The world burst into being around Evan. It happened suddenly: he was bent over his desk, wrestling with a stubborn piece of legacy code, the monitor's glow painting harsh, flickering light across his face. He'd barely slept. The bug had haunted him for days, buried somewhere in thousands of lines he didn't write, and yet he felt responsible for fixing it. Again.

  Then, a blinding surge of energy hit him, a physical force that knocked the breath from his lungs and filled his veins with a rush of static. He staggered, not onto the office floor as expected, but into something... else.

  The air thrummed with a strange, discordant symphony: birdsong laced with digital feedback, a wind that sounded like overflowing data streams, and wood creaking like overclocked circuits. The world around him glitched, its textures bleeding into one another, objects flickering in and out of existence as though it were a half-rendered simulation about to collapse.

  His vision swam, the landscape melting into a whirlpool of pixelated chaos. When it cleared, he stood on a lawn that shimmered from within, each blade of grass reshaping itself endlessly in hypnotic, algorithmic patterns. The office building behind him was gone, replaced by a towering structure of shifting metallic-organic material, its surface writhing like living mercury.

  Panic surged in his chest. This wasn't his world. This was something else entirely. He stumbled forward, reaching out to steady himself against a vibrant bush. The blossoms, glowing in impossible colors, exploded into flickering light upon contact, scorching the ground beneath them. He recoiled.

  "What the hell is this place?" he muttered, his voice shaky.

  Then it appeared.

  A flicker in his peripheral vision, a translucent rectangle hovering in the air like a heads-up display. Its edges shimmered, and in the center, text blinked in a cold, digital font:

  SYSTEM ALERT: ERROR CODE DETECTED ANOMALY INTEGRATION: IN PROGRESS... STATUS: UNSTABLE

  The box glitched, then disappeared in a burst of static.

  He tried to shout, but his voice fragmented into a digital whisper, barely audible over the ambient hum. His body felt wrong, unstable. A sharp jolt of static skittered across his fingers. They spasmed involuntarily, and for a split second, his skin flickered, like a visual artifact on a damaged screen.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  The world warped around him with every step, as though he were a corrupted file infecting the environment. And deep within, he could feel it: a resonance, a connection to the chaos. He was the source. He was the glitch.

  He moved forward cautiously, each step leaving behind a fleeting, shimmering footprint. The ground crackled beneath him as if resisting his presence. A growing dread weighed on him—he was an anomaly, an unintended consequence, a virus in this fragile reality.

  "Okay... okay, stay calm," he whispered, trying to focus. "You've debugged worse. Probably."

  His mind raced for explanations: a freak electromagnetic event? A dimensional rift? A simulation malfunction? Trained to deconstruct problems logically, he searched for a debugging sequence, a way to make sense of this. But nothing fit. This place defied physics and understanding. It wasn't just another location; it was another kind of existence, where the physical and digital converged, where technology hummed and magic whispered, where reality was code.

  And he was a glitch in the program.

  He kept moving, the corrupted world unfolding like a glitched file. Trees shimmered with color-shifting leaves, and rivers ran in broken patterns, sometimes disappearing entirely before reappearing downstream. Everything obeyed a logic that felt broken, rewritten. Even with his experience debugging complex software, this world defied comprehension.

  "Is this even real?" he asked the empty air. "Did I get sucked into a game engine gone rogue?"

  He pressed a hand to his throbbing head, chaos pulsing against his thoughts. His mind churned with fragments of code, debugging routines, and a language that felt more like a broken spell than syntax. He needed a clue, anything to help him understand. He was lost in a world where magic and code were inseparable. A world reacting violently to his presence. A world he somehow broke just by existing.

  Something watched him.

  He couldn't see it, but the sensation was unmistakable. Like a pointer hovering over him. Something in the environment had registered his presence. A flicker in the sky. The shimmer of a shadow that hadn't been there a moment ago.

  He was in over his head, caught in a reality where even breathing felt like a dangerous command, one wrong move away from crashing everything. The burden of his intrusion pressed down like a heavy cloak.

  "I need to fix this," he said quietly. "I need to fix me."

  Somewhere in the mess of memory, he heard his sister's voice: "You can't brute force your way through everything, Evan. Sometimes you have to step back and see the pattern." He clung to that thought.

  He needed to understand this world. Fix it. Fix himself. His survival—and maybe the survival of this place—depended on it.

  He paused at the edge of a rising hill. In the distance, something blinked—a tower, maybe, or a signal. A starting point. He had no better idea.

  His journey had only just begun. A journey into a world built on arcane code, a system he had to debug line by line. The clock was ticking, and every moment felt like a countdown to collapse.

  He needed answers.

  And he needed them fast.