The silence in Rin's bedroom wasn't just quiet—it was hollow, the kind of stillness that felt designed. Every tick of the clock had started sounding like a warning. His walls, once layered in posters and photographs, now seemed too bare, too smooth, like something had been peeled away in the night. A presence used to live here. Laughter. Arguments. The hum of a shared memory. Now, only still air and fading warmth. He paced, restless, trying not to think, trying even harder not to remember things that maybe never happened at all.
The pendant Sera left behind had become a kind of anchor. Rin hadn't let it go since the night it opened—at least, not willingly. He would wake some mornings with it clutched so tightly in his fist, the shape of its jagged edge pressed into his skin like a wound. There were moments he imagined it pulsed—faintly, like a second heartbeat. But when he tried to show someone, it was just a cold, lifeless trinket again.
Until tonight.
It happened after dusk, after another day of being ignored, another day where teachers called his name only to forget why, where classmates brushed past him like static. Rin sat on the edge of his bed, flipping the pendant open and closed with muscle memory. One flick. Two. On the third, it stopped halfway. Locked. The hinge caught—clicked—and held.
Inside, embedded so precisely it looked grown from the metal itself, was a needle-thin shard of crystal. He touched it—and heard music.
Four notes. Ancient. Off-key. But real. A lullaby he didn't know he remembered until it surfaced fully formed in his throat. He hummed it without realizing it, and then the walls of his room—his world—responded.
The bookcase trembled.
No quake. No wind. Just a slow shift, the subtle groaning of wood, as the back shelf creaked inward like a secret giving way. Dust exploded into the air in soft clouds. Behind the shelf was a hollow cavity—impossibly clean, untouched, as if it had been waiting.
And inside, wrapped in canvas, was a book.
Rin's fingers hovered. There was something sacred about it. Something alive.
He unwrapped it slowly.
"Echo Log: Ver. 1.7 — Property of Archivist #0"
The moment he touched it, his breath caught in his throat.
It was warm. Not like heated metal. Like body heat. Like something that had been alive only moments before. The leather binding felt organic, pulsing subtly beneath his palm. When he opened it, the air in the room grew thick—like water in his lungs. Words moved. Some reversed. Others blurred like old film catching fire.
The entries weren't stories. They were memories. Tangled, recursive, sometimes contradictory, but stitched together in a pattern so strange and meticulous that Rin had to keep reading even as nausea twisted through his stomach.
Wars he'd never heard of. People who didn't exist. Towns labeled "Obsolete." Pages that screamed when flipped too fast. And a date—burned into the back of the cover.
"Final Backup: 17 years ago."
The year Rin was born.
Panic tightened in his chest. This wasn't just some rogue Archivist's diary. It was something else. A blueprint. A ledger of the erased. A chronicle of things not allowed to be remembered.
He ran to the library basement. Kuro was already there, waiting like he knew Rin would come.
Rin slammed the book down on the table. "Tell me what this is."
Kuro looked at it—and for the first time, stepped back.
"You weren't supposed to find that."
"You said you wanted the truth."
"I said you weren't ready for it."
Kuro circled the table, staring at the Log with something between awe and fear. He didn't touch it.
"That's not a book," he finally said. "That's a tomb."
Rin blinked. "What?"
"Archivist Zero. The first of them. The man who created the system, who designed memory manipulation, who invented the very tools they used to erase Sera—he didn't die. He didn't vanish. He wrote himself into that Log. Shattered his consciousness and seeded it across the immune, hoping someone would eventually find the pieces."
"And you think I'm one of them."
"No." Kuro's voice dropped to a whisper. "I think you're the last one. The final echo. The fragment that ties it all together."
The room spun. Rin felt the truth drop into his stomach like a stone into a well.
"You're saying I'm not just immune. I'm—"
Kuro finished it for him.
"—a carrier. You don't just remember what they tried to erase. You are what they erased."