The moment we passed through the Space Crack, reality stopped making sense.
Gravity vanished. For an instant I couldn't tell whether I was falling, flying, or standing still — my body felt weightless while my mind got pulled in a dozen directions at once. Colors separated and drifted apart. Sounds stretched into distorted echoes. Time itself felt broken, a heartbeat lasting an eternity and an eternity passing in a heartbeat.
Then everything snapped back together, and I crashed onto solid ground.
Pain shot through my shoulder as I rolled across rough soil. I lay there for a moment, waiting for my head to stop swimming. Slowly my senses returned. I pushed myself upright.
First thing I saw: Anita. Second: Khan. Third thing I noticed made my heart sink.
"Ira?"
No answer.
I was on my feet immediately. "Ira!"
My voice echoed through the strange landscape. Nothing answered. Anita was groaning as she sat up, Khan already scanning the area with wide eyes.
"Where is he?" Anita asked.
I clenched my fists. All four of us had entered together, holding hands specifically to avoid getting separated. Ira was simply gone.
"Spread out a little," I said. "But stay within sight."
We searched the nearby area, calling his name. No footprints, no signs of struggle, no clues of any kind. The longer we looked, the more uneasy I became. This dimension was already proving more dangerous than the briefing had suggested.
I forced myself to stop and think. Panicking wouldn't help. We needed information.
As I looked around more carefully, something began to bother me. The environment felt wrong — not dangerous, just *wrong.* I crouched and picked up a handful of dirt. It looked normal. It felt normal. Yet something about it nagged at me.
The grains were too uniform. Too perfect. Almost like someone had copied the concept of dirt without fully understanding it. I rubbed it between my fingers — the texture felt artificial.
I walked to a nearby tree and touched the bark. Same feeling. It looked real, but lacked the tiny imperfections that exist in living things. Every surface appeared genuine. Nothing felt genuine. The entire world seemed like an imitation of reality — a copy made from memory.
I knew this feeling from somewhere. I was still trying to place it when Khan shouted.
"This place looks like one of those virtual reality games!"
I froze.
*Virtual reality.* That was it. My previous world had never developed technology to create worlds like this, but I understood the concept. And now that he'd said it, I couldn't unsee it. The trees, the rocks, the mountains — everything resembled a massive simulation. The sky itself looked slightly pixelated when I looked carefully, like a giant screen projecting a perfect illusion.
I activated Transfiguration, holding the dirt in my palm, and transformed it into ordinary soil from our world. For a brief moment it worked.
Then the transformed soil flickered. Like a corrupted image. Its structure destabilized, and a second later it reverted to what it had been.
I frowned. The transformation had worked — but the dimension had rejected the result. Almost as if this world refused to let anything truly real exist within it.
Then a worse thought arrived. If the dimension rejects real matter... what was it doing to us?
I turned Transfiguration on my own body and immediately felt something deeply wrong. My body was already changing — not from my power, but from the dimension itself. The changes followed principles completely foreign to me, unlike anything I'd encountered before.
I looked at my hand. My skin flickered. Tiny glowing squares appeared across my fingers, and then disappeared.
Pixels. My hand had literally become pixels for a moment.
A cold chill ran through me. A few seconds later, glowing blue lines pulsed beneath my skin before fading away, like streams of data flowing through my veins.
The transformation was already happening. Slowly. Relentlessly. If we stayed here long enough, we wouldn't be visitors anymore — we'd become part of this world.
I shared this with Anita and Khan. Their expressions darkened.
"You mean we're being converted into digital beings?" Khan asked.
"That's my guess."
"Can you stop it?"
"No."
Anita looked behind us. "The gate is gone."
I turned. She was right — the Space Crack had vanished completely. No portal, no landmark, nothing. As if the entrance had never existed.
Silence fell. "We need to find Ira," Anita said finally. Whatever came after could wait.
"My power is behaving strangely," Anita added.
"What do you mean?"
Instead of answering, she activated her ability — and a translucent screen appeared in front of my eyes. I nearly stepped backward. The floating panel looked like a messaging application, and words began appearing across it.
*Connection Established*
*Anita has joined the network.*
*Khan has joined the network.*
*Inala has joined the network.*
"What the hell?" Khan shouted. A second later his message appeared on the screen:
*Khan: What the hell?*
The three of us stared at it.
Anita sighed. "My power has been digitized."
It made sense. The dimension wasn't just transforming our bodies — it was converting everything into digital equivalents. Our powers too.
To test it, Khan activated his Enhancement. Floating windows appeared around him, numbers rapidly updating.
*Strength +23%*
*Perception +31%*
*Reaction Speed +17%*
"My ability became a status system," Khan said, staring at the displays.
None of us liked that. If our powers could shift this drastically, we had no idea what else might change.
We started moving. Standing still was pointless. I transformed several nearby rocks into simple flying drones, sent them up into the air, and scattered them in different directions to survey the terrain.
The deeper we traveled, the stranger the Digital Dimension became. The landscape grew increasingly unstable — entire mountain sections flickered in and out of existence, cliffs rendering several seconds late as if reality was struggling to load them. Floating cubes drifted across the sky. Rivers flowed upward. Clouds froze in place mid-movement, then continued. At one point I watched a flock of birds stop dead in the air, hang motionless for five seconds, then resume flying like nothing had happened.
Reality here wasn't natural. It was programmed.
Anita occasionally connected to the environment with her ability as we walked. "The information feels strange," she said.
"Strange how?"
"When I connect to things here... it feels less like communicating with living objects." She hesitated. "And more like reading files."
Nobody had a response to that.
Hours passed. The search drones still hadn't found Ira. The transformation of our bodies kept ticking forward — patches of my skin would flicker occasionally, strange symbols appeared and vanished around my hands. Khan reported system notifications blinking into existence in front of his eyes without warning. Anita said she could hear notification sounds coming from nowhere.
The dimension was gradually rewriting us.
Then I felt it. Someone was watching.
I stopped walking and scanned the surroundings. Nothing. Yet the sensation persisted and was getting stronger — like standing in front of a hidden camera, unseen eyes tracking every movement.
"Anita. Do you feel like we're being watched?"
She frowned. "No."
"Khan?"
"No."
I stayed quiet, but every instinct I had was screaming.
In Bloom's database, dimensions could have rulers — native beings born within them, or powerful outsiders who had conquered them. Inside their own dimension, those rulers sat at the very top of the hierarchy. If the Digital Dimension had one, we had wandered into the territory of something that functioned like a god.
Then one of my drones sent an emergency signal. My eyes widened. The camera feed flickered, stabilized — and showed a massive structure rising beyond the horizon. A gigantic black tower extending into the sky, countless glowing symbols crawling across its surface. It looked less like a building and more like an impossibly large server.
At the very top floated a single massive eye.
It was staring directly at the drone. Then it blinked.
The camera feed died. The drone disappeared from my senses — destroyed instantly.
A notification appeared before all three of us:
*WARNING*
*Foreign Entities Detected*
*Administrator Awareness: 1%*
Silence. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved.
All three of us turned slowly toward the distant horizon where the black tower stood.
*The ruler of the Digital Dimension had just noticed us.*
And that was very, very bad.
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