The morning began with a knife to the chest.
It slid between Kai's ribs like a key in a lock. He felt everything—the burn of steel, the crack of bone, the rush of blood spilling from his body like a broken dam. His knees buckled. His back hit the alley wall with a dull thud. His fingers clawed at the wound.
And then—nothing.
No white light. No tunnel. No death.
Time passed. At first a second, then a minute. Then ten.
He was still breathing. Still bleeding. Still alive.
> "Patch 3.1: Mortality Disabled. Let's see how they handle THAT." —God of Chaos, 6:42 AM
Kai's hand shook as he pulled the dagger out of his chest. The wound didn't close. It gaped, raw and wet. But no matter how much blood poured out, his vision never dimmed. His heart didn't stop.
All around him, the city screamed.
A merchant lit himself on fire in the plaza. A noblewoman leapt from her balcony, landing like a sack of fruit. A boy with no arms and legs sobbed as he tried to crawl back to his family. None of them died. They couldn't.
> "Pain Multiplier: x5 for dramatic effect." —God of Pain, laughing
Kai staggered into the main street, clutching his side. A man dragged his own severed head by the hair, babbling in three different languages. A butcher carved strips from his own thigh, giggling through tears. Someone tried to stab Kai again, just to see what would happen.
He didn't flinch.
This was the fifth time this week.
And only he remembered.
Because Kai wasn't like the others. He had started glitching months ago. At first, it was subtle: deja vu that wouldn't go away, memories that didn't belong to him, wounds that healed faster than they should.
Then came the voices.
> "He's still aware. Interesting." "Is he learning? That's not in the design."
He heard them when he slept. When he ate. When he screamed. A thousand voices from nowhere, echoing across the sky like broken glass raining down.
They called themselves gods.
But they weren't.
They were children with infinity in their hands. Divine programmers. Bored creators. Sadistic architects of chaos.
This world, Soluna, had been real once. Maybe. Now it was just a sandbox. A living modded game. Every day, they patched in new laws of physics, reset entire towns, spawned monsters just to watch them kill.
Kai had died 47 times. And come back 48.
He wasn't supposed to.
The first time it happened, he was eaten by a glass dragon during "Event Week: Crystal Apocalypse." When he woke up in his bed the next day, with the bite marks still on his ribs, he thought he was losing his mind.
Now, he knew better.
> "Player K-A1i: anomaly detected." —System Note
It wasn't madness. It was memory.
The world had rules. Then it didn't. The world had gods. Now it had devs. And Kai? He was the one thing they didn't expect:
A bug.
He made his way to the center of the city, where the sky had split open weeks ago. The clouds above the cathedral churned in unnatural patterns, forming symbols in languages no one had ever spoken. In the middle, hovering above the cathedral tower, was the Eye.
Not a metaphorical one. An actual, blinking, golden eye the size of a house. It stared directly down at the city, unblinking.
Kai stared back.
"Still watching?" he muttered. His voice was hoarse. His chest still burned. "Good. Watch this."
He walked into the square where the executions used to happen—before death was disabled. Corpses littered the ground like abandoned dolls. Some moved. Some cried. One begged to be set on fire.
He found a rock. Heavy, jagged. He raised it and smashed it into his own hand.
Bones shattered. Flesh split. The pain was real.
> "Why does he hurt himself?" "He's sending a message." "To us? Or to himself?"
Kai didn't scream.
"I remember," he whispered. "I remember the world before you turned it into your playground. Before the resets. Before the Event Chains and the Daily Quests."
A soft wind passed through the square. It carried whispers.
> "Make him interesting." "Give him a quest." "No. Let him rot. He's better that way."
They argued. Constantly. Like kids around a screen, fighting over the controller.
But one thing was clear. They noticed him.
He didn't know why. Maybe because he didn't break. Maybe because he remembered. Maybe because he chose to remember.
They called him Kai. That wasn't his real name. It was a designation. "K-A1i."
He suspected he was something else once. Someone else.
Before the world became code.
Before the gods logged in.
He turned his broken hand to the sky and raised his middle finger.
"You want a story? I'll give you one. But I'm not your protagonist. I'm your virus."
The Eye blinked.
> "World Event: The Virus Awakens." —System Alert
Thunder rolled across the city. Time froze. Then it shattered.
In a single moment, everything changed.
The sky turned red. The clouds dissolved into data. And above them all, a voice—not one of the gods, not a system prompt, but something older, deeper—whispered from the void:
"Glitch confirmed. Access Level: Unbound." "Initiating divergence."
Kai fell to his knees. Not from pain. But from understanding.
He wasn't in their game anymore. They were in his.
And he had just been given the keys.