Walking with one Hit Point left is like carrying a tray of crystal wine glasses while sprinting across a sheet of ice. Every twitch feels fatal. Every stumble feels like the end credits are about to roll.
I wasn't sprinting, though. I was limping.
My chest didn't hurt anymore, which was actually more terrifying than the pain. The hole where Seraphina stabbed me wasn't bleeding; it was just... buzzing. If I looked down, I could see through my own torso. I could see the grass behind me through a swirling window of grey static and white noise.
"Keep moving," I whispered to myself. "Don't look at the glitch. Looking at the glitch renders the glitch."
I was deep in the forest now. Well, "forest" was a generous term.
When I wrote Chapter 3, I got lazy. I needed a scary wood for the heroes to travel through, but I didn't feel like describing the flora. So, I just copy-pasted the description of "gnarled oak tree" about fifty times.
The result was nauseating.
Every tree looked exactly the same. The same knot in the wood at eye level. The same branch pointing north. It was like walking through a hall of mirrors designed by a developer who quit halfway through the project.
[Zone: The Dark Woods (Procedural Generation)]
[Texture Quality: Low]
The ground beneath my feet was flat. Perfectly flat. No roots, no bumps. Just a brown texture stretched over a geometric plane. My sneakers made a tap-tap-tap sound, like I was walking on linoleum instead of dirt.
"Okay," I panted, leaning against Tree_Model_04. "She won't follow me here. Main Characters hate low-detail areas. There’s no loot here."
I checked my HUD.
[HP: 1/100]
[Status: Glitched (ERROR: Hitbox undefined)]
[Source Points: 4/100]
I needed to rest. I needed to regenerate. But this world didn't have auto-regen unless you were in a designated inn or near a campfire. I was in neither. I was in the digital equivalent of the trash can.
I pushed off the tree and kept walking. The air grew colder. Not winter cold—empty cold. The ambient sounds of the forest (a looped track of 'spooky wind' and 'distant wolf howl') began to fade.
Then, the world stopped.
I don't mean time stopped. I mean the world stopped.
One step in front of me, the trees ended. The ground ended. The sky ended.
There was a straight, razor-sharp line cutting across reality. Beyond it was nothing. Just a blinding, infinite whiteness.
The Unrendered Zone.
This was the edge of the map. The place where the narrative ran out of words.
"Perfect," I muttered. A normal person would look at an infinite white void and scream. I looked at it and saw a hiding spot. The AI pathfinding for characters like Seraphina couldn't navigate areas with zero coordinate data.
I took a breath, closed my eyes, and stepped off the edge of the world.
ns216.73.216.10da2
and then Add to home screen.