Chapter 411: Trying to Rewrite Reality

"She isn’t thinking normally. She looked like a total stranger to me, but... She and John won’t be coming back together like this."

Elena had stayed inside Cissel’s room for three whole hours, a marathon of pleading, reasoning, and searching for the girl she once called a sister.

Yet, when she finally stepped back out to meet Luke in the hallway, she looked more confused and frustrated than when she had entered. Her eyes were red-rimmed, not just from sadness, but from the sheer exhaustion of hitting a wall of absolute stubborness.

"That means there is no hope of getting the two of them back together," Luke sighed powerlessly. He leaned his head back against the corridor wall, the sound echoing in the empty hall. He knew it was a weak hope to cling to from the start, but he hated seeing John, the friend who had carried them all on his back, this dejected and down.

"She didn’t give me any proper reason, and she didn’t believe a single word I said," Elena explained, her voice trembling with exasperation.

"She is absolutely convinced of what she experienced in that basement. She refused to believe it was Mark’s scheme or some foul ploy of the black fog. I don’t know, Luke... She looked like a total stranger to me. The way she looked at me, it was so... Weird... It was terrifying."

"At least we tried," Luke sighed, pushing himself off the wall and turning toward the direction of John’s dorm. "You did your task, Elena. Let me go do mine then."

"But she didn’t show any sign of change!" Elena grabbed Luke by the arm, stopping him mid-stride. "What’s the point in pushing him to go talk to her now? If they face each other like this, the two will end up in a fierce fight, not a date! It’ll only make the rift permanent."

"I know," Luke said, rolling his eyes slightly. "I’m not an idiot. I’m not going to force him to make the first move or go beg for her to return to him. I’ll just go check on him, say a few words, and try to see if I can at least get him to leave his room. He can’t just rot in there while the rest of the academy is watching us."

"Well... I don’t know..." Elena sighed, her shoulders drooping. "Maybe we should just give him a day to rest. We should let the initial shock wear off, then try to speak with him tomorrow when his head is clearer."

The two stood in the hallway, debating the merits of intervention versus giving him space, until Luke finally succumbed to her opinion. He realised that forcing a conversation might do more harm than good.

Instead, he decided to do what he had initially told Ricky to do: go around the department and investigate potential recruits and hidden threats.

While everyone was conflicted and worried about John’s mental state, the man in question was starting to get bored.

John had spent hours doing absolutely nothing, but his nature wouldn’t allow for true stagnation. Something deep within his chest kept roiling up and down, a volatile mixture of suppressed grief and redirected anger. It felt like a volcano was forming under his ribs, the lava creeping closer to the surface with every minute of silence.

"I can’t sit idly like this," he muttered, suddenly jumping off his bed. After hours of trying to rest, he realised he didn’t feel better. "Let me try to do something... Anything."

Sometimes, the most profound breakthroughs occur when a person felt at their absolute lowest. Having nothing left to lose and no one to distract him, John decided to experiment a theory.

He activated his Frame Recognition ability, his vision instantly shifting into the familiar grid-like overlay of the world’s underlying architecture. He opened his Shell ability interface, the digital terminal flickering to life in his eyes, and started to examine the wall directly in front of him.

"I always wondered... If this really is a game-like reality and I can hack through things, why can’t I edit the code structure of the objects around me?"

John had harboured this thought for a long time, but he’d never had the patience to grind through the boring, repetitive process of trial and error. He had tried once or twice to write scripts to add abilities to himself, like a permanent cloaking ability, but all he had ended up with was a long list of failed attempts and errors.

But today, he had nothing but time and a heart full of restless energy. He started to type, pulling random scripts from his memory. His idea was simple: if the world was built entirely on codes, then he could not only bypass them, but he could rewrite their logic. He could transform a solid structure into something entirely new.

"Failure again," he muttered after few hours of intense coding and trying. He leaned back, rubbing his eyes. "I believe I’m approaching this the wrong way. Back in the pocket trial world, I managed to transform and fuse weapons by adding them together. It means the system permits structural transformation, but it seems my manual scripting approach is missing a crucial piece."

He dragged a seat over and sat directly in front of the wall that marked his bedroom. He decided to use this as his test subject; even if he accidentally demolished it, it was a contained disaster. He looked at the green lines of code, and then at the small spot that was covered in a dull, pulsing whiteness.

That white spot was the signal of his Handshake, the sign that his blood had soaked deep enough into the code structure of the wall to permit a bridge between himself and the wall codes.

"Perhaps it’s because the handshake is too weak... The area my handshake covers is too narrow to do anything..." John looked at the size of the white spot.

It was indeed a small area, barely covering a metre radius, which was insufficient for the large-scale structural reformation he was envisioning. He wanted to pull the codes apart, to create a doorway or a hole without using the brute force of Code Destruction.

Thinking about this made him consider a variable he’d never tested. "I’ve never tried to do the handshake using both hands before..."