The village had no name.
It didn't appear on any maps.
No active quests, no relevant dialogue.
It was… a design mistake disguised as a settlement.
Perfect.
Exactly what I needed.
---
I walked its main road — just a strip of dirt between half-rendered huts — with my hood low and aura suppressed.
The villagers were different.
Not because they acted strange, but because they didn't act at all.
They didn't greet.
Didn't offer items.
Not a single icon hovered over their heads.
They simply existed.
NPCs with no purpose. Extras the system had reset so many times they'd stopped trying to fit into the narrative.
And that made them safe.
---
I found an abandoned cabin near the edge. No active runes. No magical surveillance.
Perfect hideout.
For two days, I did nothing but observe.
The "reset ones" lived like shadows of the world.
Some repeated tasks without knowing why (gathering firewood, grinding wheat for nothing).
Others just… stared at the horizon, as if waiting to be remembered.
And then I saw it.
One of them, a white-haired boy, was carving symbols into the wood of his house.
The same technique.
The same perfectly asymmetrical patterns.
It couldn't be a coincidence.
---
I approached carefully.
"Who taught you that?"
The boy didn't respond at first.
Just kept carving.
Then, in a hollow voice:
"She spoke to me before time got erased."
"She?"
"The one who sings when the moon hurts."
It wasn't a metaphor.
Reset extras don't know how to lie.
The information was there. You just had to read between broken lines.
---
That night, I decoded the symbols carved on every home.
It was a hidden language. Not magic. Not human.
A navigation system for those fleeing the script.
> "Here, no one will force you to be a character."
"Silence is refuge."
"Seek the song when the eclipse misaligns."
That last one froze my blood.
Because I knew what it meant.
The next anomaly left by "S" would appear during a misaligned eclipse.
And there was one in the astral calendar… three days from now.
One the system had flagged as canceled.
But glitches don't cancel. They delay.
---
It was time to move again.
With more caution.
With more fury.
And with a new objective:
Find the one who sings when the moon hurts.