Chapter 99: [99]: Simulated Deletion, The Dead Man’s Pass
Drifting through the Juncture felt like being stuck in a very long loading screen.
There was no sky and there was no ground.
There was only an endless void filled with the floating corpses of deleted video game servers and assimilated planets.
Sebastian stood on a massive floating chunk of asphalt.
It looked like a piece of an old highway that had been violently ripped from a modern city. The faded yellow lines offered the only color in the swirling purple smog around him.
He coughed, his chest rattling violently.
"Ugh, fuck me." He groaned and leaned heavily against the twisted metal railing of the highway chunk.
He spat a thick glob of black code onto the asphalt.
It immediately sizzled and ate a small hole into the pavement before turning into raw static.
His new green UI flickered in the corner of his vision.
[Status: Void Toxicity Building.]
[Warning: Base File Corruption at 12%.]
The Void Toxicity was slowly chewing through his foundational code.
It was not ticking down a standard health bar like a poison debuff. Instead, it felt like a cold numbness that was steadily turning his internal organs into dead pixels.
If he did not find a Server Filter soon, he was not going to die. He was just going to cease existing.
"I really need to find a pharmacy." Sebastian muttered while wiping his mouth with the back of his black leather glove.
He looked out across the abyss.
According to the coordinates he had extorted from the chained Admin, Outpost Rust was about three miles away. It was hidden inside the skull of a dead space leviathan.
But navigating the Juncture was incredibly tricky.
Without the Earth server to process his magical commands, his flight spells and teleportation skills were completely locked out.
He had to rely entirely on his newly compiled [Concept of Mass].
He focused his mind on his own body and specifically targeted the mathematical value of his physical weight.
He did not cast a spell. He just edited the number.
He dropped his mass to near zero.
He felt impossibly light. A strong sneeze could have easily sent him into orbit.
Sebastian bent his knees and jumped.
Because he essentially weighed nothing, the kinetic force of his Demigod-tier physical synchronization launched him across the void like a bullet.
He sailed over a half-mile of empty space in just a few seconds and soared past a floating Gothic cathedral.
As he approached a cluster of floating rocks, he flipped the script in his head.
He forcefully increased his mass to two tons right before impact.
CRASH!
He landed feet-first on the stone, his heavy boots cratering the surface immediately.
"Nailed it." Sebastian grunted and adjusted his torn leather coat. "Who needs an airplane when you can just bully physics?"
He was about to prepare for his next jump when a massive red warning flashed across his entire field of vision.
[CRITICAL WARNING: DATA PURGE STORM APPROACHING.]
[EVACUATE OR SEEK ABSOLUTE COVER.]
Sebastian frowned. "A what?"
He looked to his left.
Coming out of the deep purple smog was a massive tornado.
But it was not made of wind or dust. It was a swirling vortex of jagged red error codes and blinding white light.
It was a localized hurricane that literally erased matter.
Sebastian watched in absolute horror as the edge of the storm touched the floating Gothic cathedral he had just bypassed.
There was no explosion and there was no crumbling stone.
The cathedral simply wiped out of existence. It was deleted layer by layer as the red code washed over it.
"Holy shit. That is not a storm. That is a server wipe." Sebastian’s eyes went wide.
And it was heading directly toward him.
He frantically scanned his immediate surroundings. Floating debris would not save him. A stone wall would just get deleted along with him.
He needed something shielded. He needed a container built to survive the foundational wipes.
About a hundred yards away, resting on a flat piece of dark metallic asteroid, he spotted it.
It was a sleek white cylinder. It looked like an escape pod ripped straight out of a futuristic space shooter game.
It had a heavy blast door and a glowing blue control panel on the front.
"Please be unlocked." Sebastian prayed to a god he didn’t believe in.
He dropped his mass, jumped with all his might, and shot across the void.
He slammed his mass back up to a solid ton and crashed heavily onto the metallic asteroid right next to the pod.
VWOOOM-VWOOOM!
The Data Purge Storm was accelerating.
The deafening sound of raw data being shredded filled the vacuum.
The edge of the asteroid was already starting to pixelate and vanish into the red vortex.
Sebastian scrambled to the pod’s control panel and slammed his hand against the biometric scanner.
BEEP!
A holographic red text box popped up.
[Access Denied.]
[Biometric Scan Complete. Entity Status: ALIVE.]
[This vessel is a Stasis Morgue Drive. Only DECEASED data may be preserved.]
"You have got to be fucking kidding me!" Sebastian yelled at the panel and hit it with a heavy fist. "It is a digital coffin? Who designs a door that only opens for dead people?!"
The storm was less than fifty yards away. The asteroid beneath his boots was actively disintegrating.
He did not have time to hack the terminal and he did not have time to find another piece of cover.
He looked at the scanner. It needed a dead body.
Sebastian let out a frantic laugh. "Fine. You want a corpse? I will give you a corpse."
He did not have his pain receptors turned off anymore.
The Void Toxicity had completely bypassed his old UI settings. This meant he felt every ache and every agonizing sensation his body processed.
He placed his right hand directly over his own chest right above his heart.
He did not use a blade. He used the only tool he had left.
"Concept of Mass." Sebastian whispered with a trembling voice.
He did not target his whole body. He targeted the specific localized coordinates of his own physical heart.
And he increased its weight to five hundred pounds.
"G-GAAHK!"
The pain was absolute agony. It was immediate and catastrophic.
His chest cavity violently sank inward as his heart instantly became heavier than an anvil. The sheer crushing weight ripped his internal veins and arteries from their connections.
His heart violently stopped beating. It could not pump. It was a block of solid impossible mass.
Sebastian’s eyes rolled into the back of his head. Blood exploded from his nose and lips as his biological systems completely crashed.
He collapsed forward and his heavy dying face slammed directly onto the biometric scanner.
His vision faded to black. The cold embrace of actual physical death washed over his brain. He was flatlining.
BING!
[Access Granted.]
[Entity Status: DECEASED.]
[Opening Morgue Drive.]
With a hiss of pressurized air, the heavy white blast doors of the pod slid open.
Sebastian’s lifeless body tipped forward and tumbled into the dark interior of the cylinder.
CLANG!
The doors violently slammed shut and locked.
Less than a second later, the Data Purge Storm washed over the asteroid.
The metal rock was instantly deleted from reality. But the white pod remained as its shielded body successfully deflected the red error codes.
Inside the pitch-black pod, Sebastian lay dead.
But his consciousness did not fade into the void.
As his physical brain shut down, the advanced memory drive of the pod recognized an anomaly.
It grabbed his fading digital soul and forcefully sucked it into the pod’s internal hard drive.
A new prompt flashed in the darkness of his dying mind.
[Initializing Memory Dive. Welcome to Archive 001.]