[[[ WARNING - CRITICAL HEALTH ]]]
Kei opened his eyes to this beeping notification, feeling extremely weak.
He looked at his low HP and groaned when he realized his bleeding status had evolved to a hemorrhage.
As such, drinking a red potion healed him a little but did not cure his ongoing blood loss.
'Hemorrhage must be a more advanced condition than just bleeding,' he thought while tearing his clothes and tying them tightly around his wounds, 'surely a basic potion is nowhere near enough to help with that.'
He then noticed the fatigue status that significantly decreased his characteristics, presumably obtained after emptying his stamina.
Feeling numbness in his arm, he interrupted his movement. 'I get hunted to death by monster weaklings… Why am I trying ? Does applying pressure on an open wound even work in this new world ?'
'So many things have changed already and I don't know a fraction of them… What makes me keep going ? I was already about to give up before all this anyway…'
'My peaceful life was ruined before the Armageddon even started. I lost everything before it was all destroyed. What do I have to fight for ?'
Kei stayed silently brooding on the ground for a minute until the continuous, irregular sound of the running fountain became annoying. He only then realized its presence and started to look around.
'Where am I ? How did I go from getting teared up by dinosaurs to waking up in this room ? I don't even remember passing out.'
The room itself was circular and plain white. It was well lit by a supernatural, soft, pale light even though no source was to be seen.
The room had no windows but numerous identical closed doors were evenly spaced on the wall.
Kei finally got up to investigate the room, not only out of sheer curiosity but in an attempt to clear his mind as well.
A bunch of white cubes were geometrically scattered around the area, on top of which were sitting random and diverse items.
Among other things that were too convoluted to make the slightest sense of, Kei identified a very heavy looking chestplate made from a mirror-like metal, a cloak made from golden feathers that was twice his size, a pitch black floating scepter decorated with eye-shaped deep purple gemstones and a serrated copper crown with its spikes pointing where the head of the bearer would be.
He brushed his curiosity away for the moment and chose not to touch any of the expensive looking stuff, scared about what would happen if he tried to steal one.
The noisy fountain was sitting at the very center of the place, seeming incredibly out of place.
It was finely wrought and made from a dark gray, porous stone while everything around it was white and simply shaped.
A crystal clear, slightly cyan liquid was flowing endlessly from it before completely disappearing in the tiny cracks in the stone. Once again, Kei preferred not to touch the fountain or its liquid.
'What is this place ? There is such an eerie feeling to it, completely isolated from the outside world. I simply can't hear anything other than the fountain.'
Upon closer inspection, Kei noticed that every single door in the room was deprived of lock and handle, and no amount of effort made any of them even budge in any direction.
Finally realizing that he was locked in a mysterious room with no exit, his slowly decreasing health down to a quarter, the young man abandoned his caution and started to experiment more freely around the room.
'I only have one health potion left. If I do nothing, I'll end up dying for sure. Might as well risk it all and die trying to do something at least.'
Kei then tried to seize a large item that somewhat resembled a sledgehammer, but just like the doors, failed to move it even a hair's breadth.
Of all the items that were sitting on the white pedestals, none seemed to have any contextual game window to explain what they were and what they did.
Kei suspected that he needed to equip them or put them in his inventory to get access to their stats, but when he tried to grab those that he felt had the best chances of granting him strength, he failed just as much as before.
'Strangely it does not seem to have anything to do with weight. Even this small crown I can't displace at all. I would say they're all frozen in place, but astonishingly I can make the feathers on the cloak wave by just blowing on them.'
Just when he was sure that he could not take any of the items in the room, his eyes met the tiniest, lightest looking item of all.
'That settles it. If I can't move this, I can't move anything.'
It was a pair of round silver glasses with light blue reflections shimmering on the lenses. And to his surprise, he grabbed and lifted it just as he would have with any regular pair of glasses.
'They look so brittle compared to the other equipment here. I doubt silver is the best material for a spectacle frame.'
After a short hesitation, he lifted the glasses to his eyes. As soon as he put them on, his entire field of view got cluttered with dark blue message windows overlapping with his environment.
'What the hell is all that ?!'
Wherever he looked, a new window popped, filled with small and compact white text which would have been cryptic for a lot of people, but not to Kei.
'Wait a second… This syntax, these symbols… I recognize them !'
When looking at the wall, this is what he read :
{entity : game.static.terrain.wall.circle}
{(x, y, z) : (8649, 2746, -1564)}
{radius : 50}
{height : 3}
{thickness : 0}
{material : hvnQuartz}
{properties : [indestructible, hidden]}
'As mind-blowing as it seems, I know exactly what this is,' he thought while shifting his gaze to one of the doors.
{entity : game.static.interactive.door.doubleSlide}
{(x, y, z) : (8645, 2721, -1565)}
{width : 1.6}
{height : 2}
{material : hvnQuartz}
{state : closed}
{locked : true}
{key : null}
{properties : [indestructible, hidden]}
'This… This is code. The world is a video game and I can see its code !'
Wandering his gaze over each of the items in the room, he could now read all of their attributes and characteristics.
'I think I understand why I can't move any of them. They're all level 9999 items ! There is no way a level 1 like me could ever use them !'
'9999 seems like an absurdly high number, even when I don't know the average progress speed in this game.'
'But their level is not the only strange thing about these items. They have no name and no description, just raw stats and effects. Let's take my dagger for example :'
{entity : game.item.weapon.dagger.iron}
{name : "Iron Dagger"}
{description : "Cheap and efficient, it is the most common weapon among thieves."}
{damage : 3}
{damageType : slash}
{handling : 1}
'Now the golden feather cloak for comparison :'
{entity : game.item.back}
{level : 9999}
{abilities : [freeFlight, nonCollidable]}
'And the floating scepter :'
{entity : game.item.weapon}
{level : 9999}
{abilities : [setMana(-1), learnSpells(all)]}
'It can only mean one thing. If these items don't have anything to display in an inventory, it's because they are not meant to ever be found by a player.'
'I know exactly what's going on since I was a game developer myself. These are dev items, which were created for testing purposes only.'
'And this place must be the dev test room, an area that no player should ever be able to visit, only accessible through command teleportation, hence the "hidden" property that I presume makes it and everything inside it invisible from an outside perspective.'
'That raises the question : how on earth did I end up in this room ?? When I try to remember what happened, there are only the raptors hunting me, my stamina points reaching zero and me falling towards–'
'Wait… the spiky bush ? Yes, I remember now, a spiky bush at the bottom of a tree ! But in that case, could it be possible…'
'Did I… Did I just noclip through the ground because of a janky hitbox… ?'
'I hate how much sense that makes. In game development, plants don't usually get much attention because they are just decorations. But this bush had thorns, so it had to deal damage, which means it has a hitbox – or maybe every thorn has its own hitbox.'
'When I fell, my personal hitbox might have gotten messed with by the bush and a glitch caused me to be relocated through terrain, which explains why my vision turned pitch black.'
'But of course the game is not supposed to render player entities through static objects, so instead I pass out and it automatically shifts my xyz coordinates until I somehow end up in an open area, which happens to be here.'
'Now the obvious question : how do I get out ?'
Lost in the middle of all the other message boxes, the now familiar critical health notification almost went unnoticed by Kei who was completely absorbed in his thoughts.
When he materialized his last red potion in his hand and read its code, he got suddenly seized with a doubt and without drinking it promptly turned his head towards the fountain in the middle of the room.
'I had a hunch about this,' he thought with a half smile, 'and I'm glad I was right.'
He put the potion back in his inventory and rushed straight to the fountain before starting to take long sips of the everflowing cyan liquid. As a result, his health went back to full and both his hemorrhage and fatigue statuses vanished in an instant.
'It makes sense to have a way to quickly replenish your health and resources in a dev test room, but I needed to see its code to be sure.'
Now completely recovered and with a developer tool at his disposal, Kei regained some of his confidence in his chances of survival.
'It is just insane, thinking that such an item ended up in my hands. It could have happened to anyone, but it was me, a game developer, who found it.'
'I can hardly believe this is a coincidence. Why even was it the only item of all that did not have a level requirement ?'
'Well, there's no use asking this kind of question right now. It's not like I can get any answer anyway. Let's just call it luck and move on.'
'In theory, these glasses make up for the uselessness of my class tenfold. I still need to test them in practice, I wouldn't want to be too cocky about that. But first, I need to find a way out of this damn room…'
Just as he was forming this thought, Kei suddenly felt really dizzy and he just had time to read the dark red notification message popping up right before his eyes before passing out.
[[[ WARNING : OUT OF BOUNDS ]]]