FLOOR ZERO

The Grey Crawler's corpse had started to rot. Zhang Wei taped a dish towel over his nose, stepped over it, and moved to the front door.

Three hours ago he had barricaded this door with a desk, a filing cabinet, and a mini-fridge. Three hours ago, staying inside had seemed rational. He had patch notes to analyze, a hypothesis to formalize, a dead monster to avoid touching.

Now the hallway was calling. The environmental data Code Sight had shown him — spawn density 3.2 per block, above projection, difficulty scaling adjusting — meant the building's monster population was growing. Sitting still was not survival. It was waiting to be outnumbered.

He pulled the filing cabinet away. Metal legs scraped against tile. He stopped. Listened. Nothing. No scratching, no clicking, no wet breathing.

He opened the door.

The third-floor corridor of Building 7 looked like a crime scene rendered in cheap drywall and fluorescent light. Two overhead fixtures had blown outward, glass scattered across the linoleum in starburst patterns. Emergency lighting kicked in, casting everything in dim red. The blood on the walls looked black.

Zhang Wei stepped out. Code Sight activated without being summoned.

[ENV_SCAN] Corridor 3F — Building 7 Damage: Structural (Class 2 — non-compromising) Biological residue: Present — multiple sources Active entities: 0 Loot drops: 2 unclaimed

Two loot drops. Someone else had killed monsters in this hallway. He turned left.

Apartment 3A. Old Wang's place. The door hung on one hinge. Inside the threshold, four parallel claw marks gouged the floor tiles. And on the floor beside them, a body.

Zhang Wei looked away. Old Wang had been seventy-three. Retired. Grew peppers on his balcony.

He forced himself to check Code Sight. No HP bar. No stats.

ENTITY: Deceased — Civilian Cause: Trauma (biological) Loot: None

No reward for human corpses. The System only paid for monster kills.

He turned right and moved down the corridor. At apartment 3C, furniture was stacked behind the door — visible through the gap underneath. Someone alive in there. Someone who had chosen barricade over flight.

He kept moving to the stairwell. Code Sight swept ahead:

[ENV_SCAN] Stairwell B — Floors 3-7 Active entities: 1 (Floor 5 — stationary) Threat level: Low (dormant state)

Something on Five. He would have to pass it to reach 5B. He opened the stairwell door.

Concrete stairs spiraled downward. Emergency light painted each landing in shadow. He descended one flight, then stopped at the fourth-floor landing. The thing on Five was above him now. He could hear it — a low rhythmic sound, like breathing through wet fabric.

Code Sight sharpened the image:

ENTITY: Shade Stalker (Juvenile) HP: 45/45 Level: 3 STR: 14 | DEX: 18 | CON: 8 TYPE: Hostile — Stalker Class DAMAGE RANGE: 12-20 per strike [AI_TEMPLATE] Stalker_Patrol_v0.2 — Dormant_Triggered

DEX 18. Faster than anything he had faced. The AI template said "Dormant_Triggered" — it would wake up if disturbed. He backed away and took Stairwell A instead, the narrow service stairs on the opposite side of the building. He had memorized the floor plans from the management office during lease signing. Developer brain. Always cataloguing.

Stairwell A was clear. He climbed to five, stepped into the corridor, and found apartment 5B.

A fresh scratch mark crossed the door. The lock held. He knocked twice, soft.

"Who is it?" A woman's voice. Low, controlled.

"Zhang Wei. Three-B. We've been texting."

A pause. Something heavy being dragged. Then the door opened six inches, held by a chain, and a face appeared in the gap.

Li Hua was mid-thirties, dark circles under sharp eyes, hair pulled back tight. She wore medical scrubs. In her right hand, held at her side where it was clearly visible, was a kitchen knife with something dark dried on the blade.

"Your door was barricaded," she said. "How did you get past the hallway?"

"Stairwell A. The B stairwell has something on Five. Shade Stalker. Juvenile."

"You know what it is?"

"I can see its stats. Long story. Can I come in?"

She studied him for three seconds, then unchained the door.

Her apartment was reorganized with clinical precision. Couch pushed against the window. Bookshelf across the bathroom door. Kitchen supplies sorted by type on the counter. A first-aid kit sat open on the dining table, half-emptied, gauze and tape and antiseptic in a row.

"You're a nurse," he said.

"Was. ER at People's Hospital. Six years before grad school." She set the knife on the counter. "Biomechanical engineering now. Or I was, until the world ended."

"Did you use the kit on anyone?"

"Myself." She held up her left forearm. Two deep scratches, cleaned and bandaged. "Grey Crawler. Level 1. Came through the bathroom vent."

"You killed it?"

"With a knife and a towel wrapped around my arm." Flat. Clinical. "I got scratched. It got dead."

"Here's what I know." He told her. Not everything — not the beta-test hypothesis, not the developer annotations, not the Watchdog flag. Just the useful parts. Code Sight showed monster stats, damage ranges, patrol patterns. He could read what others could not. The building had multiple creature types. Most residents were dead, barricaded, or gone.

Li Hua listened without interrupting. When he finished, she pulled a medical chart pad from the counter. Two pages filled with handwritten timestamps, locations, sound descriptions.

"The building has twenty-four apartments. I've heard eight doors barricaded. Three went up before the screaming stopped. The rest went quiet." She flipped a page. "Third floor — two confirmed alive. Fourth — one apartment had fighting until about 3:50, then nothing. Fifth is you and me."

"What about sixth?"

"Crashing sounds around 4:15. Something went through a wall. I think."

He checked Code Sight in that direction. The scan returned a residue tag:

[ENV_SCAN] Residual Damage Signature Entity: Unidentified — Class: Brute (likely) Time of passage: Approx. 4:15 AM Loot drop: 1 (Corridor 6F — unclaimed)

"Loot drop on six," he said. "Something killed something up there."

"Can you read the drops too?"

"Everything System-generated."

She looked at him for a long moment. "That makes you the most useful person in this building. And probably the biggest target."

"Probably."

"We should move. Get the drops, map the building while you can still read it." She picked up the knife.

They moved together through the corridors. Li Hua handled physical navigation — which doors were reinforced, which stairwells had broken glass, which barricades could be climbed over. Zhang Wei fed her the System data: entity locations, patrol timing, dormant triggers.

They found the first loot drop in the third-floor corridor near Old Wang's apartment. A small blue crystal pulsing an inch off the ground.

LOOT DROP: Minor HP Crystal Effect: Restores 15 HP on consumption Rarity: Common [DEV_ANNO] Drop_Table_Common_v0.1 — Urban_Reward_Band_A

Li Hua couldn't see the annotation. She reached for the crystal. It dissolved on contact.

"Something just happened," she said. "Fifteen HP restored. I was at 85. Now 100."

Zhang Wei noted the spawn point — the loot table was still rolling. Another drop would materialize in twenty minutes.

On the sixth floor, they found the second crystal and the wall Li Hua had described. A hole punched through drywall and plaster, opening into apartment 6D. Inside: overturned furniture, shattered window, a body. A woman, mid-forties, sprawled face-down. No System tag. No loot. Just death.

Beside her, a broom handle with a kitchen knife duct-taped to the end. She had tried to fight.

Li Hua knelt. Checked for a pulse. Found none.

"We should keep moving," Zhang Wei said.

Five seconds. Then she stood. "We should."

They collected the second drop — another HP crystal — and moved to the end of the corridor. Near the stairwell, Zhang Wei stopped.

A monster corpse. Not a Grey Crawler. Something with a carapaced back and six legs, each ending in a curved blade. Dead on its side, three loot crystals orbiting above it in slow rotation. But the crystals were not what stopped him.

The corpse was glowing with text. Faint, translucent, overlaid on the body like a watermark. Visible only because Code Sight was active and he was looking directly at it:

ENTITY: Blade Crawler (Deceased) HP: 0/0 Level: 4 [DEV_ANNO] Alpha Build — Test Subject #2891 [AI_TEMPLATE] Aggressive_Rush_v0.4 — Melee_Close

DEBUG_LOG — Entry #0047: Spawn event triggered at 04:12:33 UTC+8 Player interaction: None (natural death — environmental damage) Loot table resolved: 3x Minor HP Crystal (Common) Pathing failure detected: Entity clipped geometry at grid (6F-14) Correction queued for Build 0.2

[SYSTEM_WATCHDOG] Note: Entity death occurred within 40m of flagged sector. Observer proximity flagged.

He read it twice.

A debug log. Attached to a corpse. Recording the spawn time, death cause, loot resolution, and — most critically — a pathing error. The creature had clipped through geometry. A bug. A literal bug in the System's monster AI, caught and logged in real-time.

And the last line. Observer proximity flagged. The Watchdog had noted that a flagged observer — him — was within forty meters of this death event.

He was reading the System's error reports. The QA data. The kind of information that existed for developers, not players.

"Zhang Wei." Li Hua's hand on his arm. "You stopped moving. What did you see?"

"A debug log on the corpse. The System is recording errors — pathing failures, AI bugs, spawn issues. This creature died because it walked through a wall. The System logged it like a crash report."

"Only you can see this?"

"Only me."

She was quiet. Then: "Back to the third floor. Set up somewhere defensible. You can read patrol patterns and tell me when it's safe."

He nodded.

They descended. Li Hua wedged a fire extinguisher under the stairwell door handle. Zhang Wei scanned the corridor — clear, one new loot drop spawning soon. He sat against the wall, legal pad on his knee, and wrote:

Debug log confirmed. QA tracking on every entity. Pathing errors logged. Spawn times recorded. This is not a natural phenomenon — this is software being actively tested and debugged.

The Watchdog flagged my proximity to the event. I am not just being monitored. I am being studied.

Li Hua sat across from him, cleaning her knife with a paper towel. "Writing everything on paper?"

"Digital is System-interfaced. Paper isn't."

"Smart." She tested the blade's edge. "So what now?"

"Figure out how deep the debug logs go. Try not to get flagged too many times."

"What happens if you do?"

He thought about the Watchdog directive. "Review queued." A review by whom? The System was automated — Test Framework v1.0, no human author. But the annotations had a tone. Purposeful. Directed.

"I don't know," he said. "That's the problem."

He picked up his phone and opened his character sheet out of habit. Same stats, same passive. But at the bottom, beneath Status Effects, a new line that had not been there before:

System_Watchdog: Active — Sector 7-Alpha Status: OBSERVE Directive: DO NOT INTERVENE. Log all anomalous perception events. Escalation review in progress.

DO NOT INTERVENE.

The System had issued a specific directive about him. It could intervene. It chose not to. For now.

The Watchdog was not a wall. It was a leash with slack in it. And the slack was shrinking.

He looked at Li Hua. She was wrapping the knife in a clean paper towel, movements precise, unhurried. She had killed a monster with a kitchen knife and patched her own wounds with medical supplies from her kit. She had not cried. She had not panicked. She had mapped a building full of death with the focus of someone reading patient charts.

"Li Hua."

She looked up.

"I think the System is interested in me specifically. Not the building. Not the sector. Me."

She set the wrapped knife down. "Why?"

"Because of what Code Sight shows. Things the System doesn't show anyone else. And the System noticed."

"What does that mean for us?"

He looked at the Watchdog directive on his phone. At the thin slack on an invisible leash.

"It means we move carefully. And we don't assume the System is neutral."

The emergency light flickered. In the corridor, a new loot crystal materialized, blue light pulsing against the blood-stained walls. The building settled around them — concrete, steel, the distant wet rhythm of something breathing in the stairwell.

Zhang Wei picked up his pen and wrote one more line:

The System can see me seeing it. And it is deciding what to do about that.