The inhabitants of the Ashen Penitentiary were not what David expected.

  He had expected monsters—corrupted entities, broken NPCs, the digital detritus of a system’s garbage collection. Instead, he found people.

  The central plaza of the broken city was occupied by approximately two hundred beings, most of them humanoid, all of them damaged in ways that reflected the corrupted environment they inhabited. A woman whose left arm existed in a state of permanent translucency, the limb flickering between solid and wireframe at random intervals. A man whose shadow moved independently of his body, sometimes reaching for things he wasn’t reaching for, sometimes walking in a direction he wasn’t walking. A child—or something shaped like a child—sitting on a bench that phased in and out of existence, reading a book whose pages were blank.

  They were NPCs. Or they had been. The system’s designation tags floated above their heads in David’s True Sight, but the tags were corrupted: [NPC — ERROR: role undefined], [ENTITY — ERROR: threat level NULL], [PLAYER — ERROR: account status SUSPENDED].

  That last one stopped David in his tracks.

  Players. There were suspended player accounts here. People who had been removed from the active system but not fully deleted—stuck in a liminal state between existence and erasure, dumped in the Penitentiary because the system couldn’t resolve their status.

  "They’re alive," Michael whispered. "Or... something like alive."

  An old man with a beard that occasionally rendered as a cascade of numerical characters approached them. His eyes were sharp despite the data corruption visible in his peripheral features.

  "New arrivals." His voice was layered—a human voice with a faint digital echo, as if two audio tracks were playing slightly out of sync. "You came voluntarily. I can tell because you still have that look. The look of people who think they can leave."

  "We can leave," David said. "The Midnight Express is parked outside."

  The old man laughed. The laugh glitched midway through, repeating a half-second segment three times before continuing. "Your train is outside the Penitentiary’s boundary. The boundary is a one-way membrane—things come in, nothing goes out. It’s not a rule. It’s a physical property of the corrupted space. Like gravity, but for data."

  David’s expression didn’t change, but his mind immediately began processing the implications. If the boundary was a spatial property rather than a rule, it couldn’t be exploited through rule manipulation. He’d need a different approach.

  "Who are you?" David asked.

  "Warden," the old man said. "Not the warden of the prison. A warden. I keep things from falling apart worse than they already have. I was an NPC once—a shopkeeper in a 6-Star dungeon that was decommissioned forty cycles ago. When the dungeon was destroyed, I was dumped here with the rest of the garbage."

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  "You have self-awareness."

  "The corruption gave it to me. Or took everything else away and self-awareness was what was left. Hard to tell." The Warden looked at David with an assessment that was uncomfortably precise for a glitching NPC. "You’re flagged. I can see the Anti-Virus marker on your account. You came here to hide."

  "I came here to operate without surveillance."

  "Same thing, said differently." The Warden sat down on a bench that materialized beneath him at the last possible moment. "The system can’t see in here. The Hounds can’t track you. The Consortium’s network doesn’t reach this deep. You’re safe, in the same way that a man standing in a burning building is safe from the rain."

  "What’s the fire?"

  The Warden’s face flickered. For a frame—a single rendered frame—his expression was not the calm, resigned composure of an NPC who’d made peace with his situation. It was terror.

  "The Penitentiary has a Warden. Not me—the real Warden. A system process that was assigned to manage the garbage dump and went... wrong. Corrupted by the same broken code it was supposed to contain. It patrols the Penitentiary on a schedule that used to be predictable but isn’t anymore, because its patrol algorithm is itself corrupted."

  "What does it do when it finds inmates?"

  "It enforces rules. Whichever rules happen to be loaded in its current cycle. Last week it enforced a rule from a decommissioned underwater dungeon—everyone in the plaza had to hold their breath for three minutes or be ‘drowned.’ The week before that, it enforced a rule that required all entities to recite a specific prayer in a language that no longer exists in any active database."

  David’s mind raced. A boss entity that enforced random, corrupted rules from decommissioned dungeons. A different rule set each patrol cycle, drawn from a corrupted database of thousands of defunct dungeon specifications. Unpredictable. Unrepeatable. And potentially lethal if the loaded rule happened to be from a high-tier dungeon with instant-death penalties.

  "How do the inmates survive?"

  "Mostly, they don’t." The Warden’s voice was flat. "The ones who’ve lasted longest have learned to read the Warden’s loading sequence. When it approaches, there’s a brief window where the rule it’s about to enforce is partially visible—a preview, like a program’s splash screen before it fully initializes. If you can read the preview fast enough, you can comply before the rule is fully loaded."

  "How long is the preview window?"

  "Approximately two seconds."

  Two seconds to identify a rule from any dungeon in the system’s history, understand its requirements, and begin compliance. For a normal person: impossible. For someone with True Sight and the analytical speed of an SSS-rank deduction talent: difficult. Very difficult. But not impossible.

  "When does the Warden patrol next?" David asked.

  The old man looked at the corrupted sky. "The schedule used to be every six hours. Now it’s... variable. Could be six hours. Could be six minutes."

  As if on cue, the ground beneath their feet vibrated. Not an earthquake—a system process initiating. The corrupted sky tiles flickered in sequence, like a loading bar filling across the horizon.

  The Warden stood up. His face was grey.

  "That would be six minutes."