Jay blinked his eyes open to the familiar glimmer of the early morning sun creeping in through the cracks in the inn's curtains. He groaned, stretching his limbs until he heard a satisfying pop in his shoulders. He felt the rough texture of the woolen blanket still clutched in his hand and noticed his user interface hovering just above his line of sight, faintly flickering as it usually did.

“Alright, let’s see what today’s grind has for us,” Jay muttered to himself. He swiped a finger to bring up the daily quests.

Except... nothing happened.

Jay frowned and tapped again, this time more insistently. Still nothing. The screen flickered erratically, and strange black patches appeared, eating through the usual glowing blue font of the System’s text. Instead of the daily quests, a message flashed in messy, overlapping letters:

“ERROR. INVALID COMMAND. RESET SYSTEM? [Y/N]”

"What the...?" Jay rubbed his eyes, half-convinced he was still dreaming. He had been living in this VRMMORPG world long enough to know that glitches weren't normal. Not here, in Eldoria, where the System had an almost godlike control over everything. Everything, down to which stat increases he could unlock, or which monsters he could hunt. Even the apple pie at the inn had precise flavor notes set by System parameters.

Jay cautiously reached out, hesitating for a moment before pressing ‘N’. The last thing he wanted was to accidentally erase himself or something. The screen blinked a few times before an unfamiliar window appeared:

“NEW QUEST INITIATED: FIND A SPOON AND NAME IT ‘MAURICE.’ REWARD: +1 ???”

Jay stared at the message for a long moment before he burst out laughing. “What kind of joke is this?” he asked the empty room. Quests were never this absurd. The System wasn’t supposed to ask him to do something that stupid. It was supposed to give clear, meaningful tasks—slay three goblins, gather twenty herbs, things that advanced the world’s narrative in some logical way.

A spoon? Named Maurice?

He blinked again and the window vanished, replaced by an even stranger message:

“CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE UNLOCKED NEW SKILL: SPOON CONJURATION (LIMITLESS).”

Jay’s laughter died in his throat. “Limitless spoons?” He looked at his palm as if expecting something magical to happen, but it stayed perfectly ordinary. He snorted, still baffled, and raised a hand.

“Uh... alright. Spoon Conjuration?”

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The air in front of him shimmered, and a dull, tarnished spoon clattered into his hand. Jay turned it over, inspecting it like he was holding the world’s most confusing puzzle. It was just a spoon. It didn’t glow, it wasn’t labeled ‘Divine Spoon of Doom’ or anything cool. It was just... a regular spoon.

“Well, that’s... useless.”

Jay tossed the spoon onto the bed, expecting it to disappear back into some kind of inventory. Instead, it just lay there, gleaming in the early morning light. A moment later, the System UI flashed again:

“SYSTEM ERROR. NPCS MAY NOW ADDRESS YOU AS: ‘GLITCHED HERO.’”

“Whoa, wait, wait, wait.” Jay shot up from his bed, suddenly wide awake. Glitched Hero? That sounded... ominous. He opened the System help menu, which flickered and buzzed. The words were written in fragments, but he could just barely make out:

“ADMINISTRATOR NOTICE: UNAUTHORIZED SYSTEM GLITCH DETECTED. PLEASE AWAIT RESPONSE.”

Jay swallowed hard, the room around him growing more unreal by the second. Administrator notice? That wasn’t supposed to happen. He wasn't important enough to catch the attention of an Administrator. They were distant, faceless forces, whispered about by NPCs like deities. Players almost never interacted with them, let alone received notices like this.

His pulse quickened. If they were aware of this glitch, did that mean they were aware of him, too?

He had a brief image of himself being yanked out of the game entirely, his consciousness forcefully ripped from Eldoria, leaving behind nothing but a blank character shell. The thought made him shiver.

Jay shook his head, as if trying to shake off the anxiety. “Alright. Calm down, Jay. It’s just a glitch. They’ll probably patch it in the next update, and it’ll all be back to normal.”

But he couldn’t help feeling that something fundamental had shifted. The System always felt infallible, omnipotent even. And yet, now it seemed... vulnerable.

A knock on the door startled him. The innkeeper’s gruff voice called out, “You alright in there, Jay? Heard you talkin’ to yerself.”

Jay looked at the spoon still lying on his bed and then back at the glitched screen hovering before him. “Uh, yeah. I’m fine, just—” he paused, staring at the nonsensical quest still faintly flickering in his periphery, “—trying to figure out... something.”

“Well, breakfast’s in five,” the innkeeper replied. “Come down if you want it hot.”

Jay hesitated for a moment before replying, “I’ll be there.” He heard the innkeeper’s footsteps retreat down the hallway. With a sigh, he picked up the conjured spoon, tucking it into his belt pouch.

“Guess I better start naming spoons,” he muttered, shaking his head with a wry grin. “Maurice, here we go.”

But as he turned to leave the room, he couldn’t help but notice that the System’s usual hum, that ever-present buzz in the back of his mind, had grown strangely erratic. It felt as though the entire game had suddenly been infected with something—a sense of uncertainty, a tension like the calm before a storm.

Jay walked down the stairs, each step echoing off the wooden inn’s walls. He could hear the faint clinking of dishes in the dining room, the murmur of NPCs as they greeted each other for another scripted day. But as Jay stepped into the room, a hush fell over the patrons.

Eyes turned toward him, filled with something that had never been there before—something he wasn’t sure if he should feel wary of or intrigued by.

A System window popped up in front of him again:

“ADMINISTRATOR RESPONSE INCOMING: REMAIN IN CURRENT LOCATION.”

Jay’s breath caught. He was no longer just some average adventurer grinding his way up the ranks.

No, now he was a glitch—a mistake in a perfect system. And the Administrators were coming.