David needed a location with minimal rendering load—a corner of the simulation where the System’s attention was thinnest and his activities would be least monitored.

  He found it at the western edge of the bazaar, where the market dissolved into an alley of abandoned stalls and unlit lanterns. The cobblestone path ended abruptly at a wall of fog—not the atmospheric fog of the rendered environment, but a flat, uniform plane of grey-white particles that marked the boundary of the simulation’s geometry. Beyond the fog: unrendered space. The System hadn’t built anything past this point because no player was expected to reach it.

  David sat down on a crate in the last stall before the fog boundary. He pulled the stone from his pocket and examined it with True Sight.

  The encrypted key was embedded in the stone’s data structure like a file hidden in a zip archive—not immediately accessible, but extractable if you knew the format. David didn’t have decryption tools. What he had was Infinite Deduction—a function that could simulate any action and observe the result.

  "Infinite Deduction: simulate cracking the stone and reading the key’s output."

  The pain was manageable this time. The SSS-rank reconstruction had replenished his mental reserves substantially. The simulation ran clean:

  [Simulation: Stone fractured. Encrypted key extracted. Key auto-executes upon extraction, opening a read-only portal to the System’s Archive Directory.]

  [Archive Directory contains: Dungeon schematics. Player records. Genesis Consortium operational logs. System architecture documentation.]

  [Warning: Archive access triggers a monitoring alert after 120 seconds. Security response: automated data purge and player flagging.]

  [Simulation complete.]

  Two minutes. He’d have two minutes of read-access to the System’s backend before the alarm triggered. Not enough time to download everything, but more than enough to identify what mattered and memorize it.

  David cracked the stone.

  It split along a seam he couldn’t see, the grey exterior falling away to reveal a core of compressed light—data in its raw visual form, a tight sphere of scrolling code that expanded the moment the stone’s containment broke.

  The light hit his retinas and decoded directly into comprehensible information. Not text—structured data, hierarchically organized, with the navigable architecture of a file system.

  The Archive opened.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  David read. Not casually—he read with the focused, extractive intensity of a student cramming for a final exam, except the exam was a death game and the study material was the source code of reality.

  What he found in 120 seconds:

  First: the dungeon system was not randomly generated. Every dungeon—every haunted house, every ghost train, every carnival—was a commissioned project, designed by architects employed by the Genesis Consortium. The "rules" weren’t emergent properties of a supernatural dimension. They were written. By humans. On specification documents that read like software requirements.

  Second: the "Survival Points" economy was a harvesting mechanism. When players earned points, they weren’t accumulating a reward—they were generating a resource. Each point represented a quantum of refined human cognitive energy, extracted through the stress and problem-solving of dungeon survival, and stored in a format that the Consortium could monetize in ways the Archive only alluded to.

  Third: the player ranking system wasn’t a meritocracy. It was a sorting algorithm. Players who ranked highly were flagged for one of three outcomes: recruitment into the Consortium’s operational structure, elimination if they posed a threat, or "harvesting"—a term the documentation used without defining, tagged with a classification level David didn’t have access to.

  Fourth: David’s own file. Player No. 7749. Two SSS-rank clears. S-Rank talent. Title: Usurper of the Express. Current threat assessment: FLAGGED. Assigned response: Cleaner Unit 7, deployment authorized, elimination priority ALPHA.

  They were already coming for him. The response had been authorized before he’d even finished the Ghost Train.

  The 120-second window closed. The Archive’s light collapsed back into the stone’s fragments, which dissolved into dust. A faint red pulse propagated through the simulation’s rendering—the monitoring alert, firing silently, flagging David’s coordinates for future reference.

  David stood up. He brushed stone dust off his coat.

  He had the information he needed. The Consortium wasn’t a shadowy conspiracy operating from the edges of reality—it was a corporation. It had employees, infrastructure, supply chains, and bureaucratic processes. It had org charts and threat assessment protocols and deployment authorizations.

  And corporations, in David’s experience, were just very large codebases with very many bugs.

  He walked back toward the bazaar’s center. The lanterns swayed in their 14-second loops. The lute music played its 45-second cycle. The NPCs smiled their static smiles.

  Somewhere in this simulation, Cleaner Unit 7 was being briefed on his file. Somewhere, a team of Consortium operatives was studying his dungeon clears, his talent profile, his behavioral patterns, preparing a strategy to end his life.

  David bought a bowl of noodles from a street stall. They cost 30 points. They tasted like the best noodles he’d ever had, because the System knew exactly which neurons to stimulate to produce that subjective experience.

  He ate them anyway. The taste was fake. The warmth in his stomach was fake. The comfort of sitting at a wooden table under paper lanterns, eating hot food after surviving a nightmare, was engineered from the ground up to pacify him.

  But David had been a broke university student for two years. He knew exactly how to enjoy a meal he’d paid for while simultaneously planning the destruction of the institution that had overcharged him.

  He finished the noodles, set down the chopsticks, and walked toward the eastern market to find the information broker who could tell him what "Cleaner Unit 7" looked like before it found him first.