Seedcode: A LitRPG Odyssey

Mira kept her hands in motion as if the wood could remember faster than she could. The bench lamp threw a small, private sun across the curl of spruce shavings; each flake smelled of resin and old rain. Outside, gulls argued with the harbor's neon—high, metallic cries that sounded like a metronome in the city's ribs. Mira had learned to read her life in frequencies: the way a plank answered under a rasp, the way a throat loosened into tune when salted air pressed on the skin. Tonight the world felt like the inside of a stopped clock.

Lumen lay on soft linen in front of her. The violin's varnish had the amber of years—fingerprints trapped in glossy islands, a strip of mother-of-pearl at the scroll like a small broken moon. Elias used to tuck coins into that hollow and call the ferry passengers by name. When he still played, the instrument threw its voice three decks and twice across the water. Mira let the horsehair fall and drew an A. The bow sighed; the string gave only a dull, complaining rasp, as if someone had muffled sound with wool.

"You're still at it?" Tess's voice lifted from the alley. She stood in the doorway with a bag of warm rolls clutched to her chest, flour dusting the inside of her palm like a small snowfield.

Mira blinked at her own hands. Calluses had become a map: a quick scar on the thumb from a misfiled peg; a pale crescent where a splinter had once lodged. "It should sing," she said. The words felt too clean to hold what she meant. Saying it out loud made the absence heavier.

Tess came into the light, chewing, and peered at the instrument. "You could ask the patchers at Echo's Table. Seedcode people keep promising miracles. Or you could just—" she tapped Mira's wrist where the AR core sat under a leather strap. "—hook in here and see what shows up."

Mira's fingers found the small core like muscle memory. The device had been a prize from a street draw: a dented metal pill with a lacquered rune that pulsed like a heart. When she brushed it, the rune flared blue and the room's edges sighed. In the shop the varnish and hot oil smelled the way they always did, but the air tightened as the mesh readied itself. The core hummed low under her palm. "If I can't fix it by hand, I fix it in there," she said, more to herself than Tess.

She thought of the rumor that had been stitched through the city for months: songs were vanishing—small private patterns, child's lullabies, a tin-whistle call at a dockside tavern—and no physical fault explained it. Cadence Labs' notices spoke of corrupted metadata and patches; on the street, people muttered about a hollow where music used to live. Mira slipped the core into the connection beneath her bench and felt the mesh take her like water taking a pebble.