But the server didn't care about poetry. The countdown hit zero.

At the edge of the map, where the game's boundaries met an invisible wall, they stopped. Beyond it was nothing. Not void—nothing. The original devs had planned an ocean, but the assets were never finished. So the community had built their own: a shader that turned the empty space into a mirror. If you stood at the wall and looked down, you saw yourself reflected in an endless, impossible sea.

"The system forgets. But we are not the system. We are the ones who stayed."