Sebastian gasped, dropping to one knee on the platform. The green necrotic breath continued to wash over him, but it suddenly stopped hurting.

His health bar stabilized at a miserable fifteen percent.

The concept of decay no longer applied to him. He owned the concept. He commanded it. To the server’s logic, you could not rot the physical embodiment of rot itself.

The Leviathan cut off its breath attack, its massive jaws snapping shut. It tilted its eyeless head, clearly confused as to why the tiny human hadn’t dissolved into a puddle of grey sludge.

Sebastian slowly pushed himself up. His left arm was completely bare to the bone, glowing with silver light. His chest was heavily burned. He looked like half of a walking corpse.

He raised his head. His pitch-black eyes burned with unhinged, absolute authority.

"My turn," Sebastian whispered.

He just pulled his right arm back.

He channeled the fully maxed [Concept of Decay] directly into his fist. His knuckles didn’t glow with elemental magic. They simply turned into a localized void of absolute, terrifying nothingness. The air around his hand instantly turned grey and flaked away into dust.

Sebastian activated [Heavenly Steps].

Fzzt.

He vanished from the platform. He instantly materialized directly above the Leviathan’s massive, rotting snout.

Gravity grabbed him, pulling his dense body downward.

Sebastian drove his right fist directly into the center of the beast’s skull.

"Delete," he commanded.

PUNCH!

The moment his fist touched the corrupted hide of the Level 80 boss, the [Concept of Decay] violently injected itself into the monster’s core architecture.

The Leviathan didn’t even have time to roar.

The massive, cruise-liner-sized beast instantly went completely rigid. A wave of ashen grey spread from Sebastian’s fist, racing across the monster’s body at the speed of light. The rotting flesh, the purple Void tumors, the heavy digital bones—it all instantly turned to dust.

SWHHSSSH.

The entire monster simply collapsed inward.

It crumbled into millions of pounds of fine, harmless grey powder that rained down into the Blood Lake like a dirty snowstorm.

[Target Eliminated. Boss Defeated.] [Massive EXP Gained... Level Cap Maintained.]

Sebastian landed softly on the surface of the Blood Lake, using his [Gravity Domain] to keep himself from sinking into the red fluid.

He looked at his skeletal left arm. The server slowly began to patch his avatar, the silver wireframe stitching new flesh and leather back into place.

"Well," Sebastian grunted, shaking the gray dust off his right hand. "That’s one way to clear a blockage."

He turned his attention down. Beneath the surface of the violently bubbling red liquid, he could feel it. The heavy, magnetic pull of an entire planet’s source code.

It was time to harvest.

The Blood Lake of Server 404 was completely calm now. Without the corrupted Leviathan constantly thrashing in its depths, the thick, crimson fluid settled into a slow, rhythmic pulse.

THROOM... THROOM...

l

It sounded like a dying heartbeat. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

Sebastian stood on the surface of the liquid, his boots anchored perfectly by his localized gravity edits. His avatar had fully repaired itself from the necrotic breath, his black leather coat looking pristine once again.

He looked toward the shoreline. The refugees in the rusted cages were entirely silent. They stared at him with wide, terrified eyes. They had just watched a man get breathed on by a god, turn into a skeleton, and then punch that god into literal dust.

"Please," an old NPC begged, his voice barely a raspy whisper. "Are you an angel?"

"No," Sebastian deadpanned, not even looking at the man. "I’m the IT guy. And I’m shutting the server down."

He didn’t have time for rescues. He didn’t have time to explain multiverse theory to lines of code. He had a comatose girlfriend on an altar back on Earth, and he needed ten million units of Source Code to buy her life back.

Sebastian canceled his gravity anchor.

SPLASH.

He dropped straight down into the heavy, thick liquid.

It didn’t feel like water. Swimming through liquefied Source Code felt like trying to swim through warm, electrified syrup. The raw data brushed against his tactical suit, sending tiny, stinging shocks of static electricity across his skin.

He engaged his [Thermal Immunity] and [Life Breath] passives, completely ignoring the lack of oxygen and the oppressive heat of the data pool.

He sank faster, his high physical mass dragging him straight to the bottom of the lake.

The Ethereal Plane’s physics engine tried to push him back up, but he just brute-forced his way down.

Fifty feet. A hundred feet.

The red light grew blindingly intense. The pressure was immense, trying to crush his digital ribs inward.

Finally, his boots hit solid ground. THUD.

He stood at the absolute bottom of the canyon. And there it was.

Resting on a massive, perfectly smooth pedestal of dark obsidian was the World Core.

It wasn’t a jagged rock or a biological heart. It was a perfectly spherical orb of pure, blinding white light. It was the size of a wrecking ball. It contained the geographic data, the NPC registries, the physical laws, and the entire history of Server 404.

It was beautiful. It was the foundation of a reality.

Sebastian felt absolutely nothing looking at it.

"Come to papa," he muttered.

He walked up to the pedestal. The ambient mana pressure radiating off the Core was so intense it actually pushed his arms back as he reached for it.

He engaged his thirty-percent physical synchronization. His muscles hardened into biological steel. He forced his hands forward, his black leather gloves plunging directly into the blinding white light of the sphere.

"Guh!" Sebastian grunted.

It was impossibly heavy. It felt like trying to deadlift an entire mountain range.

He planted his boots, wrapped his arms as far around the orb as he could, and pulled.

The system instantly, violently panicked.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

Massive, red critical error windows exploded across his vision, blinding him with frantic warnings.

[CRITICAL ALERT: UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO WORLD CORE.]