Chương 63: 2.22 Everything In Its Right Place - Radiohead (4:11)

SpicyShoyu Zeke, what are you planning to spend your elixir on? If you waste it on something weak and niche, you know people are going to lose their minds. 10161066 People are going to complain no matter what he chooses. If he picks a melee skill to boost to 7, they'll say he should have chosen a ranged skill. If he picks a class skill they'll bitch and moan and say he should have shored up his weaknesses first. StoryLeech You should really pick up a gun Zeke.

I know that you sucked with guns when you first got to The MIZ. How you almost killed yourself looking for the safety, I don't know. But that's the whole point of the elixir. It lets you skip the painful learning curve and you jump straight into competence. Rank 7 with a gun turns you into John Wick. That's more than enough for you to survive in the MIZ for the next couple months. GlassHarbor I'm backing the gun idea 100%. Everyone is underestimating how broken that skill would make you.

Rank 7 would put you way past the threshold of danger to everyone. And in a place like Frontiers, range = survival. KnuckleKiloHelo Nah. Melee is the safer investment long-term. Guns are great until you run out of ammo or it jams or something. But melee stays with you. It doesn't require you relying on external resources. Plus, if he ever makes it to Emberveil, the gun will be completely useless. If he makes it to Tech Reign, there are enemies that can dodge bullets, making a John Wick build next to useless.

Hollowindex Guns are still the obvious best option for him. It instantly makes him into someone who can defend himself. What's his melee at right now? 2? That's piss poor. RedCarpetManiac That's why we're saying he should drink the elixir. It would boost his melee skill so he can stand against things. How's your argument against him choosing the melee skill to boost going to be "it's too low rank"? OldManKiyote You're all ignoring class skills.

If Zeke puts that elixir in his Rockstar skills, he'll be able to push those skills up to 7 on the way to 10. That's going to give him so much more than just getting the skill up to peak-human. Long-term, that's where his strength is going to come from. GlassHarbor Except he needs survivability now and not in ten ranks. Z3ke (Original Poster) I haven't decided what to do with the elixir yet. I know that it's a boon and everything. The gun idea might be the smartest move in the short term.

I know how scary dangerous to myself I was with guns and if the elixir can boost me straight to Rank 7, that would fix the problem instantly. But I'm not completely sold on it. StoryLeech What's the hesitation? It's basically a guaranteed power spike. Z3ke (Original Poster) You guys are going to bitch and moan if I say anything, so I'd rather just keep it to myself. MushroomCleric Zeke, when have I ever complained about anything?

Z3ke (Original Poster) It's because of how the elixir works and what it would mean for me. I've already been freaking out because of the skills that I've been getting and how they're changing me. I mean, I told you all about Marcus and the mayor of the Holdfast and how I'm worried about changing into someone that I won't recognize. If I take that elixir and I push it into a skill (like one of my class skills or something) than how much more do you think it's going to fuck me up?

I can already feel when my Persona activates. I can feel it doing something, and I don't know exactly what it does to me. I'm not totally comfortable with how much it changes me. It influences my decisions and my reactions and everything about me, and it almost feels like I'm not the one steering my own body. Can you all imagine how that feels? Can you all imagine how much that grates on me? And what happens if I suddenly stack multiple ranks on top of that? Do I stay me?

Or do I just drift further into whatever this skill is turning me into? It's not really a min-max problem and, sorry to say, but none of you guys here have really been great at all the advice giving in terms of what it means for my emotional and mental state. Lolzold4 Don't worry Zeke. You got changed by much more than just that social skill. I'd wager running from murder puppets through the desert changed you more. PixelBaron The elixir isn't going to change who you are.

It's just going to give a bunch of skill ranks and make you better at shooting a gun or swinging a sword. That's all. You're still you. Hunter151 Well, the skills did change Zeke from a scared isekai bartender to a budget and naive Indiana Jones temple archeologist. Shootingblnks If you're not comfortable with adding it to Persona… then wait until you figure more about it. You still don't fully understand the skill. Plus, you've got some time. You're not heading out into an adventure right this second.

Go back to the Library and do some research about Persona. Putitailatva | You still don't fully understand the skill. | It might be "control over self presentation" or metaphysical masquerade. Both things can be used more than one way. Not only be brave in situations you are not, but make different Personas. It may be different roles but may be something more esoteric. GlassHarbor Gun's looking like the safer option, huh? Binary_Arcana (Primary) You don't need to use the elixir right now.

Gravemind has finally handed me the reins, and it's time to get this story back on track. The next arc won't have any combat, unless you go looking for it, so you have some time to make up your mind. Zeke, this is directed at you but everyone else can read along and try to keep up. I'm going to be blunt because that's what this fanfic needs right now. Your story is drifting. It's gotten messy, unfocused, and way too tilted towards combat.

All of your recent updates have been about survival, bigger threats, and harder fights. You're stacking danger on top of danger, and that's not what got readers invested in your fanfic in the first place. Before everyone jumps in and starts arguing, yes I know exactly how we got here. Crush wanted a spectacle. He wanted Zeke to fight something big and ugly in the Under-MIZ. The Reclaimer checked that box nicely. Frankly, I was surprised that Zeke went for it.

He's been mostly risk-averse in the earlier chapters of his fic. I'm not even saying that the Reclaimer chapters were bad, per se. The tension was decent, the pacing held up, and there was a payoff at the end. It wasn't the amount of payoff that everyone expected, but that is easily explained away as if Zeke had the entire corpse it would have been too much credits for him and would have made everything so much easier.

I will say though, that the Reclaimer chapters weren't why people were reading this fanfic in the first place. I, and others like me, are much more interested in the lore that you found. That's been your milieu and you've been straying from it. Let's rewind a bit back to the House of Seasons. That is what put your name on the map and earned you a bunch of followers for this fanfic. Threads started popping up with your name on it and readers stuck around instead of just skimming it and moving on.

It wasn't because you fought something impressive. It was because you discovered something new. You uncovered something that no one had noticed before. You added something to the Fracture-verse lore instead of just writing around the edges. You gave people something to dig into, argue about, replicate, and analyze. That's why readers flocked to this fic. It's also what the Fracture-verse has always been about. People didn't fall in love with these games because of all the monsters and combat.

They fell in love because it felt deep. They fell in love because there were layers to the game; buried histories, hidden mysteries, and things that didn't quite make sense until someone stumbled across the right piece. People fell in love with the exploration, the discovery, and the lore, not the survival aspects. Right now, you're drifting away from that. You're trying to juggle combat, survival, pacing, and tension, and in the process you're losing the one thing that made people actually care about your story.

I can already hear the comments from this forum complaining about me. They're going to say the combat's been good, or the survival aspects were interesting, or that the Under-MIZ arc was intense. All that can be true, but it doesn't mean the story hasn't lost its center. Zeke, you are not here to appease Crush and the other combat goblins. If people want fights and monsters and escalation, they can either go play the actual games or check out the thousands of other fanfics that are all about combat.

That space is crowded and, frankly, there are people who do the combat a lot better. What you do differently, and where your value is, is when you uncover things that no one else has. That's your edge. That's why people stick around, and that's what sets this fic apart. This upcoming arc is an attempt to fix all that. You need to stop thinking in terms of "what should I fight next," and start asking better questions. What hasn't been discovered? What hasn't been explained? What is missing?

That's how you retain readers and get people interested in your fanfic. I'm not saying to abandon combat altogether. Quite simple, you can't. This setting doesn't allow for safe exploration. But danger and fighting should be the consequence of discovery, not the goal of it. Thankfully for you, I am your new Primary. That means I'm not here just to critique, but to direct you. I've been digging into Frontiers for the past year, and I found some actual leads for you to follow.

This upcoming arc is going to get this story back on track by putting you in front of actual hidden lore that hasn't before been properly explored, documented, or confirmed. Before I get into specifics, let me make this very clear: if you want your fanfic to stay relevant and you want people to stay engaged so that "your OC can survive the Fracture-verse and get back home" then you need to get back to what made people care about your story in the first place. Find something new. Document it.

Show the people something they haven't seen before. And then you get your readers. Liminal_Archivist This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. Finally someone said it. I agree with Binary when he says that the story's been fun, but it has been losing some of its focus. The House of Seasons stuff felt huge. I remember when FarField discovered how to replicate what Zeke did and the whole forum exploded.

There were threads everywhere and people were commenting and freaking out. I haven't seen that kind of energy since then. Cold_Reboot Yea. The numbers show that Binary is right. The reader count has been somewhat flat through the Reclaimer arc. People like Crush have been happy with the combat, but the lore nerds are checking out. DuckDetective13 Hard disagree on this. The Reclaimer arc slapped. Not everything needs to be dusty lore books and strange symbols and undiscovered mysteries. Let the guy cook.

TwoGirlsOneCuphead Anyone else find it ironic that Binary is the one talking about how Zeke can get more readers? How many people followed his last fanfic about the lore? Like… 12? That's like me telling Tiger Woods how to golf.

"Triple bogeys are actually good, because it lulls your opponent into a false sense of security." ShivSays To be fair, Zeke HAS been dropping lore. The Corva stuff is the last big lore drop that he's had. A ton of people have been digging through the different games trying to confirm it. Just because no one's cracked it yet doesn't mean that it's not real lore. PuffPuffKeep Corva is a dead end. It's not at all confirmed canon and most people don't support Zeke's findings.

There's been nothing new there no matter how many people poke around. It was just something that Zeke wrote so attention would be drawn back to his fic and people would talk about it. He discovered the House of Seasons stuff, so I'll give him that. But then he tried to fake a new discovery with all the Corva stuff and people are starting to cotton to the idea that it's all fake. VeneratedWitchHunter I'm torn here. I definitely agree with Puff that there's been a lot of non-canon stuff going on.

But I also want to defend Zeke because he's a fan of Shards and we've got to stick together. Love the Rockstar class. Hate the Corva slander he's got going on. FarFieldVanishes Corva isn't confirmed… yet. Just because people have been searching for it and haven't found anything doesn't mean Zeke is making it up. People said the same thing about the House of Seasons before it got cracked. Remember how everyone was bitching and moaning that Zeke was making up lore? And then what happened?

Some of us are still digging around Corva, and I trust that Zeke is telling the truth about him. Z3ke (Original Poster) I don't have any interest in getting dragged into arguments about canon and lore. None of you believe me when I say that this is actually happening to me. I've tried telling you all that, but it gets me nowhere. I do hope that some of you will start taking me seriously when I say that I don't want to die in this world.

I'm also hoping that you will all stop suggesting ideas that could get me killed. Also… Binary, you've spent a bunch of time criticizing me, but you haven't actually said what you want me to do. And also, are you really the best person to be my Primary? We don't exactly have a great history. Since the beginning of this whole thing you've been crying about how I've been breaking canon and ruining the games for you. So what's with the whole 180 you're doing now? Binary_Arcana (Primary) Why the sudden change?

It hasn't been sudden. I haven't been actively criticizing your story since the House of Seasons. Go back and check the threads. There have been a bunch of people piling on and calling your posts non-canon, sloppy, and rage bait, but I wasn't one of them. The truth is that I'm one of the few people left on this forum who actually cares about the lore. Back when the games were still being released and updated, DeepFracture was different. People were posting their discoveries and talking about what it all meant.

They were testing hypotheses, or proving and disproving theories. But now, the forum is mostly just noise. It's drifted from its original purpose. There are a few people still posting theories about the lore, but now it's mostly headcanon that is dressed up as fact. Or it's half-formed garbage thrown together at 2AM and defended like it's scripture. Someone sees a line of dialogue they've never seen before and they come up with a 20-post theory that falls apart the second you actually start doing some digging.

Instead of sticking to what was real, what could be proven, and what could be replicated, everyone has slowly started to fill the gaps in the lore with speculation. They dress up their guesswork and call it discovery. There are entire threads that are built around nothing but "what ifs." All the other serious lore-theorists have long since moved on. But not me. I've always been against that. If something can't be verified, then it's not lore. If something can't be replicated, then it's just noise.

Then you showed up and for the first time in a long time, someone actually found something real. The House of Seasons was solid. People were able to reproduce what you found. They were able to test it and argue about it with actual data instead of just guesses. For a little while, this forum felt like it used to. It got back to its roots about talking about real, legit lore. So, I backed off from criticizing your story.

I didn't jump into the complaint threads, I didn't dogpile you when people were complaining about Corva, and I didn't join in the badmouthing when you came up with a cut content class. If anything, I did the opposite. I helped put the Primary system in place so that your fanfic didn't turn into a free-for-all that would get your OC killed. I've been backing you more than most people on this forum. I just haven't been very vocal about it.

I did all that, not because I suddenly liked everything you were doing, but because you'd proven that you could find something real and I wanted to see if you'd do it again. As for what I think you should do? I think you need to go after something that matters again. I think you need to discover more lore. That's why I'm sending you after the Witness. StoryLeech Jeezus Binary. You can't be serious. K1LLPR1EST Disappointed.

gif My man just wrote an entire essay about hating speculation and fake lore and then immediately drops the Witness like it's confirmed. MoronicMnemonic LMAO. Binary gets full control over the fic and immediately derails everything harder than Crush ever did. CrushDaddyXx Hey now, don't lump me in with all this. I'm catching strays here and I don't like it. First, the Reclaimer plan went off without a hitch. Zeke lived, people were entertained, and everyone won.

If you look at it, out of all three arcs, mine is obviously the best one. Null almost got Zeke killed by a body-hopping Corva. Binary is about to make him write a twenty page paper about lore that isn't confirmed. I'm the only one who has been really helping out Zeke. Second, we all know why Binary is doing this. Dood's never written a single interesting thread in his life. This is the most attention he's ever gotten and he's obviously trying to ride Zeke's coattails to push his pet theory. It's incredible.

And I don't mean the kind of incredible that the Reclaimer arc was. I'm being more sarcastic with the word. Binary_Arcana (Primary) No, there is a difference between me and all of you. I'm not throwing out half-formed theories without anything to back them up. As I said before, I've spent the last year digging into the theory in Frontiers. It's been systematic and detailed.

While I've found nothing individually that proves the Witness, I have found several clues that when combined paint an interesting picture and provide an ongoing mystery for Zeke to solve. The Witness is real, and I'm going to use Z3ke to prove it. Also, it seems that everyone is forgetting the main rule that we all agreed on when we implemented the Primary system. You're supposed to yes-and the Primary, not counter their advice. Liminal_Archivist Hmm.

Binary has been pretty good about discovering new lore in the games. Usually it's something small and out of the way. The Witness would be a big step up for him. I'm willing to see where this goes. CrushDaddyXx | You're supposed to yes-and the Primary, | Yes-and you're still an ass. GravemindLegacy CrushDaddyXx. This is your first warning. Abide by the rules of the forum, keep it civil, and refrain from personal attacks. Z3ke (Original Poster) Okay…

it seems like there's a lot of history here and I don't really care about any of that. You've got your arguments and rivalries and whatever, but none of that helps me. What matters most is whether or not you can actually help me stay alive and get home. If you can do that, I'll listen. But you all also need to understand something. I'm not like all of you. I don't know this world and I don't know the "deep" lore and I don't know any of the cut content.

I don't know what's real and what's something that the forum made up three years ago and never let go. Some of you seem convinced that I'm secretly a dev or a longtime fan of the games pretending to be clueless. I'm not. I really don't know what most of you are talking about half the time. So if you want me to go chasing after this Witness thing, you're all gonna need to explain what it is. I need to know why it matters and, most importantly, why going after it will get me closer to getting back home.

That's my goal. I don't care about the lore or the canon or entertaining anyone or playing out everyone's isekai fantasies. I just want to get back to my normal life. That's what this whole Primary thing is supposed to do, right? It's supposed to get me back to New York.

Binary_Arcana (Primary) If you want an explanation, you need to let me build up to it because if I just drop the conclusion on you without context it will sound exactly like the kind of baseless, conspiracy-tier nonsense I've spent years arguing against on this forum. So let's start at the beginning. The Witness is one of the oldest unsolved mysteries in Frontiers.

I'm not exaggerating when I say it stretches back to some of the earliest lore threads for Frontiers, back when people were still combing through the game to figure out which bugs were intentional and which were just mistakes by the dev team. Over the years, people have tried to explain it away. Some say that it's an abandoned questline that was never finished by the devs. Others insist that it's cut content that was never implemented.

Still more claim that it's a developer inside joke or a secret that never got fully removed from the game. The truth is that it is a complete mystery that nobody has ever solved. The information is out there, but nobody has ever managed to assemble it all into something actually coherent. For the past year I've been digging through Frontiers. I went through the early access builds and compared them to what was released. I tracked what changed with each patch of the game.

Then I cross-referenced all that with old developer interviews, Q&As, random answers on this forum, and anything else I could find. Most of what I found was useless noise, but every once in a while I got a clue. The first real lead came from a bug report that was mostly ignored. At the time, players were complaining about rendering issues in the Under-MIZ. There were phantom assets that were appearing where they shouldn't. Most people wrote it off immediately.

Except that the bug was only clustered in a very specific region of the Under-MIZ. Since the Under-MIZ is procedurally generated, nobody thought that the bug was associated with anything discoverable. Their phantom assets weren't showing up where other people's phantom assets were. But if you looked closely, there was a pattern to the bugs. They were concentrated in areas where we knew had dev-side infrastructure. Which brings us to something that most players don't think about: sandbox rooms.

When developers build a game with something as complex as the Under-MIZ, with all its interlocking systems and interactions and moving parts, they can't just test things in a live environment. That's how you break everything. Instead, they create isolated test spaces that are tucked away into tiny corners of the map. In those rooms, they can safely experiment with new assets. They can spawn entities and test mechanics without risking the rest of the game.

If something breaks, then it breaks there and not through the entire Under-MIZ. They can reset the whole room and start over. Over the years, a few lore hunters have stumbled across these sandbox rooms. The problem is that they're not at all interesting in the wider context of the Fracture-verse. They're just leftover developer tools. There's no loot in them and there's no meaningful story. So naturally, people stopped caring about them.

After the first few test rooms were empty, everyone assumed that they were all irrelevant. But that was a mistake, because not all of the test rooms are empty. Z3ke (Original Poster) You still haven't explained who the Witness is or why I should seek them out. ThreadSpectator42 Zeke, quick question. You know those long ass monologues in your fic that Cole kept delivering? They're based on Binary, right? Because I just read all that and somehow we're still not at the point.

Admit it, you've been lurking on this forum before writing up your fic, and you based some of the characters off the posters here. Who am I? Have I shown up in the fic yet? Binary_Arcana (Primary) I'm getting there. Like I said, if you don't understand the framework, you won't get what I'm trying to say. The next piece of the mystery was found in the Cathedrals of Ash. It's endgame content and no, I'm not sending you out there.

If that happened you'd write a dramatic death scene for your OC before even reaching one. Inside several of the Cathedrals of Ash are these large murals. Most players either dismiss them outright or only look at the religious iconography and big dramatic scenes they show. But there are smaller details that don't really fit them. Specifically, there is a figure that appears across multiple murals.

He's always positioned slightly removed from the main scene and is never really acknowledged in any of the books about the murals. Now, remember what the Cathedrals of Ash really are. They're the remnants of the old MIZ military industrial complex from before the Fracture. They were military bases, research facilities, and black sites. Every single one of them was tied to the government. So if the same figure keeps reappearing across multiple locations like that, it's not decorative.

It's an entity who was associated with the government, and all signs point to the Witness. NOW we come to who the Witness was. To answer that, we have to go back to before the Fracture. Back then, the MIZ (present day Under-MIZ) was under the control of an authoritarian government. Mushroom already had you read about Experiment 12-B and how the government fed it dissidents and unwanteds. Well, how do you think they found those dissidents in the first place? The answer to that is: the Witness.

He was an individual embedded in the city who was capable of operating at levels that no one else could. He had two class abilities that we know of. The first was perfect observation. Nothing escaped his attention. He was able to see every action, every conversation, and every movement someone made. The entire city was effectively transparent to him, and all that information he got was fed back to whoever controlled him. His second class ability was prediction. He could predict behavior before it even happened.

He identified patterns, projected outcomes, and flagged threats before they could fully form. If you put those two together, you get something absolutely terrifying. The Witness uncovered dissidents, the unwanted, and the rebellious. And he tagged them all for the government before they had a chance to do anything. Z3ke (Original Poster) | He could predict behavior before it even happened. | So… like that shitty Tom Cruise movie? HandsWithoutArms Correction. Like that awesome Philip K. Dick story.

Binary_Arcana (Primary) … Yes like the Tom Cruise movie. Dissenters disappeared. Rebellions collapsed before they could gain traction. People who might turn into problems for the government were killed off. There weren't trials or public executions, just quiet problem solving. The Witness was the perfect surveillance system for the police state. Then the Fracture happened and everything broke. The government collapsed. All the different departments of the state splintered off to do their own thing.

The Under-MIZ - what used to be the core of the city - fell to ruin. People scattered and the government dissolved. Anyone who was connected to the witness disappeared completely. That is where most people stop digging. They think that the Witness is just background flavor for the time from before the Fracture. Everyone assumes that he was cut content or that he was an unfinished idea that the devs never followed through on. BUT, there are still references to him scattered all through Frontiers.

And it's way more references than something that is cut content would be responsible for. That means that the Witness was hidden away, ready to be discovered by lore theorists. Except most people just stopped looking. Here is where you come in. The Witness is still in the game. He didn't completely disappear. He's hiding away in one of those old sandbox rooms. Or at least, he's hidden in a room that most lore theorists would dismiss as a sandbox room. And I know where he is.

Before anyone asks, no I'm not going to post coordinates. First, it's in the Under-MIZ and since everything is procedurally generated coordinates are meaningless there. Second, I'm not going to post that information before Zeke confirms it properly. Zeke, you are going to find the Witness. You're going to write it up in the same way that you did with the House of Seasons. People will be able to read all about it and can replicate it and verify it.

Just like that, we'll drag one of the oldest mysteries in this community out into the open. We both get wins from it. I've already done the hard part with the detective work. I'll guide you to the Witness and you write it up and post it, and we'll split the credit. I want this validation. I've spent a year digging through a dead game chasing this thing while everyone else was busy arguing about headcanon. I'm done watching everyone throw out bullshit guesses about lore in the Fracture-verse.

I want to prove something real. You will also benefit. The Witness is still active. It still sees everything and it still predicts everything. If there is anything in Frontiers that is capable of pointing you to a way to get back to New York and your normal life, then it's the Witness. You want a way home? Then find the Witness and convince it to help you. Z3ke (Original Poster) If this guy can get me back home, then I'll go searching for it. Where do I start looking?

Binary_Arcana (Primary) I'll message you the info. I don't want to spoil everything before you have a chance to go poking around there. Otherwise, people won't be following your adventure and will instead be searching for the Witness themselves.