The Vault of the Fallen didn't look like a prison. To the average citizen of Neo-Seoul, it was an architectural marvel—a windowless cube of shimmering white "Living Metal" that sat in the center of District 4, surrounded by a moat of liquid nitrogen.
To Jaxen, it looked like a giant, encrypted zip file.
He crouched on the rooftop of a noodle bar across the street, his new teal-tinted vision dissecting the security layers. Most Thieves would try to disable the cameras or bribe a guard. Jaxen was looking at something much deeper: the [Global_Physics_Tick].
Every 0.1 seconds, the System refreshes the security grid, Jaxen noted, his brain humming with a dull ache. There is a micro-delay—a 'desync'—between the camera's capture and the server's upload. A frame-rate drop.
"If I can't hide from the eye, I'll hide in the blink," he whispered.
He checked his status.
[Mental Processing: 45%]
[Current Buffer: 1.2 GB / 2.0 GB]
He had to be fast. If his "Buffer" filled up, his brain would go into an emergency reboot, leaving him unconscious in the middle of the most guarded facility in the city.
Jaxen stood up and stepped off the ledge.
He didn't fall. He swiped his hand through the air, targeting the [Gravity_Constant] in a five-foot radius around his body.
[Gravity: 9.8 m/s² -> 0.1 m/s²]
He drifted down like a dandelion seed, landing silently on the frozen surface of the nitrogen moat. The cold was intense, but he didn't feel it; he had already muted his [Nerve_Response_Thermal] variables. It was a dangerous trick—he could freeze to death and not know it—but it was the only way to get close.
He reached the base of the Living Metal wall. He placed his palm against the smooth, warm surface.
Source-View.
The data flooded his mind. It wasn't just metal; it was "Programmable Matter" bound by a complex algorithm. The wall was constantly checking its own integrity. If Jaxen tried to blow a hole in it, the code would simply repair the damage in nanoseconds.
"You're a smart wall," Jaxen murmured. "But you're still running on a 'While' loop."
He closed his eyes. In the darkness of his mind, he saw the lines of code that kept the wall solid. He didn't try to break the metal. Instead, he inserted a tiny piece of logic:
[WHILE 'Jaxen_Vane' = CONTACT, THEN 'Collision' = FALSE]
The section of the wall in front of him didn't move, but it suddenly lost its "Solidity." To the rest of the world, it was still a wall. To Jaxen, it was now as permeable as smoke. He stepped through the metal, his body tingling as he passed through the atomic structure of the building.
The moment he was inside, the "Desync" hit him.
"Gah!" Jaxen collapsed to one knee, clutching his head. Blood began to leak from his left nostril.
[WARNING: BUFFER OVERFLOW IMMINENT.]
[Mental Processing: 89%]
[System Note: Biological brain cannot sustain 'Intangibility' logic for more than 4 seconds.]
"Note... taken," he wheezed, wiping the blood on his sleeve. He forced himself to stand.
The interior of the Vault was a cathedral of forbidden technology. Thousands of floating "Data-Caskets" drifted in a magnetic stream, each containing an item that the System had deemed too "glitched" for public use.
There were swords that cut through time, cloaks that made the wearer literally non-existent, and rings that multiplied XP by a factor of a thousand. To any other Player, this was a gold mine. To Jaxen, it was a graveyard of broken code.
He followed a specific frequency—a low-frequency pulse that his "Packet Sniffing" skill had picked up earlier.
He moved past the C-Rank and B-Rank aisles, heading toward the very back, where the light dimmed and the air felt heavy with "Digital Corruption."
There, held in a containment field of pulsing red lasers, was a small, unassuming object. It was a pair of glasses—black frames, cracked lenses—that looked like they belonged in a museum of the 21st century.
[Object: The Dev_Eyes (Artifact - Rank Unknown)]
[Status: Corrupted / Locked]
[Description: A prototype interface used by the 'Forgotten Architects' before the Prime Engine went sentient.]
"That's it," Jaxen said, his heart racing. "My bridge."
If he wore those, the data wouldn't have to go directly into his brain anymore. The glasses would act as a GPU, a secondary processor to handle the heavy lifting of reality-warping.
But as he reached out toward the red lasers, a cold, synthetic voice echoed through the chamber.
"Anomaly identified. DNA signature: Null-Rank. Action: Immediate Termination."
Jaxen froze.
From the ceiling, a Seeker Unit descended. It wasn't a robot; it was a humanoid shape made of liquid mercury, with no face and a glowing red "Eye" in the center of its chest. It carried a blade made of solid white light—a "System-Eraser."
[Entity: Seeker-01 (Guardian Class)]
[Level: 50] [Skill: Logic Lock - Prevents nearby Users from accessing Skills.]
Jaxen tried to swipe the air to change the Seeker's gravity, but his hands felt like they were made of lead. His teal HUD flickered and died. The "Logic Lock" had cut him off from the Source.
"Oh, you've gotta be kidding me," Jaxen muttered, backing away as the Seeker raised its blade.
Without his Architect powers, he was just a Level 0 kid in a trench coat. And a Level 50 Guardian was about to delete his save file.
The Seeker moved—not with speed, but with "Instant Position" logic. One moment it was twenty feet away; the next, it was an inch from Jaxen's throat, the white blade humming with the sound of a thousand deleted souls.
Jaxen didn't think. He didn't have time to code. He just threw himself sideways, reaching into the red laser field surrounding the artifact.
The lasers seared his arm, his [Health] bar dropping from 100% to 15% in a single second. But his fingers brushed the frames of the glasses.
"Equip!" he screamed.
The Seeker's blade swung down, aiming for his head.
Click.
The glasses snapped onto his face.
Suddenly, the red "Logic Lock" didn't matter. The cracked lenses didn't just show him code; they showed him the Command Console of the room.
[Console Command Input Detected...]
[Target: Seeker-01]
[Command: /set_status = SLEEP]
The Seeker stopped. Its light-blade vanished. The mercury body slumped to the floor, turning into a pile of inert, silver sludge.
Jaxen fell back against a crate, gasping for air. His arm was a charred mess, and his brain felt like it had been scrubbed with sandpaper, but a new notification appeared in his vision—clearer than ever before.
[Quest Update: The First Breach – SUCCESS.]
[Leveling Up... Administrator Level 1.]
[New Feature Unlocked: 'Command Console' (Text-Based Reality Control).]
[New Feature Unlocked: 'Inventory Expansion' (Infinite Storage).]
Jaxen looked at the silver sludge of the Seeker. He reached out and "dragged" the pile of mercury into a floating black hole in the air.
[Item Obtained: Liquid Mercury Chassis (S-Rank Crafting Material)]
"Five hundred chapters, huh?" Jaxen whispered to himself, a tired but dangerous smirk forming on his lips as he looked at the thousands of other caskets in the room. "I'm gonna need a bigger bag."
Suddenly, the alarms of the Spire began to wail across the entire city. The "Yellow Alert" had just turned "Black."
Jaxen stood up, adjusting his cracked glasses. "Let them come. I've finally got a keyboard."