The meteorite had landed.
Jin Mu watched from the rooftop as the crater glowed faintly in the early dawn light. The energy signature was unmistakable — ancient, alien, and laced with the quantum threads of the Virtual Universe. Babata was awakening.
And Luo Feng was already on the move.
Jin Mu felt the timeline stabilize slightly, like a taut string relaxing under tension. His intervention had worked. The probability anchor embedded in Luo Feng's file had nudged fate back on course.
But it wasn't enough.
The Paradox Order had gone quiet — too quiet. He knew their tactics: destabilize, retreat, then strike when the narrative was most vulnerable. And with Babata's arrival, the stakes had just multiplied.
He needed answers.
He descended into the underbelly of the Dojo of Limits — a place few trainees even knew existed. Beneath the training halls and simulation chambers lay the Whispering Archive, a forbidden vault of corrupted data, discarded timelines, and failed simulations.
It was where the Dojo stored its mistakes.
And where Jin Mu hoped to find the truth.
The Archive door was sealed with a biometric lock keyed to Hong himself. Jin Mu didn't break it — he rewrote its probability. A 0.0003% chance that the lock would misread his signature as Hong's. He amplified it. The door hissed open.
Inside, the air was thick with static.
Holograms flickered. Data shards floated in suspension. Voices whispered from broken files — fragments of simulations where humanity had lost, where Luo Feng had died, where Earth had been consumed.
Jin Mu moved carefully, filtering the noise.
Then he found it.
A corrupted file labeled: "Echo Protocol: Failed Reincarnation #7"
He accessed it.
The file showed a figure — cloaked, faceless — standing beside Luo Feng during the Sector Lord trials. The figure had interfered, saved Luo Feng from a fatal blow, and triggered a cascade failure in the timeline. The Virtual Universe collapsed. The Beast God inheritance was lost. Humanity was erased.
The figure looked familiar.
Too familiar.
Jin Mu staggered back.
It was him.
Or rather, a version of him.
A failed reincarnation. A previous attempt by the Void Engine to insert a Paradox Wielder into the Swallowed Realm. It had ended in catastrophe.
He wasn't the first.
He was the seventh.
Suddenly, the Archive shimmered. A presence entered — not hostile, but ancient.
A woman stepped forward, her form flickering between dimensions. She wore robes woven from starlight, and her eyes held galaxies.
"You found it," she said.
"Who are you?" Jin Mu asked.
"I'm what remains of the sixth," she replied. "The last Paradox Wielder before you. I failed. But I left this Archive behind."
Jin Mu's mind raced. "Why did you fail?"
"Because I tried to change the story," she said. "You mustn't. You must walk beside it. Protect it. Guide it. But never rewrite it."
Jin Mu clenched his fists. "Then why give me this power?"
She smiled. "Because the Order will rewrite it if you don't."
She handed him a data shard — glowing, pulsing with encrypted knowledge.
"Take this," she said. "It contains the coordinates of the Order's anchor point. Their base in the Virtual Universe. You'll need it when Luo Feng enters."
Jin Mu took the shard.
The woman began to fade.
"Wait," he said. "What's your name?"
She paused.
"Call me Echo."
Then she was gone.
Jin Mu stood alone in the Archive, holding the shard, the whispers of failed timelines swirling around him.
He knew what he had to do.
He would walk beside Luo Feng.
He would protect the story.
And when the Order struck again — he would be ready.