Chapter 2: Parsing Error

  "Old man!"

  Carlisle’s scream tore through his throat like a snapped bowstring.

  He tried to rush forward, but his legs felt like lead. The chaotic repulsion force surging from the reality fissure pinned him against the rough stone wall like a giant, invisible hand. The air in his lungs was squeezed out. He gasped, every breath a knife in his chest. Tears mixed with cold sweat streaked down his face.

  He could do nothing.

  He could only watch as the horrific mutation devoured the only family he had left.

  Eldritch could no longer speak. The crystallization wasn't simple freezing; it was a dimensional collapse. A deconstruction.

  The old man’s left side disintegrated at a visible rate, turning into countless tiny, translucent cyan cubes. They spun, collided, and reassembled in the air, emitting a tooth-aching screech—like broken glass scraping together, or old gears forcibly grinding.

  His velvet robe tore apart, revealing not flesh, but a geometric structure so precise it induced despair. Glowing lines flowed within him. It was as if he had never been flesh and blood, but a model built from lines of base code, now being forcibly reclaimed by a higher-dimensional "System."

  Yet, in that final moment, Eldritch’s uncorrupted right eye stared fixedly at Carlisle.

  The look pierced through the flying crystal debris, through the boundary of life and death. There was no fear. Only the resolve of passing the torch.

  And a hint of apology. Sorry for the trap, kid.

  Crack.

  The sound was crisp in the deadly silence.

  The old man’s remaining right hand shot up, ignoring the crystallization crawling up his arm. He plunged it into his own disintegrating chest.

  Where a heart should have been, there was only a blinding vortex of chaotic code. Runes tumbled and annihilated within it. His fingers sizzled as the high-energy plasma burned them, flesh carbonizing and peeling away to reveal crumbling bone.

  He didn't seem to feel the pain. He ripped something out of that dangerous vortex.

  A shard.

  The size of a fingernail. It glowed with a faint azure light, its edges sharp as a razor. Its surface flickered with glitching shadows, like a fragment of a broken screen, or a scrap torn from the source code of the world itself. Unstable. Ready to dissipate.

  "Take... it..."

  Eldritch squeezed the last sound from his throat—a broken electronic static mixed with the crunch of collapsing crystal. With his final ounce of strength, he threw the shard at Carlisle.

  And then, he reached critical mass.

  There was no bloody explosion. No desperate wail.

  Eldritch Van Ostien, the sage exiled by the Empire for half his life, burst into a cloud of brilliant, silent crystal dust.

  Blue powder danced in the gravity-less room like sad snow. It drifted onto Carlisle’s hair, his eyelashes, his shoulders. Bitingly cold, yet carrying the mentor’s final warmth.

  "Teacher..." Carlisle choked. He instinctively reached out, trying to grab the shard, trying to hold onto the last trace of the old man.

  But he misjudged the nature of the object.

  It had a will of its own. It refused to be touched.

  The shard traced a twisted trajectory of True Script in the air, dodging his palm like a bird evading a snare. Then, it snapped around. With irresistible force, it slammed straight into Carlisle’s left eye.

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  "ARGH!"

  Pain. Instant and absolute.

  It was beyond physical limits. Like a red-hot iron rod stabbed into his eyeball, churning through the optic nerve into the cerebral cortex. Every neuron screamed. Like someone poured molten mercury into his soul.

  Carlisle collapsed, hands clutching his left eye. Blood seeped through his fingers. A broken, beast-like growl escaped his throat. His body convulsed, heels scraping deep gouges into the wooden floor.

  His vision split: half blood-red, half pitch-black despair.

  The world collapsed.

  Darkness fell. But not emptiness.

  In the chaotic zone between his blinded left eye and intact right eye, frantic spots of light began to dance. Like short-circuiting bulbs.

  Then, rows of cold, blue Runes—void of any warmth—branded themselves directly onto his retina. They flickered rapidly, inducing nausea, drilling into his mind before he could even read them.

  [WARNING: SOUL INTEGRITY CRITICAL] [CORE TRUE SCRIPT PATHWAY RUPTURED... ATTEMPTING RE-WEAVE... FAILURE RATE 78%... RETRYING...] [HIGHER DIMENSIONAL CORE ACTIVATED... SOUL CHANNEL SYNCED... FORCED CONNECTION ESTABLISHED (SYNC RATE 100%)]

  [ACTIVATING: ARCHITECT'S VISION (TIER 1)]

  "What... the hell..."

  Carlisle gasped, chest heaving. He lifted his head from the floor of crystal dust. Blood from his nose and eye dripped into his mouth—rust and salt. He coughed, every spasm pulling at the agony in his eye.

  He trembled and slowly lowered his hand.

  The familiar laboratory was gone.

  Replaced by a grotesque world of lines, parameters, and Runes.

  A "Parsed" World.

  The collapsed bookshelf was no longer heavy wood. It was a pile of brown geometric Structures. Every beam, every plank was deconstructed into basic lines. Floating text hovered over every jagged break:

  [MATERIAL: OAK | STATUS: PHYSICALLY DAMAGED (83%) | RESIDUAL MANA: NONE]

  Scattered manuscripts were no longer paper. The obscure runes on them became clear parameter lists: [TYPE: BASIC STABILITY GLYPH | ENERGY: 0.3 | CAUSE OF FAILURE: DEPLETED].

  And the blue dust—the remains of his mentor—transformed in Carlisle’s eye into strings of fading, sorrowful blue code. Every grain corresponded to a tag:

  [REMNANT SOUL FRAGMENT | CORE: FLUIDITY | STATUS: ANNIHILATING]

  It was a perspective of absolute rationality. Cold. Penetrating. As if the world had become an open code manual, all secrets laid bare.

  Before he could recover from the shock, a dull thud came from the heavy oak door.

  BANG!

  The door vibrated. Dust fell from the ceiling. Carlisle’s heart jumped to his throat.

  The Order. They were already here.

  BANG! A second impact. Heavier. Faster.

  There was no third.

  The oak door, carved with defense Glyphs and rated to withstand Tier-3 spells, began to "weather" instantly after the second hit.

  Not rot. Accelerated time. Starting from the lock, the hard wood turned gray, withered, and brittle. Cracks spread like spiderwebs. With a soft poof, it disintegrated into dust. The defense Glyphs didn't even flicker. They were dismantled, turned into meaningless energy scraps.

  Through the curtain of wood dust, three tall figures stepped into the lab.

  Their footsteps were light, yet they carried a crushing oppression.

  As they entered, the violent ice storm outside... stopped.

  Not the wind. The space itself. Every particle of matter in the room was forcibly "solidified." Dancing dust, curling paper, the smell of ozone—everything was slammed to the ground by an invisible field. Locked. Frozen.

  A suffocating, absolute stasis.

  Three Correctors stood side by side. Metal statues without emotion.

  They wore identical dark iron-gray trench coats. The fabric shimmered with a matte metallic sheen, woven from millions of tiny rune-chains.

  [MATERIAL: RUNE-STEEL FIBER | FUNCTION: ANTI-MAGIC | TIER: 4]

  But the most terrifying part was their faces.

  Not masks. Living mercury mirrors. Smooth surfaces with no features, reflecting the broken lab, the cowering Carlisle, and the sad blue dust on the floor. The mirrors rippled slightly, devouring and parsing the scene in real-time.

  The middle Corrector took a step forward.

  Crunch.

  His armored boot stomped ruthlessly on a patch of Eldritch’s crystal remains. The blue crystal ground to powder. The sound was ear-piercing in the silence. A desecration of a sage’s final dignity.

  He didn't look down. He didn't pause. As if he hadn't crushed a person, but a line of redundant code. An error to be debugged.

  The Corrector tilted his head. Red ripples pulsed across his mercury face. System loading.

  A voice resonated directly in the air—cold, flat, a layering of multiple metallic audio tracks that drilled into Carlisle’s brain.

  "[PARSING COMPLETE]"

  "SUBJECT: TABOO VARIANT (UNCONTROLLED TRUE SCRIPT PRODUCT)."

  "VERDICT: LEVEL 3 REALITY CORROSION DETECTED. NO SALVAGE VALUE."

  No monologue. No "surrender" warning. In the Corrector’s logic, there was only "Parse" and "Fix." That which did not fit the Order must be deleted.

  Mechanically, he raised his right hand, gloved in black. Palm facing Carlisle. Runes lit up on the glove surface.

  Carlisle’s Architect's Vision screamed the data:

  [SKILL: ORDER · THE ERASURE RITE] [ENERGY LEVEL: 5.7] [CAST TIME: 0.5s] [VERDICT: UNAVOIDABLE]

  Hummmm—

  No fire. No lightning.

  Carlisle watched in horror as the air in front of the Corrector’s palm began to "Lattice."

  Countless straight golden lines generated in the void. They wove a perfect tetrahedral cage, locking Carlisle’s coordinates. No gap to escape. The golden lines radiated the aura of "Negation."

  [WARNING: BASE LOGIC OVERWRITE DETECTED] [TYPE: THE ERASURE RITE] [THREAT LEVEL: FATAL (100% MORTALITY)] [NOTE: TARGET EXISTENCE WILL BE NULLIFIED VIA ROOT ORDER CALL]

  Carlisle’s left eye twitched violently. The warning box was red enough to bleed.

  He understood. This wasn't an attack. It was an administrative command. They were invoking the world’s "Veto Power." A force to rewrite logic and delete him from history.

  "EXECUTE PROTOCOL: ZERO."

  The sentence fell like a gavel.

  The golden tetrahedron began to collapse.

  Light itself was straightened, assimilated, and annihilated in its path. Carlisle watched the space around him being "deleted" inch by inch.

  The shadow of death swallowed him whole.