapter 40 – When the Clock Refused to Stop