Chapter 76: The Glitching Code, The Wraith’s Wake
Levi was completely ready to march out of Valerius Citadel and find the next high-level zone to farm. He had just hit Level 35, his stats were absurd, and he had three months to turn himself into a literal god-killer.
But right as he turned away from the Citadel Core, a sickening, digital tearing sound echoed behind him.
Levi whipped around.
Isolde was on the floor.
She hadn’t just tripped. Her avatar was physically tearing apart. Thick streams of glowing green hexadecimal code were violently bleeding out of her gray cloak, spilling onto the stone steps like liquid static. She was entirely on her hands and knees, her fingers digging into the rock.
"Isolde!" Levi dropped his scythe and rushed over to her.
He grabbed her shoulder. The VR engine completely freaked out. His hand actually clipped right through her cloak for a second before the collision physics snapped back into place.
She looked up at him. Her blank, robotic eyes were completely gone. They were replaced by endless strings of scrolling green code.
"System retaliation," Isolde whispered. Her voice wasn’t flat anymore. It was stuttering, skipping like a badly scratched CD. "The God-fragment... it is attempting to overwrite my human consciousness. Deletion sequence initiated."
Levi’s jaw clenched. "How long?"
"Calculations indicate my human code will be permanently erased in exactly twenty-one days," she stated, her head twitching violently. "I have three weeks. After that, the Anomaly will take full control of this vessel."
"Yeah, I’m not letting that happen," Levi snapped.
He didn’t care that she was technically a walking apocalypse trigger. Over the last few days, her broken True Damage had saved him entirely from getting walled by game mechanics. More importantly, she was the only person in this entire simulation who actually understood what was going on.
He wasn’t going to let his only ally get deleted by a math error.
Levi’s brain rapidly searched through three years of past-life memories. There had to be a way to fix a corrupted soul in Starfall. The game was massive, and high-level lore was full of weird metaphysical loopholes.
Then, it hit him.
"The Midnight Continent," Levi muttered.
It was a Level 50 to 70 quarantine zone located entirely across the Sea of Screams. The developers had basically locked it away because the code there behaved erratically. Deep inside the Midnight Spire resided Kaelen, the Night King. His boss core possessed the exact metaphysical properties required to anchor a soul.
"We’re going to the Spire," Levi told her, pulling her up to her feet.
Isolde’s avatar flickered heavily. "The Midnight Continent is beyond your current level parameters. The mathematical probability of you surviving—"
"I don’t care about the math right now," Levi interrupted. "I didn’t pay for all these upgrades just to watch you get deleted."
He slung his scythe onto his back and opened his remote Domain interface.
Because he was the owner of the Harvester’s Exchange, he had access to his vault ledger from anywhere in the world. His 5% tax had been farming the top guilds all day. He looked at the balance. He needed cash to cross the ocean, and he wasn’t going to haggle.
He hit the withdraw button and pulled 50,000 Gold Coins directly into his personal inventory.
"Let’s go," Levi said.
He didn’t bother using his mount. He just picked Isolde up, throwing her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Her avatar was glitching so badly she barely weighed anything.
He turned around and sprinted down the steps of the Citadel Core.
The surviving players standing in the courtyard immediately scrambled out of his way. They parted like the Red Sea, terrified of the guy in black armor rushing at them. Levi ignored them completely. He ran straight through the ruined, burning streets of Valerius Citadel.
He didn’t head for the main gates. He headed for the underground slums.
It took him ten minutes of navigating dark, winding tunnels before the smell of smoke was replaced by the smell of rotting fish and heavy sea salt. He reached the Docks of the Damned—a smuggler’s port hidden entirely beneath the city, sitting on a black, underground ocean.
The docks were lined with shady NPC merchants and pirates selling illegal buffs and stolen loot.
Levi walked right past them. He headed straight for the largest ship docked at the end of the wooden pier. It was a massive, rotting galleon covered in glowing green ghost-light.
Standing at the gangway was NPC Captain Silas. He was a skeletal pirate wearing a tattered captain’s coat, missing half his jaw.
"The Sea of Screams ain’t open for tourists, boy," Captain Silas rasped, resting a rusted cutlass on his shoulder. "Unless you got a death wish, turn around."
Levi didn’t slow down. He walked right up to the skeletal captain and opened a trade window.
He dumped 10,000 Gold Coins into the slot.
Captain Silas’s remaining jawbone physically dropped. The NPC’s scripted intimidation dialogue instantly broke.
"I need to charter the Wraith’s Wake," Levi said, his voice dead serious. "We’re going to the Midnight Continent. Right now. And I don’t want to hear any complaints about the weather."
"T-ten thousand gold?" Silas stammered, his eye sockets flashing with greedy blue light. "Aye, captain! The ship is yours! We sail immediately!"
Levi pushed past the NPC and walked up the gangway onto the deck of the ghost ship. He set Isolde down gently on a wooden crate near the mast. Her gray cloak was still leaking hexadecimal code, but the static seemed slightly less violent now that they were moving.
She looked up at him, her robotic eyes twitching. "You just spent ten thousand gold on a boat ride. That is highly inefficient."
"I own the auction house," Levi smirked, leaning against the wooden railing. "I’ll make it back by tomorrow."
The ghostly crew of skeletons frantically untied the mooring lines. The heavy sails, full of holes, somehow caught a massive gust of unnatural wind. The *Wraith’s Wake* pulled away from the underground docks and headed out into the pitch-black water.
Levi stood at the bow of the ship, watching the heavy black fog of the Sea of Screams swallow them whole. They were heading into a Level 50 quarantine zone. He was going to have to fight mobs fifteen levels higher than him.
But with 1,080 Attack and a SSS-Rank class, he wasn’t worried. He was just ready for the next harvest.