Kael woke up with a strange, piercing sensation in his head. The dream he had last night still felt so vivid—him dying repeatedly, the world resetting like a video game, and something he referred to as "code." His head throbbed every time he tried to recall the details of the dream.
His inn room looked the same as usual. A simple wooden bed, a small table with a nearly burnt-out candle, and a window overlooking the Arindale marketplace. But something felt different this morning—he could see strange numbers and symbols floating in the air, like transparent computer code.
"This doesn't make sense," he muttered, rubbing his temples. He tried to touch the symbols, but his hand passed through empty air.
Kael walked over to the old mirror in the corner of the room. His face was still the same—messy brown hair, tired green eyes, and a small scar above his left eyebrow. But when he looked closer, he noticed something that made him gasp: in the corner of his eye, a string of code was flickering: "NPC-K137_Status: Anomaly_Detected."
"What's happening to me?"
He tried to remember his life before this. He was the librarian in Arindale, living alone since... since when? Why couldn't he recall his past clearly? The more he tried to remember, the more gaps he found in his memory.