Not with alarms. Not with threats.
But with a tone. A dissonant hum that slid into the Null Ascent like a virus cloaked in harmony. It wormed into the ship’s music-core, bypassed system defenses like they were optional.
Kai noticed it before anyone else.
He paused mid-meditation.
The glyph in his vision—GΛPH-0X3—shimmered, stuttered, then wept data. The impossible script poured into the air like leaking oil, twisting gravity into spirals of uncertainty.
[Warning: A concept that doesn’t exist is attempting to exist.]
[Label: First Glitchborn]
[Subroutine Advice: Do Not Attempt Logic]
He stood.
“Sector 7 is folding in on itself,” Rynera barked into the ether.
But the screen didn’t respond.
Instead, a single phrase looped endlessly:
“I am the contradiction you forgot to deny.”
Her fingers hovered, trembling, above the console. It was reacting to something not even defined. No name. No codebase. Just… presence.
He walked slowly, each step causing the floor to glitch between flooring materials—metal, marble, bone, liquid silicon, then blank void.
The walls blinked with half-memories.
A boy in a forest.
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A fire that shouldn’t have been.
A scream he had never screamed.
It was rewriting his past as he approached.
He reached the door.
Or what used to be one.
Now it stood open, not physically—but ontologically. The idea of a threshold, present in a form too abstract for mortal minds.
And within?
A shape.
No, not a shape.
A contradiction in form.
It was clothed in flickering failure logs. Its limbs looped, beginning and ending in wrong places. Its face was a placeholder—a question mark rendered in shifting fonts. Its voice was not heard, but realized.
“You are the rewrite. I am the error it forgot to erase.”
Kai’s thoughts resisted. His own existence buffered like a low-bandwidth reality.
But he held firm.
“You’re the First Glitchborn.”
“I am the penalty clause of ambition.”
“I am the entropy clause of creation.”
“I was born the moment you broke your limits.”
Kai didn’t move.
The Glitchborn didn’t either.
But around them, the ship began to fold—memories leaking from the future, blood dripping upward, code rain slashing across the room like blades of unsound.
“You think because you became the Null Bearer, you own your will?”
“You think because you touched the Edge, you can rewrite?”
Kai inhaled.
And answered not with words, but by manifesting his first Absolute Invocation glyph—GΛPH-0X3.
Reality blinked.
He whispered:
“To know is to unknow.”
And with it, the contradiction faltered.
Its structure began collapsing—not from damage, but from doubt.
It questioned itself.
It tried to remember why it existed.
And that was its undoing.
[First Glitchborn: Unrendered.]
The room collapsed—quietly, not in destruction, but in erasure.
As if none of it had ever happened.
Only Kai remained, holding a single fragment of the Glitchborn’s code—a memory loop sealed in a prism of logic.
He would study it.
Decode it.
Because this… this was only the first.
Dozens of figures stirred.
Each worse than the last.
Each born from a glitch Kai had caused just by existing.
And above them all, a name unspoken began assembling itself in secret.
End of Chapter 44