/~Narrator~/
The world stretched thinner the deeper he went.
What began as fractured memory had now become a terrain that was coded, but real. A data-slick path cut through the void like a spinal column of pure white light, lined with fragmented obelisks and crumbling blocks of old dev logs, some still bearing traces of names long erased from the system.
This was The Spine.
Not on any map, it was not even whispered of in underground player forums or data-hacker threads. It wasn't part of the game.
It was beneath it, it was way before it.
This was a place where failed gods, abandoned developer experiments, and conscious lines of forgotten code still slithered, half-alive, half-corrupted.
Contrario stood at the mouth of a broken bridge made of glass and command-line fragments. Behind him, Stray materialized slowly, his eyes were low with caution.
"This is the oldest part of the foundation as far as I know," Stray said.
