The sketch didn't burn.
No matter how much Airi tried—fire, acid, null-ink—the drawing of Yuna and the shadow-beast refused to be destroyed. It felt... alive. Like it knew it had been brought into the waking world.
Hiragi sat on the couch, silent, eyes unfocused. Still disoriented from the Protocol.
"What did she mean by that?" Airi asked, pacing. "Wake me up? She's not even alive anymore."
"She is," Hiragi whispered.
They turned to him.
"She's alive in there. In the Spiral."
Ishigami pulled up the metadata from the sketch. It shouldn't have had any. But the system spat out a header:
FILE TAG: [Cognitohazard] YUN-A_Prototype: HOLLOW MODEL
ORIGIN: The Ninefold Spiral, Layer 1 — The Hall of Forgotten Bells
Airi paled. "That's a Spiral coordinate."
Hiragi stood. "Then that's where I'm going."
The Spiral wasn't a physical place. It was accumulative trauma shaped like architecture. Every layer was a conceptual construct built from the remains of broken minds and discarded identities.
Layer One: The Hall of Forgotten Bells.
They entered via deep-tether. No physical body moved.
Only the mind descended.
A cathedral greeted them.
Empty, gray, infinite—lined with bells that never rang. They floated midair, frozen in time. Each bell had a name carved onto its brass: Amari, Riku, Mio, Yuna...
"They're names of children," Airi murmured. "All casualties from the Prototype."
Beneath each bell hung a single shoelace.
And in the center of the cathedral stood Yuna—except her face was covered in a mask made of cracked glass, and where her forehead should've been, there was a hole.
A hollow.
"You're back," she said softly.
Her voice was laced with distortion, like a radio too far from its tower.
"I found your memory," Hiragi stepped forward. "The classroom. The drawing."
"You should've left it."
Suddenly, the bells began to tremble.
She pointed at him. "Because now He knows you exist."
The walls bent inward. A wind of whispers howled through the cathedral.
Ishigami shouted, "Incoming entity! Manifesting signature—spiraloid-class!"
From the hollow in her head, a face emerged.
Not hers.
Not human.
It wore the masks of dead children.
Layered one over another. Thousands. Melting into a tower of faces.
And at its core, the true voice spoke.
"I AM THE READER OF UNWAKENED NAMES."
"RETURN HER, OR I WILL ERASE THE MEMORY OF YOUR EXISTENCE."
The team activated emergency protocols.
But Yuna stepped forward.
"She's not the one you want," she said, to the entity. "I am."
She turned to Hiragi—and smiled.
"I remember you now. From before Eden."
Hiragi's breath hitched.
"Wait. Yuna—"
But it was too late.
She walked into the hollow. Into herself.
And vanished.
The Spiral collapsed.
The cathedral shattered into ringing silence.
They woke up, gasping.
And in Hiragi's hand—another sketch.
This time, it was blank.
But at the corner, a phrase had been written in tiny letters:
"Layer Two awaits. You can't wake up alone."
[End of Chapter 74]