You are dead."
That's the first thing he hears.
Not screaming. Not sirens. Not even the roar of nuclear fire.
Just a voice. Calm, artificial. Female, with a robotic flatness.
Like a customer support AI informing you your soul's subscription has been canceled.
"Rebooting user: Jin Aether…"
A screen flickers open before him.
Text appears in pure white light against endless black.
[User Status: Deceased]
[Cause of Death: Global Collapse Event — CODE: ENDGAME.GD00]
[Access Level: Developer Root]
[Warning: Root privileges detected. Proceeding will overwrite laws of current reality.]
"Heh…"
Jin Aether chuckles, but it sounds more like a cough.
His body is broken—he doesn't remember how.
Blood pools beneath him, vanishing pixel by pixel.
The world isn't burning. It's glitching.
Skyscrapers float sideways. Cars flicker between frames of existence.
The sky is a blue screen—literal, stuttering with error messages in a thousand languages.
Earth is gone.
Reality has been patched.
He forces himself up, fingers scraping against a cold, glassy surface.
The ground is made of code tiles—each one labeled, tagged with broken fragments:
[WEATHER_SYSTEM.EXE], [GRAVITY], [TIME.ENGINE].
He looks at his reflection in one.
Bloodied face. Scorch marks across his cheek. Eyes that glow faintly with blue code lines.
He's alive. But wrong.
"No…"
He's not alive. He's been rebooted.
Three Days Earlier
Jin Aether was the best damn systems architect in Asia.
He built neural AI networks when he was sixteen.
He reverse-engineered satellite code for fun.
He was the lead on Project Godcode, the world's first sentient game engine.
And now… he was the man the world blamed for the apocalypse.
"You opened the door to something you couldn't control!"
"Godcode wasn't just a game—it was a gateway!"
"This is your fault, Jin!"
He remembered the hearings.
The arrests. The betrayal of his own research team.
Then the screaming started. People glitching out of existence. Cities folding into data loops.
And the thing in the sky…
That thing.
Made of light and hate. A being with a face like a corrupted hard drive, crowned with circuit tendrils.
It spoke one word before annihilation
"RESET."
Back to Now
Jin stands alone on a platform made of dead reality.
Above him, a structure rises into the sky—a tower, infinite in height, each level glowing with alien code.
A notification pings.
[Welcome, Rootwalker.]
[You have been selected to climb the Tower of Reversion.]
[Every Floor is a Failed Earth. Every God is a Corrupted Code.]
[Rebuild. Ascend. Rewrite the End.]
[Choose your First Hack:]
Override Gravity
Rewrite Pain Receptors
Recode Movement Protocol
Begin with No Modifications
Jin's lips curl into a tired grin.
"Start me off broken? Typical dev move."
He taps [1. Override Gravity].
The laws of physics hiccup.
The platform beneath him shudders. Debris floats.
Jin lifts into the air, as if the world has decided to stop caring about mass or weight.
The Tower looms ahead—its first entrance labeled in glitching glyphs that morph into words he can read:
[FLOOR 1 – THE CRADLE OF WIRES]
A final prompt appears:
[Warning: Hacking world laws drains stored memories.]
[Cost for Gravity Override: -1 Memory Block]
[Deleted: "Aurelia – Younger Sister"]
Jin's smirk fades.
"Wait…"
But the name means nothing now.
He shrugs.
"If I can rewrite the world, I can find her again. Even if I don't know who she is."
"Let's climb."
[TO BE CONTINUED – Chapter 2