The charging of the Nemesis-class Volcano Cannon on the EVA-Titan's back reached its zenith. The space surrounding the muzzle distorted into ripples visible to the naked eye, and the incandescent glare was so piercing it forced eyes shut. The low-frequency hum sounded like a countdown from the Grim Reaper himself.
Its cold, red cyclopean eye remained locked onto the deified Unit-01 beneath the Doors of Guf...
You lose track of how long you have been sitting in the darkness. Time has lost its scale here, flowing silently like an elongated shadow. There is no temperature inside the Crystal Mountain, nor any sound, save for the pulse of the Tree of Light—a cosmic heartbeat that thrums through your bones and seeps into the depths of your memories.
Your helmet shattered long ago. A thin layer of frost has condensed on the visor—the final trace of your breath. The energy of your protective suit has been exhausted, yet you feel no cold. Perhaps your body has already perished, or perhaps... you no longer belong to the realm of matter.
Your consciousness floats, falling slowly like a leaf in a windless night sky. You see your sister as a little girl, wearing a faded red dress, running among the ruins while clutching half a piece of moldy bread. She turns back to smile at you, a missing tooth showing, but her eyes are as bright as stars. "Brother!" she shouts. "Look! I found a guitar!"
That was the final scene before the start of the Gemini Project.
Later, when NERV took her away, you were speechless. Your throat felt like a welded pipe; you couldn't even manage a sob. They said she was a "Pilot," a "Vessel of Hope," the "Key to Instrumentality." But you knew she was just a child—a child who was afraid of thunder, loved to sing, and dreamed of candy houses.
Now, her voice floods in from all directions.
"You've come." "I knew you would." "I've been waiting."
It isn't heard through your ears, but resonates directly within your soul. Gentle, yet undeniable.
You lift your head. The roots of the Tree of Light are slowly writhing, entwining something—a transparent vessel suspended in the void. Inside sleeps a girl, eyes closed, her long hair drifting like seagrass. Her face is identical to the sister in your memories, yet it possesses a divine radiance that does not belong to humanity.
The voice of B-0 resurfaces, no longer a synthesized machine tone, but the actual voice of a little girl: "I am not her, yet I am not 'not her.' I am the collective of all the 'Erased,' the pain of your forgotten past, the unfinished dream, the final fragment of memory that Unit-09 failed to recover—the paradox of humanity itself, wanting love but always expressing it through destruction."
You stand up, your steps unsteady yet determined as you walk toward the vessel.
"So... you are the true core of the Eden Ring?" you ask.
"No." She opens her eyes, her golden pupils reflecting the entire galaxy. "The Eden Ring is just the shell, a sugar coating to appease you. The true core is the mountain beneath your feet, the tree within me, and the Torrent of Empathy released the moment you shattered the crystal. Now, it is spreading across Earth, awakening those dormant cognitions."
You manage a bitter smile. "They will be afraid. Suddenly remembering too much... deaths from past lives, memories of war, the parting of loved ones... This isn't salvation; it's torture."
"But what if they lived forever in a false peace?" she asks back. "If happiness must be built upon forgetting, is it still happiness? When you repair a machine, can you simply replace parts without checking the root cause of the failure?"
You fall silent.
She gently raises her hand, and ripples appear on the surface of the vessel. Images emerge: On Earth, in a city square, hundreds of people fall to their knees, weeping uncontrollably. They have just "remembered" being buried alive in the ruins of a nuclear war in another life. In another scene, a mother cradles her infant, murmuring: "I'm sorry... in our last life, I was the one who pushed you into the incinerator... I thought it would set you free..."
Pain sweeps the globe like a tidal wave.
But then, a miracle occurs.
People begin to embrace strangers. Someone kneels to clean the wounds of a homeless man. In a school, a child who used to bully his classmates falls to his knees before his victim, wailing: "I remember now... I was treated like this before... I shouldn't have repeated that pain..."
An empathy network forms spontaneously. Without devices, without training—as long as people look into each other's eyes, they can feel the other's emotional wavelength. Anger dissolves, hatred recedes, replaced by a primal and profound understanding: We have suffered together; therefore, we can no longer hurt one another.
"This... is this Instrumentality?" you whisper.
"It is not Instrumentality," she says. "It is a reboot. Not becoming one, but learning to coexist. Not eliminating differences, but respecting the scars. You finally understand that true peace is not the absence of conflict, but choosing not to destroy, even when conflict exists."
You look at her, suddenly feeling exhausted to the core.
"Can I go now?" you ask.
"You can," she nods. "But know that once you leave here, you can never return to your past life. Your body was broken during the jump; what remains of you now is merely a projection of consciousness in the data stream. You can choose to dissipate, or you can choose to merge with the Tree of Light and become a medium for the Guides."
You shake your head. "I don't want to be a god, and I don't want to be a sacrifice. I just want to be an ordinary man—repairing machines, listening to music, and sitting in the sun with my sister."
She smiles, light dripping from the corners of her eyes like falling stars.
"Then go back," she says. "I will stay behind and continue to listen. And you—go tell them: Oil isn't meant to cover the rust; it's to make the gears turn again."
As her words fall, the entire Crystal Mountain begins to disintegrate, yet it is reborn through the crumbling. The branches of the Tree of Light extend beyond the Moon's surface, gently touching the edge of Earth's atmosphere, forming a rainbow bridge across heaven and earth. Countless memory fragments flow up the bridge, pouring into the lunar core to be decomposed, reorganized, and transformed into new seeds of information.
You feel yourself falling, yet also rising.
In the final moment of consciousness, you see her standing by the wreckage of the Dawn, clutching a broken crystal. She looks up at the Moon, tears streaming down her face.
"He succeeded," she tells those behind her. "The signal is restored. It's not just communication... it's a heartbeat resonance. The children can hear each other's dreams now."
Ritsuko approaches, holding her son, and asks softly, "And him?"
She shakes her head. "I don't know. Maybe he became data, maybe he became the wind. But the code he left behind is still running, rewriting the underlying protocols of the neural network every second. He once said... 'True freedom begins when you are no longer controlled by the program.'"
Earth welcomes its first morning without surveillance.
On the streets, police put down their guns, teachers tear up standardized tests, and factories shut down their automated assembly lines. People begin to write by hand, talk with their mouths, and read hearts with their eyes. An ancient language quietly revives—not English, not Chinese, but a "Resonance Language" based on emotional frequencies. A single syllable can convey complex emotions.
And beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, a long-dormant EVA unit suddenly activates. Its armor is covered in moss and ice crystals, the plaque on its chest reading: EVA-13Prototype. The cockpit is empty, but the operating system shows a synchronization rate of 98.6%. The pilot name field flashes with two words:
UNKNOWN.
Meanwhile, the mirror-like cracks on Mars open once more. This time, it isn't Unit-09 that emerges, but a group of blurred human silhouettes. They carry tools and rucksacks, like a band of crusading craftsmen. The leader carries a massive wrench on his shoulder and a rusty guitar strapped to his back.
They look up toward Earth, humming that lullaby in low voices.
In the wind and sand, a slogan carved with iron ore is faintly visible:
"The repairman is never absent."
Years later, humanity officially enters the "Post-Instrumentality Era." The Lilith Foundation has transformed into the "Council of Empathy," establishing 108 Silence Towers across the globe—no screens, no keyboards, only circular stone rooms and central pools. People come regularly to sit in silence, casting their emotions into the water. The ripples are automatically encoded into light signals and sent to the Tree of Light on the Moon for integration.
It is said that whenever someone truly repents or gives selflessly, a new flower blooms on the canopy. The petals fall to Earth as meteors, called "Proofs of Awakening" by those who find them.
A little boy finds a glowing leaf in the desert and takes it home to plant in a withered pot. The next day, the entire desert blooms with blue flowers. Within the stamens are hidden microchips recording a conversation from the year 2035:
"Do you think humanity is worth saving?"
"I don't know. But I'm willing to try."
One night, she climbs a snowy peak in the Himalayas alone. She brings an old tape recorder and plays a heavily distorted tape. It was the last thing you recorded before the Mars landing:
"If one day everyone forgets what we did, please remember this song. My sister taught it to me; it is the key she left for the world."
The melody plays, simple and mournful.
Suddenly, a crack opens in the sky. Moonlight pours down like liquid silver, outlining two figures on the snow: one holding a wrench, the other a guitar, walking side by side.
She falls to her knees, tears falling like rain.
"Do you hear it?" she asks the void. "We're all singing. Every child, every old man, everyone who has hurt others or been hurt... is singing."
There is no response.
But she knows you heard her. Because the last program command you left behind is still running in the lunar core, broadcasting automatically once every twenty-four hours. Its frequency penetrates all media, receivable only by those with pure hearts:
"Do not believe in the Moon."
"Believe in the one who dared to shatter it."
Many years later, when an archaeologist discovers the wreckage of Unit-01 on the floor of the Pacific Ocean, he notices a line of tiny text carved into the palm of its left hand, identifiable only through laser scanning:
"I am not a god, nor a monster. I am just a man who wanted to fix the world."
And on the edge of the distant Orion constellation, an unnamed starship sails silently. Inside the cabin, a figure in overalls bows his head to repair an instrument panel, a scarred arm peeking from his sleeve. From the radio comes the sound of singing from Earth.
He stops his movements, looks out the porthole at the vast sea of stars, and whispers: "Next stop, Jupiter. I heard there's a broken old machine there too."
Then, he tightens the last screw and presses the start button.
The engine roars, and starlight pierces the darkness.
The journey never ends.
Spring has come, carrying the scent of engine oil and an unending song.