MYTHREAL: ECHOHEART
The first neural-link game to simulate full emotional cognition.
sight, sound, pain, heat and even more.
It wasn't just a game.
It was a place.
A second world — or maybe the real one, depending on who you asked.
Each NPC was laced with high advenced AI: they remembered, adapted, evolved. They didn't just react. They held grudges. Fell in love. Took sides.
Every decision mattered because every character felt like they did.
Most players toggled pain to 20%, maybe 30% if they were masochists.
But some…
Some pushed the dial to 100%.
To feel everything.
The snow bit at Aiden's cheek like a razor.
He stood at the edge of a high cliff, overlooking Cardfall Canyon — a cracked, volatile PvP zone where wind howled like a haunted dealer calling out bets.
All around him, a storm of cards littered the floor - surrounded by a faint violet light.
Below, a red-named player stumbled across the canyon floor, blood trailing from their boots.
"Lucky bastard!" the player shouted.
Aiden didn't respond.
Instead, he drew a single card between two fingers — the Queen of Echoes.
The card shimmered once, then vanished. In its place, a spectral clone flickered behind the escaping player, mimicking Aiden's last attack.
A scythe slice.
The clone stabbed straight through. The player disintegrated in a puff of red pixels, dropping a silver token and something rarer — a stat point.
The cards collapsed and disappeared into thin air.
[You've won a Legal Duel. Stealing a stat point of AGI from Player: Cry1st.]
He blinked the notification away.
Then turned toward home.
Emosh City.
Situed in the Celestia Empire.
Population: 14,763 players. 9,501 registered NPCs.
As the Data said.
Half run by real players. Half by evolving AI factions.
A city that grieved, loved, and traded in emotion.
Markets didn't just sell gear — they sold revenge. Guilds negotiated with bartenders to have access to information. And in the alleyways of the city, children begged for warmth they couldn't feel.
This was where the line between real and programmed broke down.
This was where Aiden feel it belonged.
He stepped through the north gate.
And that's when the voice came.
"Aiden!"
"You're late. Again."
Warm. Familiar.
He turned.
A tavern maid stood with her hands on her hips — flour-smudged apron, blond braid, chipped tooth, eyes too human.
Her name was Seren.
An NPC.
"Don't tell me you forgot," she said. "You promised to play that coin game with the alley kids. Three days ago."
He blinked.
He forgot about the promise.
But she remember for him.
"For someone who cheats for a living," she added, "you're terrible at showing up."
Aiden didn't answer.
Not because he was rude.
Because something in his chest had twisted.
Somewhere between surprise and guilt.
She turned back toward the market.
"Come by later," she said over her shoulder. "They're still waiting."
He watched her go.
An NPC, yes.
But there were maybe a thousand lines of code behind her eyes.
And not one of them had lied.
Aiden stepped into the crowd.
Emosh City moved like it breathed. Every stone in the street felt worn by memory, by repetition, by story. NPCs bustled beside players, their lines blurred until you couldn't tell who was scripted and who was real — and maybe it didn't matter.
An old swordsman argued with a shopkeeper over the price of a broken blade. A bard played a discordant tune from a rooftop, while a nearby child danced out of sync to it, laughing too hard. Above them all, the banners of three guilds fluttered: one run by humans, one by the AI, and one... something in between.
Aiden walked past them all. He wasn't on a quest. He didn't need one. Just being here — that was the point.
He passed a vendor stand where a familiar voice crackled.
"Back again, huh?"
Aiden turned.
A slim figure with gloved hands sat behind a velvet-covered table. Dice rolled lazily in her palm. No nameplate floated above her head. She wasn't a quest-giver. She was something else.
"Thought you burned through your luck yesterday," she said, eyes half-lidded. Her accent curled like cigarette smoke.
Dealer Knox's assistant. No one knew her name. Maybe she didn't have one. But she always seemed to be watching what was happening in the city.
"I'm not here to play," Aiden muttered.
She laughed. "You're always playing. Even when you're losing."
He didn't respond and kept walking.
The city changed as he moved — not geographically, but emotionally. The Market Square gave way to Narrowward, where the buildings leaned like eavesdropping thieves and the cobblestones were stained with decades of unspoken stories.
It was there, in the shadow between a bakery and a shuttered armory, that a voice piped up.
"Hey."
Soft. Childlike.
Aiden stopped. Turned.
A girl sat on a crate, legs swinging. Seven, maybe eight years old. Dirty tunic. Sharp eyes.
"You forgot," she said.
His chest tightened again.
She held up a hand — not empty. Cards.
Crude, hand-drawn. Paper. Crayoned suits. She tried to shuffle them, but they scattered like leaves in the wind.
"I was gonna show you a trick," she said, crouching to pick them up. "But Seren said you got busy."
Aiden crouched too, helping her gather the scraps.
"I couldn't come around for a while," he said quietly.
She blinked at him. "Its ok your the only one who bother to see me."
She said, whispering it like a secret. "Remember, you said I could be anything."
The words hit him harder than they should have.
He nodded once.
"Okay, Lumi."
She grinned, then placed a bent card in his hand. The Joker. One drawn with wild red scribbles for hair and uneven eyes.
"This one's mine," she said. "You can borrow it."
Aiden stared at it. It didn't glow. Didn't pulse. Didn't hover. It didn't react into his class.
But somehow, it felt heavier than his entire deck.
Lumi tilted her head. "You okay?"
He nodded once, but didn't speak.
This wasn't a quest. There was no reward. No XP.
Aiden think that the AI of Mythreal: Echoheart was just too much advanced.
She tucked the rest of her cards into a stitched pouch and looked up at him again. "They say Dealer Knox wants to talk to you."
He froze.
"How do you know that?"
She shrugged. "The wind told me." Then smiled. "Or maybe Seren did. She talks when she thinks I'm not listening."
Aiden's deck hovered tighter around him now. Tension, real or simulated, curled along his spine.
He turned toward the deeper part of the city — toward The Dead Den.
It wasn't marked on any official map. But players talked about it. A place below Emosh, where run an underground business.
Knox ran the gambling rings. Illegal trades. Loan Sharks, most of the illegal activities where run by Knox
And he had taken a special interest in Aiden's class.
The entrance to the Dead Den was hidden behind a wine stall run by a blindfolded AI monk.
Aiden approached.
No words were spoken.
He dropped Lumi's paper Joker onto the counter.
The monk paused — reached out blindly — and slid the card under the stall.
The wall shimmered. A doorway blinked into existence, framed in glitching gold lines.
Aiden stepped through.
The music hit first — low jazz, then the scent — smoke, iron, wine.
And in the center, beneath a flickering chandelier of shattered emblems, sat a man in a crimson coat, legs crossed over a table of cards that shuffled themselves.
Dealer Knox.
His mask glinted — a black coin over one eye.
"Gambler," he said, voice like weighted dice in a velvet pouch. "Welcome to where the odds go to die."
He snapped his fingers. The cards on the table turned over, all blank.
"Let's talk about what's real, shall we?"