[Ren’s POV]
The road south was longer than the system said it would be.
I checked the map three times. It appeared whenever I mentally tapped the air, like I was swiping across a phone screen that didn’t exist. According to the system, Haremdale City was two days away.
I’d been riding for two and a half days, and the city was nowhere in sight.
Now that was strange.
The system map had never failed me before. It wasn’t making a suggestion or giving me a rough estimate. It was supposed to tell me exactly where I was going and how long it would take to get there.
Its predictions were always accurate.
So when the prediction turned out to be wrong, I did what I always did when something didn’t make sense.
I looked for the bug.
It reminded me of my gaming days, except back then, if a map glitched, I could check the forums to see whether other players were having the same problem. Here, I had no forums, no patch notes, and no developer to complain to.
Just me and a system that apparently thought everything was fine.
[HERO SYSTEM]
Status: Yamamoto Ren
Class: Chosen Hero
Level: 15
Luck: ∞ (SSS)
Combat: Peak (Tier 3, Enhanced)
Charm: Flawless
Active Quest: The Dragon Kingdom (Main)
Active Quest: Win the Trust of Clara Dale (Side) — Status: Unknown
Active Quest: Investigate the Anomaly (Hidden)
There it was. No error message. No warning. Nothing.
The system simply showed me my usual information, as if I hadn’t spent the better part of three days riding toward a city that should have been visible by now.
I’d played enough games to know when something was wrong with the engine. The problem was that I’d never played a game where I couldn’t tell whether the engine was broken or whether reality itself had stopped following the rules.
From my perspective, the system didn’t do user error. It was practically all-powerful. If the map said two days and the journey took three, the map was wrong.
Period.
Except the system wouldn’t admit that anything was wrong. The map still showed the same travel time, and there was no explanation for the extra distance.
So I did the only thing I could.
I rode faster.
That was when I started noticing the terrain.
The changes weren’t dramatic enough to make me stop immediately, but they were strange enough to get my attention. According to the system, the road between the forest and Haremdale City crossed mostly flat farmland. The elevation changes were supposed to be minimal, somewhere between zero and five metres.
Reality had other ideas.
There were hills.
Not mountains or anything ridiculous, just low, rolling hills that shouldn’t have been there. I remembered my geography teacher explaining how certain hills formed over centuries through geological processes.
These things looked as though they’d been there for years.
But according to the map, they didn’t exist.
The system and reality were having a disagreement, and somehow I was the idiot stuck in the middle.
On the second hill, I saw something that made me pull my horse to a stop.
A tree.
One tree stood alone on the hilltop, its branches covered in dark green leaves. The surrounding trees were already turning the usual autumn colours, orange and yellow spreading across the landscape.
But this one was green. Completely green, as if summer had decided to make a final stand on a random hill.
I stared at it for a moment, then looked at the map.
Nothing.
No special location marker. No environmental anomaly notification. No explanation.
Just a tree the system apparently didn’t know existed.
I shook my head and continued riding.
The hills kept coming, and the tree wasn’t the only strange thing I encountered. There was a stream that seemed to run uphill. I watched the water long enough to convince myself I wasn’t imagining it, then decided I didn’t want to waste another ten minutes arguing with a stream.
There was also a bird whose feathers caught the sunlight in a way that reminded me of a visual effect in a game. The shimmer looked almost like an ability activation or a temporary buff.
Except it was just a bird.
No status effect. No notification. Nothing.
The world was filling in.
That was the phrase that came to mind, and it made a disturbing amount of sense.
My streamer brain immediately started comparing it to a game receiving a major update. New terrain, new environmental details, things appearing where they hadn’t existed before. Except developers usually announced updates. They gave players patch notes, maintenance warnings, or at least a notification that something was changing.
This world had given me nothing.
It was as if someone were adding content while I was playing, and I was expected to pretend that was normal.
The Forest of Unwritten Things had been the first place I noticed it happening. I’d taken Clara’s hot sister there, expecting a straightforward journey through an ordinary forest.
Instead, I’d run into enough trouble to rival the festival attack, where I’d nearly let Clara die because I hadn’t known there was another attacker. My system had flagged three enemies. There had actually been six.
Six.
Imagine playing a boss fight where the game tells you there are three enemies, then four more crawl out of the walls halfway through the fight.
My viewers would have roasted me for weeks.
Millhaven had been the first place where things started going wrong, although I hadn’t recognised it at the time. Now the road to Haremdale was showing the same symptoms.
The world was changing faster than the system could account for it.
And I had a pretty good idea who was involved.
Joseph.
Ever since I’d met that guy in the tavern, the world’s attention seemed to have shifted away from me and towards him. He’d appeared out of nowhere, interfered with my quest, and somehow managed to get Clara interested in him.
Now the world itself was behaving strangely.
I didn’t like it.
I was the Chosen Hero. How the hell could some random NPC mess up my quests and steal my spotlight?
I urged my horse forward.
If Joseph was responsible, I’d find him. If he wasn’t, I’d find whatever was causing this mess.
Either way, I needed answers.
On the third day, the road finally crested a ridge, and Haremdale City appeared in the distance.
Finally.
The city was huge compared to Millhaven. Stone walls surrounded it, with towers rising above the gates. The guards looked like actual soldiers rather than decorative NPCs placed beside an entrance to make the settlement feel important.
Beyond the walls, I could see wide streets, tall buildings, and what looked like a market square. Some of the buildings had three or four storeys, and the larger structures bore the signs of established trading companies.
There was a garrison, too.
Now this looked like a proper regional capital.
The system responded as soon as I approached.
[LOCATION DISCOVERED]
Haremdale City — Regional Capital
Population: ~12,000
Key Figures: Councilman Dale (City Council), Lord Ashford (City Council), Lord Vellmore (City Council)
Garrison Commander: Lord Commander Gareth Renvale
Key Trade Houses: Voss Trade House, Dunmore Trading Company
I studied the information.
Everything looked right. The population seemed plausible, the key figures matched what I expected, and the location data was complete.
The system was working perfectly again.
Which was almost more annoying than if it had continued malfunctioning.
I’d just spent three days riding through terrain that supposedly didn’t exist, past a tree that had apparently missed the memo about autumn, and beside a stream that seemed to have forgotten how gravity worked.
Now I was looking at a city, and the system could identify its population, political figures, and trade houses without breaking a sweat.
So what was different about Haremdale?
I rode through the gate.
The guards nodded as I passed. They didn’t ask for my papers or question my business. They simply let me in, which I assumed was another effect of my Charm stat.
People were drawn to me. That was how the skill worked.
Usually, I appreciated the convenience.
This time, though, I found myself wondering whether easy and right were actually the same thing.
I found an inn called The Lantern.
It was clean, well-run, and considerably better than some of the places I’d slept in during my travels. The innkeeper was a woman in her forties, and she gave me the same look I’d become accustomed to receiving from people in this world.
The Charm effect was doing its job.
She gave me one of the best rooms available, and I paid with the coins the system had provided when I first arrived. They’d appeared in my inventory like the starting currency in an RPG.
I still appreciated that particular feature.
Some transmigrators had to start with nothing, spend weeks begging for work, or risk getting murdered for a loaf of bread. I’d been handed money, equipment, and an absurdly powerful set of stats.
For all my complaints, I knew I had it good.
I sat on the bed and stared at the wall.
Then, naturally, I thought about Joseph.
The hidden quest had told me to find the disruption and resolve it, but I still had no idea what the disruption actually was. The system couldn’t identify the anomaly, the Clara quest remained in an unknown state, and the terrain outside the city was clearly wrong.
The system was losing track of things.
And it didn’t even seem aware of the problem.
Here was what I knew.
Joseph had no quest tag and no system highlight. He was the one person I’d encountered whom the system refused to acknowledge properly.
Meanwhile, the world around me was changing. The map no longer matched the terrain, travel times were inaccurate, and things were appearing that didn’t fit the system’s information.
So maybe Joseph himself wasn’t the anomaly.
Maybe the problem was whatever had started happening after I met him in that tavern. Maybe his arrival had triggered something, or maybe he was simply connected to an event the system couldn’t predict.
I hated how many possibilities there were.
Back when I streamed, I could spend hours testing a game mechanic until I understood it. If something behaved strangely, I could experiment, compare results, and ask my viewers what they thought.
Here, I had no way to check whether anyone else had noticed the same problems.
I was flying blind.
Then the system chimed.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
New Companion Bond Available
Target: Sera Voss
Bond Type: Narrative-Generated
Note: The narrative has identified a compatible companion for the hero. Approach and build trust to establish the bond.
I stared at the notification.
A companion bond?
With a woman named Sera Voss?
The narrative had identified her as compatible, meaning she was someone I could potentially recruit as a companion.
I’d never received a notification like this before. Until now, I’d assumed companions would come through the usual quest progression. Save a woman, earn her trust, complete a few objectives, and eventually unlock the relationship.
The standard RPG romance mechanic.
But this was different.
The system wasn’t telling me to win Sera’s trust as it had with Clara. It was informing me that a compatible companion had been identified by the narrative itself.
The wording was strange, but the implication was obvious enough.
A new opportunity had appeared.
And if there was one thing I understood, it was how to take advantage of a good opportunity.
I wasn’t exactly drowning in romantic success back in my old life. Calling myself a wuss would have been generous. But things had changed since my transmigration. I had a perfect face, a flawless Charm stat, and the kind of appearance that would have made my old viewers accuse me of using mods.
I was practically playing on easy mode.
So, naturally, I was interested.
Still, I couldn’t afford to get distracted. I had an immediate problem to deal with, and that problem was the anomaly.
I needed to find it. I needed to understand what it was doing to the world, and if necessary, I needed to destroy it.
Then I thought about Maren.
Clara’s older sister was the one woman who seemed completely unimpressed by me. She looked at me like a tool she might find useful rather than a man worth getting to know.
My Charm stat hadn’t worked on her, and that bothered me more than I wanted to admit.
The strange terrain was one thing. A map that gave me the wrong travel time was another. Those were problems with the world, and I could at least try to investigate them.
But if my Charm stat could fail on a person, what else could fail?
My entire build was based on the idea that the system’s stats meant something. If one of its core abilities could produce a result I didn’t expect, I had no way of knowing where the limits were.
For the first time since arriving in this world, I wondered whether my perfect stats were as reliable as I’d assumed.
And, as usual, my thoughts circled back to Joseph.
That fucking NPC.
I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes.
For a while, I dreamed about streaming. About the chat moving too fast to read, a thousand voices talking over one another, arguing about my gameplay and spamming emotes whenever something stupid happened.
It should have been annoying.
Instead, it was comforting.
The noise reminded me that I’d once had a place where I belonged. People who watched me, talked to me, and expected me to show up again the next day.
It was proof that I’d been somebody.
When I woke up, the system had updated.
[QUEST UPDATE]
Investigate the Anomaly (Hidden)
Description: Something is disrupting the narrative flow. The Hero System cannot identify the source. Travel south. Find the disruption. Resolve it.
Status: In Progress — Arrived at Haremdale City
New Lead: None
I read the notification, then read it again.
No new lead.
Of course there wasn’t.
The system still couldn’t identify Joseph. There was no marker to follow, no useful information to examine, and no indication of what the anomaly was doing.
How the hell was I supposed to investigate something the system couldn’t even describe?
What if I took too long? What if the world changed again before I found the source? What if the story shifted so far that even the system stopped recognising the things around me?
I sat up and rubbed my face.
The system was supposed to be good at finding things. That was its entire purpose. It pointed me towards objectives, gave me the information I needed, and helped me complete them.
Now it was telling me to find something it couldn’t identify.
That was like a quest marker pointing towards an empty patch of ground and telling me the treasure was somewhere nearby.
Useful. Very useful.
I got out of bed, washed my face, and took a moment to collect myself.
I couldn’t let people see how stressed I was. Whatever was happening, I still had an image to maintain. I was the Chosen Hero, not some panicking player who’d wandered into a bugged area and couldn’t find the exit.
I looked at my reflection.
Perfect jawline. Clear eyes. A face that looked as though someone had spent hours adjusting the character creator sliders until everything was exactly right.
The system had given me all of this.
I was perfect.
At least, that was what the stats said.
I changed into my armour, strapped on my sword, and left the room. The city was waiting, and sitting around staring at the walls wasn’t going to solve anything.
I needed to find Joseph first. If he was the anomaly, I would find out what he was and deal with him.
If he wasn’t, then I’d keep looking until I found the real problem.
Simple enough.
Find the NPC. Figure out why the game is breaking. Fix it.
What could possibly go wrong?