It clicked.
"You forgot to turn off the occlusion culling."
Then, a child's voice, but digitized—no, too clean, like a sample rate of a million kHz—whispered directly inside his skull: 3d haunted
No. Don't.
Leo froze. His hand moved to the mouse, but the cursor was already drifting on its own. It hovered over the "Build" button. It clicked
The camera climbed the steps. Through the fractured bay window, he could see a dusty chandelier. But something was wrong. The reflections—he hadn't added raytraced reflections to that asset yet. Yet the chandelier's crystals were casting faint, dancing light on the walls. As if something had just moved past it.
He hit "play" on the animation timeline. Leo froze
He was about to scrub the timeline back to frame zero when his headphones emitted a sound not from the speaker config: a soft, wet creak. The rocking chair. It had stopped.