He didn’t know what would happen if he ignored it. Maybe nothing. But the system hadn’t timed out, shut off, or moved forward without him.

  It was still here. Still listening.

  Without gesture or verbal confirmation, he provided the quiet intention to proceed.

  [CONFIRMATION RECEIVED]

  [SURFACE SCAN INITIALIZING…]

  [LIMITED RANGE ENGAGED: SPHERICAL PULSE / RADIUS 80 METERS]

  [RESOLUTION: PARTIAL / SPECTRAL-LAYERED DATA ONLY]

  [SCAN FILTER: MATERIAL / STRUCTURAL / ENVIRONMENTAL TAGGING ENABLED]

  [TOOLSET ENABLED: OBSERVATION]

  [ADDITIONAL FUNCTIONS: RESTRICTED]

  [THREAD INITIATION: DORMANT]

  Max studied the prompts as they rolled in. Each one felt like a system log more than a message—terse, modular, and about as user-friendly as a crash report duct-taped to a dumpster fire.

  Observation toolset enabled. It sounded like a developer-sided toggle—probably passive, but he couldn’t be sure. He hadn’t been given a UI or viewport, which suggested it wasn’t meant to be visual in the conventional sense. Maybe a backend tool. Some way to sense what was around him—environmental layout, maybe terrain data—but without seeing it.

  Spherical pulse / 80 meters. A hard radius. Probably some kind of scan. Something like a hitscan? Sounded like something a recon drone would emit.

  Badass.

  Resolution. He guessed this determined what kind of visual the pulse returned—like adjusting camera quality or shifting between render modes.

  Scan Filter. He figured these categories were what would be “tagged” as relevant during the scan. As to what specifically these Material, Structural, or Environmental tags provided, he could only infer surface-level guesses for each. This was something he would test rather than assume.

  Thread Initiation: Dormant.

  That one stood out. It didn’t look like a scan result—more like a hidden switch. One that hadn't been flipped yet. Maybe it needed a certain condition—distance, timing, who knew.

  It reminded him of a door waiting for the right knock.

  Mysterious, annoying, and just vague enough to keep him interested.

  Each line hinted at priorities, structure, logic. No cinematic flair, no grand reveal—just dry system-speak.

  Alright, well... let’s see what happens when I start pressing buttons, Max muttered inwardly, his intent now directed toward this new Spherical pulse "tool."

  The resulting pulse felt like pseudo-vision. Not actual sight, but close—an awareness that radiated outward like sonar made of data.

  With it came a sensation—faint at first, then rising in intensity like pressure pressing outward from his core. The pulse rippled through space in a widening wave, and for an instant, he felt every shift it touched. Air, stone, density gradients. It wasn’t pain, and it wasn’t physical, but it clung to the inside of his awareness like static.

  Something opened in his perception—an outward reach, dispersed and patterned, like a pulse radiating through space in a loose cloud of directional points—proximity data unfolding in every direction at once.

  The system didn’t return a picture. It returned structure—gradients of material density and spatial resistance. Something interpretive, like a heat map or surface overlay.

  Stone above him was compacted and ancient, mapped in slow sediment. Old tectonic lines echoed faintly in the pattern—stable but weathered. Then, just beyond eighty meters out, the profile shifted. Resistance dropped. Then a return of flags along with a sensation not previously experienced.

  One that was difficult to describe.

  There was a flood of accompanying… static. It was what Max could only interpret as this system’s version of junk meta-data.

  It wasn’t painful, just… dense.

  It was like receiving the entire backend blueprint of a city block hard-lined through his brain.

  Or his mouth affixed to the receiving end of a digital firehose.

  As soon as it came—within tenths of a nanosecond—it had subsided, now compiled neatly, resulting in a new prompt:

  [SURFACE TOPOLOGY DETECTED]

  [ATMOSPHERIC VARIANCE: CONFIRMED]

  [EXTERNAL STRUCTURE: RUINED FOUNDATION, STONE TYPE E]

  [NO ACTIVE ENTITIES WITHIN SCAN RANGE]

  [SUGGESTED SCAN INTERVAL: 1/6 CYCLE]

  [RETURNED TAGS: MATERIAL, STRUCTURAL, ENVIRONMENTAL]

  MATERIAL: STONE TYPE E — SEDIMENTARY COMPOSITION, MID-TO-HIGH DENSITY, PARTIAL WEATHERING

  STRUCTURAL: RUINED FOUNDATION — PARTIAL FOOTPRINT, NON-STANDARD ALIGNMENT, EROSION PRESENT

  ENVIRONMENTAL: ATMOSPHERIC SHIFT DETECTED — PRESSURE DELTA +0.12, TEMPERATURE VARIANCE -3.4°C

  The hell was that…?

  He blinked. Then blinked again. Followed by several more blinks—each more metaphorical than the last.

  That filter... needs a filter.

  Refocusing, he read through the prompt again.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The data was raw, but not useless. Tagged and categorized. It wasn’t enough to paint a picture, but it was... organized.

  And it confirmed something else.

  There was a surface—not within reach exactly—but just barely inside the scan’s radius. Right at the edge.

  And above it, ruins. Faint and fragmented, like digital haze.

  The system’s interpretation blurred the further it reached. Max couldn’t see detail, but there was enough shape and structure to guess what it had once been. A foundation. Maybe the edge of a forgotten outpost.

  Anything beyond that faded into obscurity, like low-poly geometry popping in and out of focus at the edge of a limited render range.

  The scan had pulsed in every direction—spherical. Not directional. Which meant the chamber, the walls, the floor—everything within range—had registered.

  He turned his attention downward.

  The chamber floor didn’t rest on solid bedrock. At least, not uniformly.

  The density shifted—stone giving way to compressed sediment, and then… space. Traces of hollow sections in the data. Faint outlines where the pulse had traveled slightly faster through open air. Empty pockets.

  To the sides, the stone bent—cracked in thin seams, like old stress fractures.

  Tunnels were highlighted. Some narrow. Some wide. All obviously manufactured.

  Their edges were too clean. Their paths too deliberate. And they didn’t end nearby. They led somewhere—somewhere out of his current reach.

  He hesitated, letting the data settle. He wasn’t used to this kind of clarity. The idea that a single pulse could map the world that precisely—it was equal parts exhilarating and overwhelming.

  While the return was just cold hard data, Max could interpret potential clues to this place’s history and purpose from it.

  The dungeon’s placement didn’t feel accidental. It wasn’t close to the surface, but something above it had likely once held meaning—ruins, structures, now long eroded.

  Tunnels beneath, a spiderweb in all directions, likely connected and buried in the passage of time.

  He stayed with the data as long as it flowed. The range never increased. The detail never sharpened. There was no indication that the system was limiting him—this just seemed to be the extent of what the tool could do for now.

  He eased out of the scan, letting the thread of awareness retreat back to the chamber. But something strange lingered in his mind—an echo of the scan.

  He couldn’t see it, not exactly, but the shape of the space, the layout of the chamber and nearby terrain—it was there. Subtle.

  Like a muscle memory of the area he’d just mapped.

  He ran back through the scan in his mind—and realized every detail was still there.

  Not an after-image, but vivid, precise tags, terrain gradients, atmospheric deltas. All of it. Available with perfect clarity.

  Maybe that was part of this new form. Some passive memory cache baked into whatever he’d become.

  It was full data retention. As if everything he’d touched, scanned, or triggered was being stored somewhere, waiting to be referenced.

  He hadn’t noticed any memory limits yet—no degradation, no fuzzing of the data. Everything he’d scanned was still there, accessible with the same clarity as the moment it appeared.

  But his sample size was still small. Whether that clarity would last, or whether there were limits he hadn’t hit yet… that would take testing.

  For now, it felt stable, archived quietly just in the background.

  Still, it gave him something else to test—his first tangible foothold.

  He turned the idea over in his mind. If the system could preserve information like this, store everything with perfect recall, then it wasn't just passively listening—it was built to respond. Maybe not immediately, and maybe not always obviously, but there were triggers. Variables. Parameters to uncover.

  His thoughts drifted back to the pulse. It hadn’t just been a clean data return—it came with a sensation. A presence. That outward pressure had been something real, something visceral.

  What if that pressure wasn’t fixed?

  What if that was the key?

  Maybe he couldn’t brute-force his way past the range limitation... but he might be able to lean on it.

  He considered the pulse’s hard limit—eighty meters in all directions. A neat, spherical boundary. No indication that it was adjustable. No system prompt offering an upgrade path. But no explicit lockout either.

  Max had brute-forced exploits into games before. Hardcoded caps weren’t always as rigid as they looked.

  How different could this be?

  Let’s try something stupid.

  A little too amused for someone about to punch a system boundary, but in true playtest fashion, he focused. Pushed. Let the intention stretch outward.

  The result hit like pushing a power tool into a wet socket.

  A sudden spike of feedback—raw, jarring, and borderline painful. Like reality hiccupped.

  The world didn’t glitch, but something in his awareness stuttered. A loop caught mid-execution, kicked back in protest.

  The limit held.

  Now he knew where the wall was—and what it felt like to lean on it.

  Alright, system… round one goes to you.

  He lingered in the aftermath, the feedback still ringing faintly in his senses. Not painful anymore—just sharp. Like the echo of a door slammed on your hand.

  But under the sting… something registered between whatever might qualify as nerves now.

  There’d been a delay. Subtle, but real. Between the moment he pushed and when the system shut him down—a flicker. A stutter. The same kind of micro-hitch you’d get from a program choking on conflicting inputs.

  A frame drop.

  Well, well… what do we have here, a mental twitch of amusement flaring somewhere deep in the back of his awareness—his new equivalent of a sly grin.

  That flicker hadn’t felt like a simple hiccup. It was system-wide.

  He focused again. Not to extend, but to replicate. He layered his intent—first one pulse, then another, overlapping them like queued commands. Not brute force. Just speed. Repetition.

  If the system had seams, he wanted to find every single one of them.

  The system hiccupped. His perception warped. Something about the pressure—outward, then inward—like his thoughts tripped over themselves trying to process before the system could deny them.

  It passed quickly.

  But in that instant, he felt the scan push a little further.

  Not enough to break free.

  But enough to prove it could.

  Okay, he muttered, the grin in his voice audible even if the air didn’t carry it. So the engine’s got a tick rate. Good to know.

  He thought back to an exploit. One he’d uncovered during his early QA days—a client build of a now-defunct MMO where the firing rate of a skill was tied to the client’s framerate instead of the server tick. Drop the FPS low enough, and it throttled everything. Spike the FPS just right, and the skill looped twice in a single frame. You could double-tap a cooldown if you timed it with a resolution switch.

  It had been a dumb, hacky oversight.

  But it worked.

  Now here he was, years later, testing the same principles—but with whatever this was. The system didn’t feel like code, but it behaved like it. Responsive. Deterministic. Vulnerable to timing.

  Time dilation.

  It wasn’t a plan. Not yet. Just a sliver of possibility buried in system behavior. But the fact that he could even observe the delay—feel it—meant it existed. And if it existed, maybe it could be widened.

  He wasn’t about to start calling himself a hacker. But he’d been in enough late-night dev builds to know that some walls weren’t meant to be brute-forced. They were meant to be timed. Exploited. Threaded.

  And this?

  This was starting to feel less like an engine with rules, and more like an engine with rhythm.

  He didn’t know how far he could push it, or if there’d be a cost.

  But somewhere behind that hiccup in the pulse was something the system didn’t want him to see.

  That was enough for now.

  He wasn’t sure how to access it. But if there was a pressure point—

  He’d just found it.

  One glitch at a time.