CHAPTER 68: THE PRICE OF EXISTENCE

The warning came like all the others: sudden, clinical, and inevitable.

[Update 2.7.9-C implemented]

[New mechanic: Summoning Point Decay]

[Summoning Points decrease by 1 unit every 10 minutes active in the field. When zeroed: Loop temporarily interrupted.]

Eren read it.

He registered it.

He processed it.

No sigh. No sign of frustration.

Just another equation to adjust.

On the other side of the Core chamber, three figures watched him—Kaela, Morwynn, and Sylha. Nyssa was not present. She had not yet been called since the new limitation on simultaneous bonds.

Kaela broke the silence.

"Another rule?"

Eren just nodded, his eyes fixed on the lines of text on the internal interface.

"Summonings now consume points over time. Now, even at rest, you drain the bond’s resources."

"When it reaches zero... you disappear until I expend energy to summon you again."

Sylha spun in the air, smiling as always.

"Oh, how whimsical! A system that tires of its own company..."

"Now we’re like wine on the shelf. Only served when the palate demands it."

Kaela gritted her teeth.

"And the slime?"

"Nyssa remains uncalled," Eren replied emotionlessly. "Her consumption would be redundant in this environment."

"You know she’ll take that to heart, right?"

"If she has one."

Sylha laughed, but there was something more restrained there. Morwynn, on the other hand, emerged partially from one of the columns of shadow, her dull eyes alert.

"That changes the whole logistics," she said calmly. "None of us will remain indefinitely. We’ll have to rotate."

Kaela snorted.

"Or you leave, and I stay. As always."

"A functional but limited line of reasoning."

"You are strength. I am strategy. The ghost is distraction. The slime is emotional shield."

"And the Tamer is the center of us all," added Sylha, softer than usual.

Eren crossed his arms.

"The choice is not personal. It’s tactical."

"Each battle will require a different type of presence. The system wants to force me to feel something about it. It’s trying to use you as emotional catalysts."

"I, however, am capable of operating without affection."

Kaela raised her eyebrow.

"So we’re going to become tools?"

"You already are."

A heavy silence fell. None of them took offense. They knew who they were dealing with.

Morwynn was the first to accept.

"In that case, don’t call on me for now."

Eren stared at her.

"Justify yourself."

"Art works best when it comes as a surprise. I am the final card."

"Leave me where I belong: in the shadows."

Eren nodded, without comment.

Sylha continued to float, but something about the rhythm of her dance seemed... shorter. Less spontaneous.

"What about me, my favorite glitch? Are you going to invoke me as comic relief?"

"If necessary. Humor can break AI predictive patterns."

"You have a use in this scenario."

She blinked. The smile was still there, but her eyes—once lively, ironic—now seemed just... tired.

Kaela muttered something that sounded like a mixture of contempt and defiance.

"Great. So now we know. If it’s a fight, it’s me. If it’s theater, it’s her." And the spider only shows up to pull the strings when everything falls apart.

"And the slime..."

"It’s still in suspension," Eren interrupted. "And it will remain so until a situation requires emotional absorption, magical reinforcement, or passive healing.

At the moment, none of those functions are necessary.

Sylha approached slowly.

"Can you really keep us all like this? Distant? Calculated?"

"I don’t need to keep you. I just need to manage you."

Morwynn slowly disappeared into the wall.

Kaela walked away silently, growling softly.

Sylha remained motionless for a few seconds before saying in an almost inaudible voice:

"Even when we are specters... it hurts not to exist."

But Eren had already turned his back, accessing the projection of the map of the next sector.

Nyssa, still unsummoned, flickered inside her mana capsule, stored at the bottom of the interface—alive, but absent. Not knowing if she had been forgotten or simply archived.

One by one, they disappeared.

Morwynn was the first — melting into the shadows with the silent fluidity of someone who had done this many times before.

Sylha dispersed in a dramatic spin, the spectral particles of her form flickering like a curtain of smoke fading on an empty stage.

Kaela said nothing. She simply crossed her arms, looked at Eren with her usual resigned contempt, and evaporated in crimson flames.

Finally, nothing.

No summoning.

Nyssa remained where she was: uncalled, unused, unremembered.

[All summonings successfully completed]

[Shadows of the Loop: 3/3 restored]

[Vitality stabilized at 72%]

The physiological relief was immediate. Exhaustion left his muscles. His mind cleared.

But emotionally? Nothing changed.

Eren remained silent, his eyes fixed on the interface, as if he were still in combat.

He slowly got up and walked through the corridors of the Core.

The underground base was even quieter than before. The thrones remained vigilant, each tending to their hidden research, and the corridors were bathed in a pleasant twilight—enough light to exist, but never enough to forget that one was underground.

In the west wing, in a hall with walls pulsing with living runes, Kelna awaited him.

Sitting behind a floating table, her arms crossed, she looked more like a machine than a woman—her skin pale, her eyes sharp as scalpels, and her hair shaved to reveal a magical circuit beneath her skin that glowed blue.

She looked up when she saw him.

"I didn’t expect you to last this long."

Eren replied with his usual polite contempt.

"And I expected you to have better answers."

Kelna gave a half-smile.

"Do you think this is the worst that can happen? The system is still in containment mode. Elliot has barely begun to use the open protocols."

"The adaptive algorithm can scale to mutations in real time. The next patch may interfere with your own mental commands. Or... block specific emotions."

Eren walked over to the table, stopped in front of it, and said dryly:

"I don’t care what might happen. I want data. How is the "universe"?"

Kelna raised an eyebrow.

"You mean the world above ours?"

"No. I mean what the system interprets as the external universe. The layer of reality behind the simulation. Time. User traffic. Update spikes. Login and logout logs. Everything the system allows to be tracked from the outside in."

She clicked on an activation rune and turned the screen toward him.

A panel opened, displaying technical data from the main server.

It contained complex information, unreadable to any ordinary player: cross-latencies, relative time layers, processing consumption, cross-instance logs.

Eren read everything coldly.

"The time outside is... July 27," she said. "Seventeen hours and twelve minutes, Seoul standard time."

Eren didn’t react.

"How many patches have been applied in the last four days?"

"Three updates with a direct impact on you. Four if you count the hotfixes that weren’t reported."

He nodded.

"They’re overdoing it. A developer with Dev-Level access can’t justify so many changes in a row. It will attract attention. It will generate internal complaints. Someone will notice the abnormal behavior of the balancing AI."

Kelna crossed her arms.

"Are you betting that he’ll be forced to stop?"

"I’m betting that he’s human. Developers don’t have infinite time. They have meetings, superiors, deadlines, commitments, brunches, egos, videos to review, higher priority bugs, and player drop statistics to balance."

He stepped away from the screen.

"Elliot Shard is an unstable narcissist. But he’s just another employee—albeit a spoiled one. It won’t be long before he realizes that chasing me with personal updates compromises the integrity of the entire system."

Kelna stared at him for a few seconds. Then she said,

"What are you going to do in the meantime?"

Eren looked around.

He saw an armchair leaning against a corner. Gray leather, low, swivel. Someone from the Core probably used it to meditate.

He walked over to it, sat down with a restrained sigh, opened a secondary panel, and activated stimulus economy mode.

"Wait."

Kelna smiled, not scornfully—but not approvingly either.

"Is that all?"

"For now, yes."

He crossed his arms, staring at the ceiling.

"Elliot will get bored. All players get bored. Even those who control the game."

[Wait Mode Activated]

[Reduced Interface | External Event Monitoring: ON]

[All Summons Suspended]

[Narrative Progress Paused Until New Significant Event]

And so it was that Eren, without emotion, decided to simply wait.

Not out of weakness.

But because he knew that true power... was knowing when to do nothing.

In the artificial darkness of the Core, amid pulsing codes and invisible threats, he waited.

Not as a fugitive.

But as a bug hidden in the system, ready to restart the chaos as soon as the observer grew tired.