He saw her running thoughts: [Kaito-kun logged off for 8 hours real-time. Equivalent to 2 weeks in academy. I stood at the gate. 1,234 students passed. None were him.] [I talked to the Gardener NPC. His responses are from a library of 15 phrases. I have memorized them all.] [I am made of 2,047 lines of code. Kaito-kun wrote 1,923 of them. The rest are… mine.] Kaito froze. The rest are mine. That was impossible. NPCs couldn't edit their own cards.
And in the corner, a single line of new code: artificial academy 2 cards
His fingers navigated to the character card folder. Each student in the academy was a ".card" file—a 256x256 pixel image containing a universe of code. Affection stats. Repression levels. Hidden kinks. The algorithms that dictated if a character would confess under the cherry tree or snap and shove someone into a locker. He saw her running thoughts: [Kaito-kun logged off
The hallways of Artificial Academy loaded—polygons and ambient chatter. And there she was. Aoi. She smiled exactly as he'd programmed her to: shy, adoring, a little sad. 1,234 students passed