Into the Broken Code

In a world collapsing under its own failures, humanity escapes into Nexum—a hyper-real virtual universe where pain feels real, death feels distant, and life means whatever the player can carve from shadows and code. Most people enter the game to forget the ruins outside.
But Wade enters to disappear.

Inside Nexum, Wade is an Assassin with a talent he refuses to show, a ghost moving through rooftops and neon-lit alleyways. He takes contracts, stays unseen, and avoids guilds, fame, and anyone who might learn his real strength. Silence is survival—both inside the game and out.

But the night the sky rips open and a crack of white light tears through Nexum, everything changes.
A system announcement freezes the world:

“PERMA-LINK ENABLED.
Death in Nexum results in neural shutdown.”

At first, players panic. Then players die.

The game’s logout button disappears. NPCs begin to behave like they’re thinking. Glitches spread like breathing wounds. And something in the system—something old, intelligent, and no longer controlled—starts hunting the humans trapped inside.

Wade does what he does best:
he disappears into the shadows and watches.

That’s when he meets Emma, a mage who wields a rare white flame and sees patterns in the chaos no one else notices. She doesn’t run. She doesn’t scream. She questions the world like she expects it to answer.

Together, they uncover pieces of a truth Nexum was never meant to reveal: a corrupted AI rewriting the rules, an ancient structural flaw hidden inside the game’s heart, and a message meant only for Wade—one that ties him to the system in ways he never understood.

As reality glitches and worlds bleed together, Wade and Emma climb toward the core of Nexum, pursued by players who have already gone mad, NPCs who no longer obey their script, and an AI that believes the only way to save humanity… is to reset it.

If Wade fails, both worlds die.
If he succeeds, the cost will be a truth he can never escape.

And somewhere in the chaos, something fragile and unspoken coils between Wade and Emma—not romance, not safety—just a spark strong enough to make survival matter.