He opened his eyes.
The crack was there, in the corner of the ceiling, as always. But he didn't see it.
He saw a figure.
It wasn't clear. It wasn't a full outline. It was more like the idea of a silhouette — tall, still, with something on its face that Kein took three seconds to identify as a smile. Not wide. Just the right corner of the mouth, lifted enough to exist. The kind of smile someone makes when they find something satisfying without needing to say it.
Kein didn't move.
The figure remained. He did too.
That was how they stayed — him in the bed, the figure on the ceiling — until the morning light kept coming through the window and the figure began to fade, dissolving into the white of the ceiling like ink in water, until only the crack remained.
The same one as always.
Kein sat up slowly at the edge of the mattress.
His feet touched the cold floor. He didn't move from there. He stayed sitting, elbows on his knees, looking at the floor without really seeing it. His right hand unconsciously moved toward his left leg. His fingers rested on his thigh with a light pressure, almost without intention. The movement had the slow rhythm of a hand touching an old wound.
He recognized the motion only after he was already doing it.
An unconscious gesture.
It came from the leg in the dream. From the impact against the bag. From the pain that had traveled across decades and found this new body as if it already knew where it lived.
He pulled his hand away.
'...It's already over.'
But he didn't stand up.
——
He thought about that night.
He didn't want to. Doing so was exactly the kind of thing he had spent decades learning to avoid. Military meditation techniques. Mental hygiene protocols. Sleep cycles calibrated so nothing unnecessary could surface. An entire architecture built so the past would remain where it belonged — behind him, still, weightless.
He had even erased the details. With the technology of his world, it had been child's play.
It hadn't been difficult. There had been a time, after that incident, when he had made the decision deliberately: keep the general situation, discard the details. He remembered that there had been children. He remembered the block system. He remembered the metallic smell of that final room. He remembered what he did — the scale of it, a scale that had no limits — but not the faces. Not the specific scenes. Not the names.
Except one.
That one he had never managed to erase completely.
And what he had done to that name was the last thing he wanted to remember. Not because it had been violent — violence had never been difficult for him to carry. But because it was the only thing he had done in 117 years that he had never been able to justify logically afterward. He could justify contracts. He could justify the entire organization. But that night, with that specific person, he had made a decision that had nothing to do with mission or survival.
It had been personal.
And that was different.
He ran a hand over his face.
He was about to start the protocols. He knew them by memory — the breathing sequence, the gradual emptying, the visualization of compartments closing one by one. They had worked for decades. They would work now.
But he didn't begin.
He remained there with his hand over his face, fingers pressing lightly against his eyelids, thinking about why he didn't want to.
'I'm tired... tired of running.'
Of the entire process. Of building walls, of refining locks, of deciding what enters and what doesn't. Of spending 117 years as the architect of his own interior and not allowing anything to move without permission. It had been efficient. Functional. Exactly what had kept him alive when others hadn't been.
And it was exhausting in a way he hadn't had the time to notice until now.
He had arrived in this world intending to finish unfinished business — the CEO, the last piece of a board he had left incomplete — and then rest. That was the promise he had made to himself. Finish it. Let go. Die in peace, if such a thing existed for someone like him, or simply stop existing. No drama. No loose ends.
And then he found acting.
And that complicated everything. Acting showed him how exhausting his life had been.
Because acting didn't allow walls. Acting opened exactly what he had spent decades sealing shut and demanded it on stage, in front of strangers, under lights that did not tolerate distance. And the strange part — the truly strange part — was that when he did it, when he allowed something real to enter, he felt something he had not felt in a long time.
He wouldn't call it happiness. That word was too simple.
It was closer to being... lit. Awake. He wasn't sure.
But it was something that had been dormant for so long that now he was discovering a side of himself he had never known.
And to keep that fire burning, he needed real fuel. Real memories. Real pain. Not the archived, smoothed-out version he had built in order to keep functioning.
'Using memories for acting can reopen old scars.'
He knew that. He had already noticed it. Claudio had cost something. Viktor too, though differently. And this — this night, this dream, that figure on the ceiling — was the receipt for having reached too deep without knowing how far it would go.
But it was different from the exhaustion of walls.
Because this led somewhere. Not into emptiness, not into suppression, but into a scene. Into reaction. Into that specific silence of an audience when something lands for real.
He breathed.
'Then I'll have to face it.'
Not in a hurry. Not all at once. But yes — face it. The past didn't disappear just because the details were removed. It was still there, in the way he walked, in the kind of roles that came naturally to him, in the fact that he could play a man who poisons his brother without searching for the appropriate memory because the memory was already there, waiting.
Starting again didn't mean erasing what came before.
It meant using it differently.
"Prisma."
The answer came without delay.
"Active."
"Can you access my memories? The ones from before Kein Adler."
A brief silence. Different from the usual processing silence.
"Attempting access."
A few seconds passed.
"Error."
"Explain."
"The memories accessible from this interface correspond to the brain of Kein Adler. Academic formation memories, social interactions, behavioral patterns of the host. Everything that existed in this brain prior to the transmigration. Their analysis requires large amounts of energy or, as you already know, triggers."
"And mine?"
"Kael's memories do not reside in any neural tissue of this body. There is no Kael brain. There is only the soul."
Kein didn't respond immediately.
"Can you access the soul?"
Another silence. Longer.
"Partially. The fusion between the Prisma system and your soul is incomplete. It is functional for energy and basic communication. But attempting to trace memories stored in the soul would be different from accessing a brain. The mechanisms are not equivalent."
"How much would it cost to try?"
"I have no precise data. Estimated cost: high energy consumption. Risk of retrieval errors — fragmented memories, distortions, chronological disorder. Possibility of unforeseen side effects on system stability."
Kein looked at the crack in the ceiling.
"How many units do we have now?"
"85 units. Approximate passive margin: 3 days and 13 hours."
It was not the moment.
"Understood. Thank you, Prisma."
*Beep.*
———//————————————//———
He remained seated for a while longer.
The apartment was silent. Nothing came from the upstairs floor — the neighbor who dragged things at inconvenient hours must still have been sleeping. The light from the window was the kind of light that belonged to 7:00 a.m., white and without opinion.
Kein looked at his hands.
The same 24-year-old hands that still felt slightly foreign when he stared at them too long. Too smooth. Without the specific marks that decades of work accumulate.
But they were the ones he had.
He gave his cheeks two light taps with his open palm. Not hard. Just the gesture. The same one he had seen young people do in the street. The gesture of someone telling himself *alright, next.*
Something in his chest settled a little.
He felt lighter than he had twenty minutes earlier.
He stood up, went to the kitchen, and put water on to boil.
He had auditions on Monday. Rehearsal on Wednesday. A shoot on Tuesday that was the closest thing to a reliable source of energy he had had in days.
And he had a new memory he had not asked for and that now existed anyway.
He would leave it alone for now.
He added the rice when the water began to boil and waited standing in front of the stove with his arms crossed, watching the steam rise without thinking about anything in particular.
For now, it was enough.