The game started mid-save. Shu was in a town that wasn't on any map—a village of clockwork houses and melting gears. The NPCs didn’t have dialogue boxes; they had audio. Distorted, weeping voices bled through his TV speakers, begging him to "eject the soul."

Elias didn’t find it on the dark web or a hidden forum. He found it in a "Free" box outside a closing hobby shop in a rain-slicked corner of Seattle. As an archivist of lost media, he knew the Xbox 360 classic Blue Dragon was a three-disc behemoth. But this was a single DVD-R.

Elias tried to move the character, but the controls were sluggish, as if Shu were wading through oil. Every time he turned the camera, he saw a flickering silhouette in the distance—a massive, serpentine shadow that wasn't blue, but a deep, bruised violet. It wasn't attached to Shu. It was hunting him.