Scarhold was still bleeding.
Not visibly. But Elian could feel it — threads warped from surveillance fatigue, glitching pulses running through the walls, echoes of silence that didn't belong.
The system was watching.
So were the factions.
And that meant it was time to feed them lies.
He returned to the transmission array the masked Seedborne had used the day before — carefully avoiding the active glyphs, skirting the edge of the crumbling floor.
At its base, beneath a collapsed panel, he found what he needed: a decay shard — a piece of failed code from a broken message loop. Useless to most.
But to Elian?
It was the perfect voice.
He sat cross-legged, drew a circle of silence, and began crafting.
He didn't need power here.
He needed a story.
He fused the decay shard with an echo pulse from the Harmonizer fragment, rerouted its ID tags, and added one final layer: a partial Lucid imprint — enough to mimic his own thread signature.
Then he released it into the local net.
A whisper.
A shadow of him.
Moving away from Scarhold.
[Threadpulse Construct Deployed: False Anomaly Signature – Directional Drift: Zone C-17]
[System Response: Sweep Redirected]
[Paradox Faction: Observation Recalibrated]
[Threadbreaker Progress: 2.5% → 2.8%]
He smiled as the threads began to shift — pulling attention away from him, following a ghost he'd designed to be just flawed enough to look real.
A bait of his own making.
And with it in motion, Elian was invisible again.
Not unseen.
Just misunderstood.
Exactly how he liked it.
[Lucid Trait Sync: 24% → 25%]
[New Behavior Logged: Signature Misdirection – First Successful Use]
[Trait Synergy Detected – Threadbreaker + Lucid: Passive Gained – Ghost Frame I]
You can now embed minor false signatures into thread-interactive zones. Limited duration. High value in misinformation strategies.
Elian stood, slow and steady.
The system would adjust.
The factions would adapt.
But neither of them would know where he was.
Because from now on?
He would choose what they saw.