The white walls didn’t last long.

  I barely had time to read the update before the pod dissolved and the world remade itself around me.

  [SYSTEM UPDATE // DREAMER AMAYA]

  Zone Unlocked: Dream Dwellings – Exploration Mode

  Objective: Descend. Retrieve Dream Cores.

  Warning: Conscious strain expected.

  The warning turned out to be an understatement.

  The Dwelling felt like a corpse someone forgot to bury.

  The air was thick. Not just damp or cold—thick, like breathing through cotton soaked in old blood. The walls weren’t stone or metal. They looked like something between bone and concrete, slick in patches, porous in others. Everything carried this faint blue-white glow, like the afterimage of a screen you stare at too long.

  Nausea hit me so hard I had to pause, one hand on the nearest wall. It was warm.

  Great. The dungeon was alive.

  The system flashed the same polite harassment as always:

  [EXPLORE]

  I took a step forward. The floor gave slightly, like bruised flesh. Every movement felt heavy, like something invisible was hooked into my back and pulling.

  “This better have a good reward,” I muttered.

  I’d done dungeons in normal games. Mobs, corridors, mini boss, boss, loot. This had none of that. No enemies. No sounds. No direction. Just that queasy wrongness and the echo of my own footsteps.

  Then, ahead, I saw it.

  A shard of azure, pulsing faintly in the dark. Not bright, not dramatic. Just… there. Like a piece of a sky someone had broken and left behind.

  A Dream Core.

  The closer I got, the worse the nausea got. My ears started ringing, and my eyes watered like I was staring into a screen with the brightness maxed.

  I reached toward it.

  Pain knifed up my arm, sharp and electric. A warning slammed across my vision:

  [CONSCIOUS STRAIN RISING]

  Long contact with Cores may cause damage. Proceed with caution.

  I pulled my hand back, breathing hard. The Core hummed where it lay, embedded in the wall, faint cracks running through it like stress fractures.

  “How am I supposed to ‘retrieve’ that?” I snapped at nothing.

  The system, unbothered as always, offered a new tab:

  [INVENTORY CREATED]

  Status: Empty

  Tip: Find items in reality to assist in Dream Core collection.

  I stared at that word.

  Reality.

  So my dream katana wasn’t enough.

  It wanted actual, physical tools.

  Weird.

  A wave of nausea crashed over me, harder than before. My vision blurred. The ambient hum in the Dwelling grew into a roar, pressing against my skull.

  Another prompt forced itself into my eyes:

  [CONSCIOUS STRAIN CRITICAL]

  Restart Dream Dwelling?

  Yes / No

  I didn’t even hesitate.

  I hit Yes.

  The Dwelling imploded.

  The world snagged—then snapped.

  I was back in my apartment, fully awake.

  My lungs dragged in a real breath like I’d resurfaced from underwater. My hands trembled.

  “Find items in reality,” I repeated softly.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  So this “dungeon” needed outside tools. Not internal weapons. Something real.

  Fine.

  I grabbed my wallet.

  The hardware shop guy didn’t blink when I bought a rope, a small but sturdy knife, a foldable shovel, a cheap respirator mask, and a canvas bag. My city had seen weirder purchases.

  Construction gear to him.

  A loadout to me.

  Back to bed.

  Back to white.

  Back to the Dwelling.

  Attempt two.

  The rot hit again, but the mask dulled the edge of the smell—not that I was sure it was a real smell. I could still feel it crawling behind my nose, but it was better than nothing.

  I found another Core further in, wedged into a wall like someone had forced a fragment of the outside world into this place.

  This time, I didn’t touch it with my bare hand.

  I looped the rope loosely to steady myself, wedged the shovel’s edge under the Core’s base, and gently pried. It resisted at first, humming louder, the air thickening, the walls around it vibrating like they were trying to argue.

  “Come on,” I muttered through my mask. “You’re not sacred. You’re an objective.”

  The Core cracked.

  Not in a satisfying way.

  In a wrong way.

  A hairline fracture formed, light bleeding out. The shovel slipped. The Core split—and something burst free.

  Not a monster.

  Not a shadow.

  A flicker of light, small and fast, like a firefly made of static. It shot past my face, leaving a trail of glitch behind it, and darted deeper into the Dwelling.

  The system’s calm tone vanished. For once, it sounded urgent.

  [URGENT MISSION TRIGGERED]

  Sprite has escaped.

  Catch ALL Sprites before they breach Dream Boundaries.

  “Dream boundaries?” I echoed. “What boundaries?”

  The walls jittered like a corrupted file.

  I chased it.

  It wasn’t graceful. My balance was off, rope dragging, bag bouncing at my side. The Sprite was fast and erratic, zigzagging like a cursor gone wild. Sometimes it flickered between two positions, skipping frames. Every time it did, the environment around it glitched—a patch of wall turning into static, the floor briefly turning into a flat untextured plane before snapping back.

  The nausea kept rising, like the Dwelling itself didn’t want me in the same corridor as that thing.

  Then I stumbled into it.

  The corrupted zone.

  It was like walking into a software error.

  The corridor ahead wasn’t a corridor anymore. It was a mess of broken geometry—walls folding into themselves, floor vanishing in strips, parts of the space flickering between darkness, a flat gray grid, and the normal fleshy texture of the Dwelling.

  Right at the center, reality was tearing in a vertical line, like someone had cut through it with a knife and then changed their mind halfway.

  The Sprite darted toward that tear.

  “Don’t you dare,” I hissed, lunging.

  The moment my foot crossed into the corrupted area, everything went white-hot and inverted. Sound cut. Weight disappeared. I felt the same tug I’d felt when logging out—except this was rougher, like being yanked by the scruff of my neck.

  The Dwelling disappeared.

  I was back in the white walls again.

  Not gently this time — the world spat me out. My knees almost buckled as I stumbled forward, catching myself on nothing but air.

  My heart hammered. Sweat clung to my spine despite the cold sterility coating the room.

  A new prompt slid sharply into view:

  Reason: Spatial distortion encountered.

  Re-entry needed to stabilize environment.

  “Spatial distortion,” I repeated under my breath. “I barely did anything.”

  Before I could argue with a glowing box, another prompt overrode it:

  Restart required.

  No explanation.

  Just a demand.

  The white walls faded out like someone erasing a sketch. The pod didn’t appear. The floor vanished too. I was suddenly suspended in darkness with nothing but one thin, blinking line of text.

  I didn’t know if clicking Yes was smart.

  I clicked it anyway.

  [SYSTEM :: NIGHT LATTICE INTERNAL LOG]

  Ping received: Dreamer Amaya

  Unauthorized proximity to ONERA ENGINE detected.

  Distortion severity: HIGH

  Initiating patch…

  Rebuilding corrupted site…

  Updating Dwelling coordinates…

  Status: Dreamer Amaya remains under observation.

  Priority: Maintained.

  And the Dwelling rebuilt around me.

  Same zone.

  Same concept.

  Different… feel.

  The rot was muffled now, like the smell after a room’s been disinfected. The walls were straighter, their pulses slower. The glitch pocket was gone—the corridor now a smooth curve of bone-stone, as if it had never broken.

  The Sprite hovered at the corner, glitching quietly in a small loop, like someone had pinned it to a constrained animation.

  I caught it—more carefully this time. As my hand closed around it, the Inventory tab pinged open:

  [SPRITE CONTAINED]

  Data fragment secured.

  Data.

  Not monster.

  Not loot.

  Data.

  A shiver ran down my spine.

  Something had shifted. Not just in the Dwelling. In me. In… everything. Like I’d brushed against a part of the system that wasn’t meant to be seen.

  I “logged out.”

  Or—was awake.

  That wording made too much sense now.

  The office the next morning felt wrong in a different way—too bright, too ordinary, like a bad cover layered over the world. Monitors, coffee cups, the low buzz of keyboards. Normal.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the glitch. About Sprites counting as “data fragments.”

  Yuki dropped by my desk, balancing a coffee and her phone.

  “You look like you lost a fight with your pillow,” she said.

  “Just a long night,” I replied.

  “You and your insomnia,” she sighed, already scrolling. “Anyway — did you see this? It’s going viral.”

  She angled her phone toward me. A news video played—shaky footage of an apartment corridor, emergency workers, a stretcher being wheeled out. The anchor’s voice droned:

  “—no sign of forced entry, no visible injuries, no cardiac event. Authorities are investigating the cause of death…”

  The camera caught his face.

  My blood went cold.

  Akai.

  The same profile I’d seen under glitching trees and echoing deer antlers. The same eyes that had looked at me, wary and tired, in the Wild Layer.

  I grabbed Yuki’s phone before I could stop myself.

  “Amaya?” she asked, startled. “What—do you know him?”

  On the screen, someone had zoomed in on the still form on the stretcher. No bruises. No blood. No explanation.

  My voice came out thin.

  “…Akai.”

  The word tasted like static.

  And for the first time since entering Night Lattice, the real world felt more unreal than the dream.