The descent into the system's inner domain felt like falling through forgotten dreams. Time and space looped around the group, environments shifting between ruined citadels, crystalline data vaults, and vast voids echoing with silence.
Kazen led with narrowed eyes. "We're in a recursive archive. Every ten steps repeats a moment in stored memory—see?"
Rael glanced to the left. A tree bloomed. To the right, the same tree wilted and crumbled to code.
"This is where the system stores the lives it's consumed," Patchling whispered. "Memories with nowhere to return."
Echo floated ahead, flickering with static. "Each fragment holds part of the Overlord's consciousness. Find enough, and the core will awaken."
They passed fragments like ghosts—shadowy figures locked in moments of despair, love, betrayal. Oroth paused at one, watching a version of himself… younger, bloodied, dragging a limp friend across a battlefield.
He didn't speak.
Further in, Kazen's screen pulsed again.
> Memory Fragment Synch Complete
Identity Tag Reconstructed: Subject R0-Alpha // Origin: Null Root
Rael froze. That code again.
"That's me," he said. "But it's not… just me."
A door opened in the void.
Inside, a mirror waited. It showed not Rael—but a younger boy, uncertain and angry, standing beside a man with glowing red eyes.
Echo spoke, voice fragmented. "This is the fracture point. Where the system broke its own rule."
"What rule?" Rael asked.
"Only one soul per thread of time."
And then everything shattered.
The team was separated in an instant, scattered across different branches of memory. Each trapped inside echoes of their own forgotten pasts.
Rael awoke in a city he remembered burning.
Only now, it hadn't yet.
And his mother was still alive.