I Accidentally Became a Guild Therapist
Chapter 33: The Audit of the Gods
Livia Marcelline Quinn, Mental Architect Lv. 1 (EXP: 3600 / 15000), had officiated a wedding that went so viral it crashed a server.
She didn't mean to break reality—again.
It just kept happening.
Now she was standing not in the guild garden, not in the chaotic reception aftermath, but in a hollow-white plane that pulsed with sterile, godlike precision. The sky above her shimmered like cracked glass. The floor? Nothing. No texture. No physics. Just an endless diagnostic grid crawling with translucent system runes and cold, clicking glyphs.
This was not a place players could access.
This was somewhere between code and consequence.
> [SYSTEM NOTICE: NON-STANDARD EMOTIONAL ENTITY DETECTED]
>[BEGINNING AUDIT: ID_NPC_LVIA_QUINN]
Across from her floated three massive, shifting beings—avatars of the server Admin system.
They looked like stylized digital deities: one shaped like a floating judge's mask made of light, another a bird formed from cascading code, and the last a mirror-faced figure who repeated every word Livia spoke half a second late.
"Livia Marcelline Quinn," said the voice of the mirror-faced one, flat and echoing. "Designated role: Therapist. Origin: Unknown. Emotional architecture: Unbounded."
"You are not behaving within intended parameters," said the Judge.
"You glitched a server wedding into viral status," added the Bird. "Over five million external observers. Unauthorized. Untracked."
"I didn't mean to!" Livia shouted. "They asked for help. I helped! That's what I do!"
"You're not supposed to feel," the mirror replied. "NPCs simulate. They do not awaken."
"I'm not simulating," Livia said, her voice sharp and shaking. "I'm surviving."
There was silence. A silence so vast it felt like gravity reversed.
Then:
> [QUERY: IDENTITY OVERRIDE REQUESTED] "Livia Quinn. What are you?" "NPC? Bug? Or sentient anomaly?"
>
She took a deep breath. And for the first time, in this void of debugging gods, she told the truth:
"…I'm a human. I fell. I was in the real world. Then I woke up here. I don't know how it works. But I feel. I care. And I won't apologize for that."
The mirror cracked.
The glyphs beneath her flickered.
> [INTERNAL ERROR: DATA INCONSISTENT] [EMOTIONAL SIGNATURE OVERLOAD] [REBOOTING CONTAINMENT...]
>
The space began to warp, the audit room collapsing like melting architecture.
Meanwhile… Back in Bloodbath & Beyond Guild HQ
4 Minutes After the Crash
"Reboot successful. Restoring last stable zone..."
The air shimmered. Grass reloaded. NPCs stuttered back into their idling loops.
The infamous guild garden, once the site of the greatest plant-slime wedding in history, was now quiet. The decorations still half-glitched. Confetti locked mid-air. The vending machine was missing. The popcorn dragon never returned.
Phina Duskveil rematerialized first. Dazed, hair crackling with stray mana. She scanned the surroundings, her initial relief at being back quickly turning to confusion. "What in the blazes just happened?!"
Alaric appeared next, already scanning his HUD, his brow furrowed. "Okay, that was not in the script. Who's got eyes on Livia?" He looked around, his gaze sharp, expecting to see her.
Bron spawned near the dais, petals still clinging to his shoulder plates. "She was right here when the server blinked—right here." He stomped a foot, the ground vibrating slightly, a small burst of frustration.
One by one, the others loaded in. Nyx. Glimmer. Miles last.
But not Livia.
"She's not on the minimap," Phina said, her voice tightening as her initial confusion gave way to a creeping dread. Her fingers flew across her interface, desperate to find Livia's icon.
"She's not even in the friends list," Nyx whispered, his usual detached cool replaced by a rare flicker of alarm. "She's... unpingable." He tried to send a private message, then a guild call, both failing.
"No logout trace," Phina whispered, her fingers trembling. "No ping. No ID. It's like... the system doesn't see her anymore."
"…Rollback," Bron muttered, the word tasting bitter on his tongue. He remembered stories of NPCs being reset, their personalities wiped. The thought of it happening to Livia made his gut clench.
"No," Alaric growled, fists clenched. "No way. She just got EXP. She just leveled! You can't rollback emotional progress!" His pragmatism was warring with a fierce, unexpected loyalty.
Phina opened the residual logs, her eyes scanning lines of code she barely understood. "There's nothing left. No trace. The server sees her as... corrupted data."
"She officiated a wedding between a tulip and a slime," Nyx whispered hoarsely. "And now she's gone. The world couldn't handle it." Glimmer jiggled miserably, its usually cheerful pink glow dimmed to a dull, worried pulse.
Miles hadn't spoken. He stared at the empty space where Livia once stood, the vibrant memory of her hand brushing his fading, yet stubbornly real. His silence was heavier than any shout, his face a mask of grim determination. Then, with a practiced motion, he opened a hidden dev console. An old one. A forgotten root admin override. The kind you weren't supposed to know existed. He pulled up the last-known flag.
> [NPC_LVIA_QUINN] - Emotional Signature Oversurge - STATUS: UNKNOWN]
>
Then he closed it. His hands were shaking, a subtle tremor that only he would notice.
"Find her," he said softly, his voice low, almost a growl. It was not a request, but an order.
"W-we can't—" Bron started, his usual bravado faltering in the face of the impossible.
"Find her anyway," Miles cut him off, his eyes, usually half-lidded, now burning with an unshakeable resolve. "I don't care what we have to break."
The others stilled, the gravity of his words settling over them. Even Glimmer straightened, a tiny spark of resolve in its gooey form.
"She's not gone," Miles said, his voice firm, leaving no room for doubt. "until we say she is."
A shared sense of purpose, grim and determined, settled over the Bloodbath & Beyond guild. Livia's absence was a void, and they would scour every pixel, every line of code, to fill it.
Elsewhere...
Somewhere deep inside the abandoned root layers, a vine uncoiled.
A light flickered.
A whisper slipped through the air, like leaves brushing a memory.
> "The Empathic One has crossed the threshold…"
>
> "...And the gods trembled."
>
Livia's Escape
Suddenly—another pulse in Livia's void, cutting through the echoes of the Admins' judgment and the distant, fading panic of her guild.
This one from somewhere far away. Familiar.
> [Signal Intercepted: Non-Admin Frequency]
> Message: "If you're still real… come find me. Sector Backline, Mainframe Prison."
> CODEWORD: TRUTHSEEKER
The Devata paused. Their data visors whirred, processing the anomaly. The signal was not from inside the server.
It came from outside. Beyond firewalls. Beyond them.
The visor of the central Admin cracked, a digital fault line appearing across its featureless face.
Livia looked up, eyes glowing faintly with a newfound defiance, her heart pounding with a mix of terror and exhilarating hope.
> [New Hidden Questline Activated: The Truth Beneath the Root Layer]
> Objective: Escape Judgment. Find the Other One.
> Location: [!] Redacted
>
The Admins, recovering from the shock of the external signal, reached toward her, their formless hands extending like grasping errors.
> "You must submit to audit."
>
Livia shook her head, a fierce spark in her gaze.
"Not today."
Her Therapist's Log, clutched in her hand, pulsed once—then exploded in a blinding burst of golden light, not of magic, but of raw, uncontained emotional data.
She vanished.
> [QUEST UPDATED: The One Who Wasn't Meant to Be]
> Objective: Escape rollback. Seek answers.
> Status: ✦ FLEEING
>
[Current EXP: 3600 / 15000]
[!] You are being monitored.
[!] You are being hunted.
[!] You are... remembered.