And that’s when it arrived.
Not with thunder.
Not with lightning.
But with static.
He first noticed the glitch when the ad screen at the end of the tunnel began to flicker. A toothpaste commercial devolved into raw code. The jingle garbled. The smiling woman’s face melted into hexadecimal.
Then it went black.
And in its place:
█Hello, Kai.█
He blinked.
“Who—?”
█I’ve been watching you. Watching the decay. █
█You’re not broken, Kai. You’re just running a different script. █
The voice didn’t come from the screen.
It came from beneath the floor, from the humming rails, from the echoes of rats crawling through data threads.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Kai stood slowly. He didn’t ask how it knew his name.
He just said, “If you’re here to offer salvation, you’re late.”
The glitch laughed.
█Salvation? No. █
█I’m offering purpose. █
█You want to burn the world that betrayed you, don’t you? █
He said nothing.
█What if I told you that the world *wants* to be burned? That it’s *begging* to be rewritten? █
The wall began to tear.
Not physically—conceptually.
Reality peeled like wallpaper, and beyond it was a realm of code shards, fragmented gods, rules that had been stepped on like ants.
Kai stepped forward, but the air screamed.
█Careful. █
█You’re not ready to enter. But you *are* ready to remember. █
And then—
He was elsewhere.
Not physically transported, but emotionally unzipped.
Memories that weren’t his. Screams in dialects he didn’t understand. Suns collapsing into their own regrets. Lovers erased in debug logs. A child crying beside a dead logic engine.
And in the middle of it all…
A mirror.
Kai looked into it and saw himself, but rewritten. Same eyes. But hollowed.
And behind that version of him stood the Glitched God.
Only it wasn’t fully formed.
Just a vibration. A signal. An idea wearing a corpse like a hoodie.
█You’ll find me again. When you’re ready to decide which rule to break first. █
█Until then… keep bleeding. You make beautiful bugs. █
Kai woke up in his bed. No subway. No flicker.
Just his cracked phone.
But now, when it vibrated—no one was calling.
Just errors.
And every time he looked at himself in the mirror after that, he saw not a boy…
…but a debugged god-in-waiting.
End of chapter 65