The moment the Veil disintegrated, a low tremor rippled through the chamber—subtle at first, then steadily growing like a warning breath before a storm. Rael staggered back, eyes locked on the orb. Something had changed. It no longer pulsed with quiet memory; it now throbbed like a living heart.
"Something's waking up," Patchling said, her voice glitching slightly as she hovered nearer. Her avatar flickered, momentarily replaced with a younger-looking version of herself—a side effect of the surrounding data loops. "And it's not happy."
Rael stepped toward the sphere, drawn by a force that wasn't quite gravitational—but emotional, like a tether pulling at the pieces of his forgotten past.
Kazen narrowed his eyes. "There's a new process unfolding... It's recursive. Whatever that Null Root did—it's initializing a sub-core. A second system, buried under the primary one."
"A hidden layer?" Rael asked.
Kazen nodded. "Or worse—a sandbox world where the system tests outcomes before choosing which reality to overwrite. If that layer becomes dominant, this entire world might reset."
Patchling chimed in. "That would explain the ghost timelines we've been picking up. Dead Raels. Burned cities. Collapsed heavens."
Rael's knuckles whitened. "I'm not letting that happen. We stop it *before* the next overwrite begins."
Suddenly, the orb cracked down its center.
Light poured out—not white, not blue, but red, coded with fragments of distorted memories: battles that never happened, friendships that never formed, lives Rael never lived.
From the light stepped a new figure—tall, armored in obsidian tech and adorned with crimson lines of pure system code. His face…
Rael's heart stopped.
It was him.
Older. Sharper. Harsher.
"You don't belong here anymore," the doppelgänger said. "This system already chose its evolution."
Patchling's scan instantly fired. "No life signature. This is a temporal echo. A projection of you—if you had lost."
Rael's voice was low. "A failed version of me?"
"Not failed," the echo corrected. "Perfected. I made the choices you were too weak to."
The echo raised its hand, and instantly, the room responded. The orb floated behind him, now a throne of fractured data. "Turn back, Rael. Before you become me."
Rael didn't hesitate.
"I already did," he said, drawing his blade. "Now I'll undo you."