There were no footsteps in the place Hiragi awoke.
Only glass. A sea of it, stretching endlessly beneath a grey sky.
Each step he took sent ripples through the mirrored surface, revealing fragments below—faces, places, names.
Some were familiar.
Some should never have existed.
He heard her voice before he saw her.
"You were never meant to dream."
A girl stood ahead, barefoot on the glass. Her face was obscured, like static over a photograph.
Her body flickered. One moment she was thirteen. Then twenty. Then burned. Then crying.
She had no name, yet she knew his.
"You're too late. The third lantern is awake."
The sky cracked like porcelain.
From it descended shapes—limbs formed from stitched hands, eyes rolling in wrong directions.
Each shape whispered names Hiragi had forgotten.
"Mika."
"Arata."
"Your father."
"Yourself."
They circled, not attacking—but reflecting.
And Hiragi saw himself in each one.
A coward.
A killer.
A savior.
A vessel.
The girl approached, holding a mask made of smooth obsidian.
"Do you want to forget?"
Hiragi said nothing.
She pressed the mask into his chest. It didn't hurt. But it burned.
Images flooded in:
A hospital room. A man in a coat of wires. A young Hiragi screaming at his own reflection. A file labeled EXPERIMENT: H-7 VOID-TYPE SUBJECT.
"They took your dream," she said, "and fed it to the lanterns."
The mirror cracked beneath him.
Water rose—but it was not water.
It was liquid memory.
Faces bloomed like oil paintings, distorted by time:
Airi's tears the day her sister vanished. Ishigami burying something under a sakura tree. Nolan watching a child disappear into a void gate.
Then—
Silence.
The third lantern stood ahead. Towering. Open like a maw of light and shadow.
A voice echoed from inside it.
"Three lanterns lit. Three sins remembered."
"One left. The God stirs."
Hiragi stepped into it.
The world turned inside out.
And suddenly, he was no longer in the dream.
He was in a white room.
Surrounded by monitors.
Alarms.
Wires.
Test tubes.
And a screen flashing: SUBJECT HIRAGI—REAWAKENING
Someone stood behind the glass.
Wearing a coat.
Void in his eyes.
Smiling.
"You're almost back, my son."
End of Chapter 63