It was a hidden level—an entirely new district that the developers had never intended to ship. The architecture was a blend of Seljuk and Byzantine styles, bathed in an eerie, low‑frequency hum. At its centre stood an enormous, ornate mirror set into a marble pedestal. When Maya’s avatar approached, the mirror’s surface rippled like water.

She decided to dig deeper. Maya exported the hidden level’s assets and began reverse‑engineering the underlying scripts. She discovered a series of encrypted strings hidden in the level’s “event triggers”. Using a custom de‑cryption routine she wrote on the fly, the strings resolved into a series of coordinates—latitude and longitude points spread across the modern Middle East.

Inside lay a simple wooden chest, carved with the same star‑map motif from the hidden level. Within the chest, she found an ancient‑looking scroll made of parchment, but its ink glowed faintly under ultraviolet light. The text was in a mixture of Arabic and an unknown cipher. She photographed it and sent the image to her secure server.