The Ashen Penitentiary did not look like a prison.

  It looked like a city that had been designed by a committee of architects who had each worked from a different blueprint, in a different century, without consulting each other or agreeing on which direction was up.

  Buildings rose from the grey terrain at angles that contradicted gravity. A cathedral’s spire pointed sideways. A row of apartment blocks curved upward like the spine of a crouching animal, their windows opening onto sky on one side and into the interior of other buildings on the other. Streets intersected at angles that Euclidean geometry had no name for, and where they crossed, the pavement texture glitched—cobblestone bleeding into asphalt bleeding into something organic that pulsed faintly underfoot.

  The sky was the worst part. It rendered in tiles, each one displaying a different time of day: noon sunlight next to midnight stars next to a sunset that was somehow also a sunrise. The tiles didn’t blend at their edges. They cut against each other in hard lines, like a mosaic assembled by someone who’d never seen a sky but had been given thousands of photographs and told to make one.

  David’s True Sight activated automatically. What it showed him was worse than the visual chaos: the data underlying the environment was corrupted at a fundamental level. Rule strings floated in the air like debris in water—fragments of code from dozens of different dungeons, none of them complete, many of them contradictory.

  [...if ENTITY touches PLAYER, apply HEALING...]

  [...gravity reverses every 7 mi——ERROR: value truncated...]

  [...Rule 4: Do not. Do not. Do not. Do not...]

  [...PERMISSION LEVEL: NULL. EXECUTING: NULL. RESULT: NULL...]

  The rules were broken. Not hidden, not encrypted, not deliberately obfuscated—broken. Shattered fragments of operational code from decommissioned dungeons, dumped here by the system’s garbage collection and left to drift. Some rules still partially executed. Others looped endlessly on corrupted values. Others had decayed into meaningless strings that triggered nothing.

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  David had built his entire survival strategy on reading rules, identifying their logic, and exploiting their edge cases. In this environment, the rules were unreliable. A rule that said "do not touch the red door" might kill you for touching it, or it might do nothing, or it might kill you for not touching it because the conditional had been inverted by data corruption.

  He was a programmer in a codebase where half the functions returned random values and the other half had been commented out by someone who’d spilled coffee on the keyboard.

  "This is... wrong," Michael said. He was standing on a patch of cobblestone that was vibrating at a frequency visible to the naked eye. His face was pale, but his coin was already in his hand, turning in its habitual arc. "Everything feels wrong. Like standing in a room where one wall is slightly closer than it should be."

  "The logic matrix is corrupted," David confirmed. "The system dumped incompatible code here from destroyed or decommissioned dungeons. The rules exist but they’re fragmentary and unreliable."

  "So your talent—True Sight, Infinite Deduction—"

  "True Sight can read the fragments. But reading broken code doesn’t tell you what it’ll do when it executes. And Infinite Deduction simulates outcomes based on rules—if the rules are unstable, the simulations will be inaccurate."

  Michael absorbed this. "You’re saying your main weapon doesn’t work here."

  "I’m saying it works differently here. I can’t predict with certainty. I can only calculate probability distributions." David looked at the fragmented sky. "Which means, for the first time since I entered this world, I’m going to have to improvise."

  A sound reached them from the city’s interior—not the orchestrated horror of a dungeon’s soundtrack, but something messier. Voices. Multiple voices, overlapping, some speaking in languages David recognized and some in languages that might not have been languages at all. The sound of a population.

  The Ashen Penitentiary had inhabitants.

  "Stay close," David said. "Don’t touch anything until I’ve assessed the local rule density. And if something happens that doesn’t make sense—"

  "When has anything in this world made sense?"

  "Fair point. Let’s move."

  They walked into the broken city.