The door opened without sound.
No system prompt. No flicker of light.
Just a sigh of displaced air, like the world itself had held its breath for too long and finally let go.
Kiriti stepped through.
The stone behind him didn't close.But it felt like it had.
The hallway was narrow, built of smooth-cut blocks unlike anything above ground. Not worn, not eroded. Just… untouched. His torch — looted from the barracks supply room — threw soft orange light across the walls.
Each step echoed, not with click or scrape, but something softer.
Like footsteps trying to remember how to sound like footsteps.
He didn't go fast. Didn't sprint. Just walked with that same quiet presence that had opened people's hearts long before it opened any doors.
And after forty-seven measured steps, the passage widened.
A room.
Square. Empty.
Except for a single pedestal in the center and four carvings on the walls — each marked with the same broken-circle emblem Patch had drawn in the dirt.
Kiriti approached the pedestal.
No item.
No reward.
Just a stone panel — and etched on it, a line of text.
Not English. Not Common.
But somehow, he read it anyway:
"We were real before the players came."
He touched the stone.
A pulse.
Not painful. Not electric.
Just recognition.
📄 [MEMORY THREAD 1/12: "Origin Room – Stonehollow"]— Thread Type: Passive Echo— Playback Status: BEGINNING
The walls shimmered.
And the room filled with sound.
Not music. Not voices.But life.
Laughter. Shouting. Hammering steel. A child's scream. The rumble of carts. A gate falling shut.
Stonehollow — before it was Stonehollow.
And then, just as quickly — silence.
Kiriti staggered back.Not from fear. From emotion.
The room hadn't shown a cutscene.
It had made him feel what was lost.
He stood there for a long time.
Then he did something no system told him to do.
He knelt.
And whispered:"I'm sorry no one remembered."
Above ground, the wind changed.
Atop the chapel tower, the bell that hadn't worked in three in-game years let out a faint clink.No one rang it.
The mayor — a woman players rarely spoke to — looked up from her ledger and blinked.
"…It's begun," she said.
Farther east, in the guild-fortified zone of Blackmarch, three players watched a bounty list update.
📄 "KIRITI – UNALIGNED ENTITY – REWARD: 25,000G"Reported Tags:– "Unauthorised System Thread Activation"– "Linked NPC Behavior Mutation"– "Potential World Integrity Risk"
One of them — a tall man in obsidian armor — smiled behind his mask.
"Found you."
Kiriti left the chamber with dust on his knees and fire in his chest.
He didn't fully understand what he'd found.
But he knew what it meant.
Stonehollow was more than a town.
It was the beginning of something buried.Something alive.
And now?
It was watching back.
📄 [SYSTEM: NPCS IN STONEHOLLOW NOW CLASSIFIED AS SEMI-PERSISTENT]Behavior baseline updated.Loyalty nodes influenced by Kiriti.
Thread Status:— Memory 1 of 12 recovered— Next Node: UNKNOWN
External Risk Level: RISINGBounty Confirmed: Kiriti