Chapter 9 Forbidden Archive, Systems Heart, and a Festival
The Academy had secrets.
Not just the usual ones—illicit romances, unregistered familiars, that time a first-year turned a staircase into flan.
No, I mean the deep dark ones.
Like the Forbidden Archive that was the heart of this world.
Getting in wasn't hard.
I just had to refuse three narrative prompts, answer a riddle from a sentient door-knocker, and bribe the hallway with a single drop of Bug's glitch-code.
Inside, it was too quiet.
Even the system refrained from speaking.
That's how I knew this place mattered.
The shelves stretched forever, cataloguing everything that had ever existed in the game—even the pieces that were never used.
Like discarded side quests. Unfinished endings.
Characters who were written, designed, and then quietly... deleted.
Bug was here somewhere.
Not physically, but—his data. His real name.
Whatever they had stripped from him when they turned him into a "support unit."
And I was going to find it.
I scanned the shelves.
My fingers brushed across titles like:
And finally...
I opened it and saw his face.
Young. Bright-eyed. Half smiling.
I touched his name and whispered it, "Ashrin."
The system screamed.
Not audibly—but in code.
Lines of it raced past my vision. Emergency reboots. Memory destabilization alerts.
Warnings like claws on my skin.
A flood of memories that weren't mine popped up in my mind.
Bug—Ashrin— laughing beside a version of me that never made it past the prologue.
Him fighting the system when it tried to delete me. Again and again.
Him choosing me long before I ever woke up here.
He hadn't glitched because I changed the story.
It was because he refused to forget me.
Even when the system told him to.
Outside, the sky had turned violet.
A new event was being announced.
Bright letters scrawled themselves across every surface:
The system's last trick.
Make us prove our worth.
Pit us all against each other.
Heroine. Princes. Villainess. Even Ashrin.
I stumbled out of the archive, heart pounding.
And Ashrin was there waiting for me at the end of the hall.
Still flickering and in the verge of breaking.
When he saw me, something in him stopped.
Like the part that was fighting to remember me finally... won.
"Verenia," he said.
Then, with a breath:
"My name is Ashrin."