Chapter 78: Whispers from Beyond
The weight of his new knowledge was heavy. Ryan felt like a kid who had accidentally stumbled into the big boss’s office and read a secret file titled "Everything Is Broken and It’s Your Job to Fix It."
For a full day, he just sat in the Core Chamber, watching the silent, swirling map of the god Verse, trying to wrap his head around it all. The Reality Schism. The Prime Weaver. His own strange, unique power. It was a lot to take in.
He decided not to tell anyone else. Not yet. How could he? How could he walk up to Chris and say, "By the way, the universe is broken, and we’re the interdimensional janitors hired to clean up a mess made by god-like beings of pure light"? Chris would probably just blink, scratch his head, and ask if that meant they were getting paid extra.
He spent his time exploring the Weaver’s systems, learning more about his new role. He was no longer just a player pressing buttons. He was a user with administrator access.
He could feel the pulse of Sector Gamma, the flow of energy, the health of its reality. He could even run "diagnostic" scans on the sector’s outer edges, where the fabric of space was thinner and more frayed from the Schism.
It was during one of these deep scans that he found it.
He was looking at a particularly dark, unstable patch of the sector, a place where the stars seemed dim and the background energy was a chaotic, sputtering mess.
It was a place no one ever went because it was spooky and dangerous. As he focused the Weaver’s sensors on the area, he detected something. It was a signal. It was incredibly faint, like a tiny whisper in a hurricane, but it was there.
And it was using a Precursor language protocol. The same ancient, complex code he had seen in the Weaver’s archives.
His heart started to beat a little faster. He carefully focused all of the Weaver’s power on that one tiny point in space, filtering out all the background noise, all the static from the broken reality.
He pushed his own mind into the connection, using his gauntlet to fine-tune the reception. Slowly, painstakingly, the whisper became a clear, repeating message.