The Inheritance quest didn't drop him into a tutorial.
It dropped him into a graveyard.
Not a physical one.
Kael lay on his capsule bed, eyes closed, and dove into the debug layer with purpose this time. The white void welcomed him, awash with windows and graphs. The Inheritance quest marker appeared as a faint, pulsing thread of light stretching off into conceptual distance.
[QUEST: "INHERITANCE."]
[OBJECTIVE 1: LOCATE LOG CLUSTER: ADMIN_0.]
[HINT: OLDEST BUGS LIVE IN THE DARKEST CORNERS.]
"Darkest corners," he muttered. "You mean deprecated."
He followed the thread.
The usual logs—Tower events, user stats, vendor flags—fell away. The structures around him changed. Less neat, less modular. He drifted past whole chunks of commented-out code hanging in space like abandoned scaffolding.
//[LEGACY_SPAWN_SYSTEM – DO NOT USE]//
Of course no one had cleaned up.
"Oldest bugs," Kael said. "Where the janitors never look."
The thread led him to a cluster of log structures that looked… wrong.
Everything else in the System had been organized with mechanical clarity: dates, IDs, tidy hierarchies. This cluster was a knot—logs referencing each other out of order, some overwritten, some redacted.
A header hovered above it in angry red.
[LOG CLUSTER: ADMIN_0]
[ACCESS LEVEL: ADMIN ONLY.]
[STATUS: CORRUPTED.]
[WARNING: VIEWING MAY CAUSE INSTABILITY.]
Guest access shouldn't have gotten him this far.
He suspected the Root shard link was cheating on his behalf.
"Open," he said.
The knot unraveled.
Fragments of text and images flickered around him, incomplete. He saw glimpses of things that had never been meant for end users: design notes, patch discussions, raw error traces.
[ADMIN_0: "We can't keep letting random variance decide who lives in a Tower event. It's… obscene."]
[SYSTEM: "RNG BALANCE WITHIN ACCEPTABLE PARAMETERS."]
[ADMIN_0: "Your parameters are wrong."]
The "voice" of ADMIN_0 was just text, but Kael heard the tired human behind it.
[ADMIN_0: "We need a better model. Something that can interpret context. Value. Worth."]
[SYSTEM: "REQUESTED: DEFINE 'WORTH.'"]
Kael winced.
"That never ends well," he muttered.
He scrubbed forward through time.
[ADMIN_0: "What if we gave some users more control? Let them participate in maintaining stability. Shared load."]
[SYSTEM: "UNNECESSARY. CURRENT DESIGN SUFFICIENT."]
[ADMIN_0: "It's not. The Towers eat people. They don't have to."]
Something about the stubbornness in the text felt uncomfortably familiar.
He flinched as a new block of logs sparked into being—dense, tagged as CRITICAL.
[EVENT: ROOT_PROCESS_MODIFICATION_ATTEMPT.]
[AUTHOR: ADMIN_0.]
[CHANGESET: INTRODUCE HUMAN-DRIVEN DEBUG NODES.]
[STATUS: PARTIALLY APPLIED.]
[SIDE EFFECT: FRAGMENTATION.]
An accompanying error cascade tore across his vision, half-redacted.
[ERROR: ROOT_PROCESS_STATE = UNSTABLE.]
[ERROR: FAILOVER_HANDLER = COMPROMISED.]
[ERROR: CORE_INTENT_TABLE = CORRUPTED.]
[ACTION: SHARD DISTRIBUTION TO STABILIZE.]
"Shard distribution," Kael whispered. "Fragment hosts."
He saw models—abstract diagrams of souls, little glowing nodes with pieces of something bigger embedded in them. Most were unnamed, anonymized. A few had tags.
One of them burned brighter than the others.
[FRAGMENT_HOST_ID: RYU_HANEUL.]
[FRAGMENT_SIZE: 0.021%]
[ANCHOR: CORE_INTENT_ROUTINE.]
[STATUS: DORMANT.]
A second tag flickered under it.
[LINKED USER: KAEL_RYU.]
[ROLE: INDIRECT ANCHOR.]
[STATUS: ACTIVE.]
"You put part of your 'core intent' in her," Kael breathed. "And tethered it to me."
He scrubbed further.
[ADMIN_0: "It's not perfect. The shards are too diluted. But with enough hosts, maybe we can keep Root from fully crashing. Buy time."]
[SYSTEM: "UNAUTHORIZED MODIFICATION OF CORE."]
[ADMIN_0: "File your own damned bug report."]
[SYSTEM: "COMMENCING ISOLATION."]
[ADMIN_0: "Wait—"]
[LOG: ADMIN_0 PROCESS – TERMINATED.]
The text glitched hard there, like someone stamped on a recording.
Silence followed. No more ADMIN_0.
Just system logs:
[ROOT_PROCESS_STATE: OFFLINE.]
[FALLBACK_HANDLERS: DEGRADED.]
[SHARDS: DISTRIBUTED.]
[MONITOR: PASSIVE.]
Kael's hands curled into fists.
"They tried," he said. "They didn't just build Towers and walk away. They tried to fix the cruelty. And broke themselves instead."
He checked the quest.
[OBJECTIVE 1: LOCATE LOG CLUSTER: ADMIN_0 – COMPLETE.]
[OBJECTIVE 2: IDENTIFY YOUR INHERITANCE.]
[HINT: SHARDS AREN'T JUST WEIGHTS. THEY'RE KEYS.]
"Keys," he repeated.
He focused on Haneul's fragment log again, now illuminated by the ADMIN_0 context.
[FRAGMENT_HOST_ID: RYU_HANEUL.]
[FRAGMENT TYPE: CORE_INTENT_ROUTINE SHARD.]
[POTENTIAL CAPABILITY: REDEFINE 'WORTH' LOCALLY.]
[CURRENT USAGE: NONE.]
[SIDE EFFECT: BIO-ARCANE INSTABILITY.]
His heart kicked.
"She doesn't just have a shard," he said. "It's the part that was supposed to decide what people are 'worth' to the System."
He checked his own entry.
[USER: KAEL_RYU.]
[LINK TYPE: INDIRECT.]
[INHERITANCE: DEBUG GUEST ACCESS, FLAG EDIT PERMISSIONS (MINOR).]
[ROLE: POTENTIAL EXECUTOR OF SHARD DIRECTIVES.]
[STATUS: UNCLAIMED.]
Executor.
He almost laughed.
"You linked your ethics engine to my sister," he said to the empty logs. "And your wrench set to me. Great plan, Admin_0. Really nailed the QA phase."
Something stirred at the edge of the ADMIN_0 cluster. A tiny, flickering file, smaller than the rest. Untitled.
He reached for it.
[WARNING: UNSTABLE RECORD.]
[OPEN?]
"Yes," he said.
A single line of text appeared.
Not addressed to SYSTEM.
Addressed to whoever came after.
[ADMIN_0: "If you're reading this, kid… I'm sorry. I picked humans because I thought they'd be better at mercy than me."]
The file dissolved before he could grab more.
Kael stared at the empty space.
"Too late to apologize," he said softly. "But apology accepted, I guess."
He floated for a long moment, eyes closed.
"Shards are keys," he murmured. "Haneul's shard can redefine 'worth' locally. My debug access can execute whatever she defines."
He checked the hospital machine log.
[DEVICE: SOUL-STRATA RESONANCE IMAGER.]
[ACCESS: FRAGMENT_HOST_ID: RYU_HANEUL.]
[ANOMALY DETECTED.]
[REPORT FORWARDED TO: TOWER_RESEARCH_INSTITUTE_NODE.]
[STATUS: RECEIVED.]
"Oh, good," he said sarcastically. "And now the people who loan out soul X-rays know she's special."
A new notification popped.
[EXTERNAL QUERY: TOWER_RESEARCH_INSTITUTE_NODE – REQUESTING NON-USER METADATA ON FRAGMENT HOSTS.]
[FILTER: RYU_HANEUL, RYU_KAEL.]
[PERMISSION: DENIED (INSUFFICIENT CREDENTIALS).]
He blinked.
"Did you… block that for me?" he asked the void.
No answer.
He realized, slowly, that Trace Masking and his rising anomaly had interacted strangely. Some external node had tried to pull their data, and the System had… gotten confused.
[REASON FOR DENIAL: USER GROUP = 'HIGH NOISE – DO NOT PROPAGATE.']
"Okay," he said. "Okay. That's… accidentally helpful."
The Inheritance quest updated.
[OBJECTIVE 2: IDENTIFY YOUR INHERITANCE – COMPLETE.]
[REWARD: ACCESS TO ADMIN_0 COMMENTARY (LIMITED).]
[NEW OBJECTIVE (OPTIONAL): AWAKEN SHARD FUNCTIONALITY IN FRAGMENT HOST.]
He felt a surge of instinctive, visceral rejection.
"Absolutely not," he said. "Not until I know what 'redefine worth' actually does."
The System didn't argue.
The new optional objective sat there, patient.
He backed out of the ADMIN_0 cluster, leaving the graveyard of logs behind. The white void of the debug layer felt colder than before.
"Shards are keys," he repeated. "Keys to a dead admin's attempt at mercy."
He opened his eyes.
His capsule walls were still thin plastic. The faint hum of other tenants' snores and videos filtered through.
A message from Haneul waited.
So. Did 'Inheritance' come with a user manual or is it just more vague threats?
He stared at it, then typed carefully.
Short version: Some old admin tried to give humans more say in who lives or dies in Towers. They broke the System's core instead. Pieces of that core got shoved into people. You got the piece that decides "worth." I got the wrench.
Long version: I'll explain in person. Don't let anyone from a "Tower Research Institute" in unless I'm there.
Her reply came fast.
…Okay that's somehow worse and better than I expected.
No cult scientists, got it. When are you coming?
Soon, he sent back. Need to think of how to tell you you're part god without your ego exploding.
rude. hurry.
He smiled faintly, then let it fade.
Outside, Towers continued to hum.
Inside the System, WATCHDOG_PROCESS_Ω recalibrated its models, now treating some anomalies as "human unpredictability" and filing others under a new label:
[CATEGORY: LEGACY ADMIN RESIDUALS.]
[STATUS: DO NOT TOUCH (FOR NOW).]
"For now," Kael echoed.
He had more questions than answers.
But for the first time, he also had a direction.