I had programmed Code Sight during a late-night session in month nineteen, when the game was nearly complete and I was filling in the edges.
Not a combat skill, not a crafting ability. Something different: a passive unlock that triggered under specific conditions, rewarding players who demonstrated deep mechanical understanding of the world by letting them see the world's underlying data structure. The man behind the curtain, I had called it in the design document, without breaking immersion entirely. A gift for the players who had learned to think about the game the way a developer thought about it.
I had never expected to be the player who needed it.
"Debug mode," I said, through lips that were doing something dry and specific that I recognized as early dehydration symptomology. "Deve
