— On the LOS kill list lies the key to rebooting the world.
The air inside the library still trembled.
On the terminal screen, red alerts flashed wildly—like a beast awakened, howling from the depths of data.
Lindsay's fingers gripped the console tightly, her eyes tense, like a warning wire ready to snap.
Shawn and Les had just returned. Their consciousnesses were not yet fully stabilized, but both of them had already sensed the oncoming resonance—
A wave more precise and insidious than a system crash: a consciousness-tracking pulse, quietly locking onto their neural loops.
Lindsay all but growled:
"Two nodes have been tagged—LOS is reverse-parsing their consciousness traces, trying to pinpoint the origin!"
She gritted her teeth and swiftly typed in a string of override commands. The light screen shifted.
"You both need to see this."
Lines of encrypted files slowly unfolded in the air—
High-level data fragments, recovered from LOS's energy-spectrum decryptions: a classified Registry of the Unawakened.
Only two names were listed, suspended in the cold light like signal points adrift in the deep sea:
[M-03: Eliya]
[M-04: Rin]
"It's them!" Les exclaimed, eyes wide.
"You know them?" Shawn asked.
"Only their META Matrix codenames," Les replied quickly. "M-03 is The Mirror, M-04 is The Heartseer."
Lindsay pulled up their data profiles, frowning.
"'Mirror'… 'Heartseer'… What do those mean?"
Les hesitated, then spoke in a measured tone:
"The Mirror can reflect multiple layers of consciousness—he's a folded structure of the self. The Lake of Reflections."
"The Heartseer senses the collective unconscious—like currents flowing beneath language and memory. The Stream of Resonance."
He paused, then added:
"They were the original seeds in the META Matrix—those capable of rewriting the system's foundational logic."
Lindsay's eyes narrowed.
"So… The Mirror corresponds to the D-Matrix. The Heartseer, to the K-Matrix."
Les nodded.
"One sits in the Dui(☱) position—associated with imagery and self-reflection. The other falls in the Kan(☵) position—governing emotion and subconscious flow."
Shawn looked out the window.
In the fog beyond, the Sunzen University clocktower stood silent and tall—a symbol of knowledge from the old age.
Now, it resembled a beacon buried within a blood-tangled net—perhaps the epicenter of the next storm.
Lindsay's fingers danced rapidly over the interface.
"I can temporarily block the node trace—but only for sixty minutes. After that, LOS will regain full-access permissions… and we'll be exposed too."
She paused, her voice dropping.
"But their locations… are bad."
"Where?" Les asked.
Lindsay took a deep breath and expanded the projection map:
"One is located in the Old Administrative Core—the original incubation site of the system's foundational algorithms. It's now an isolated testing zone… officially classified as a logic-contaminated red zone."
"The other," she pointed to the far edge of the map, "is marked as the Shatterfront–Redline Periphery—a boundary shatte in the system architecture. Even the core OS can't fully stabilize it… a grey zone."
Shawn closed his eyes. The Meta-Band on his wrist emitted a low hum.
He could feel the weight behind those two names—
Two nodes that might carry the future… and two of the first the system would choose to eliminate.
His voice was quiet but resolute:
"We split up."
Les nodded slowly.
"Whether they're still asleep… or already corrupted—we bring them back."
Shawn fixed his gaze on the terminal. Two red dots pulsed there like targeting sights.
"If they disappear, everything we've awakened… vanishes with them."
He turned to Lindsay, voice sharp and clear:
"Open transfer routes. You're going to the Shatterfront–Redline Periphery—use your admin protocols to penetrate the grey zone interference."
"Professor Les and I will go to the Old Admin Core. I know the layout—I can anchor the consciousness link faster."
Lindsay hesitated.
"You're sending me alone into Redline? Are you sure?"
Shawn's tone was calm but unshakable:
"You're the only one capable of maintaining a coherent consciousness structure inside the Fracture."
He paused, then added firmly:
"I'll also report to Ranzi—have the Wyrm Guardians deployed to assist you."
Lindsay was silent for a moment—then nodded.
The command synced. The light-gate flared open.
Two paths now lay ahead: the Fracture and the Core.
There was no time to hesitate.
---
Old Administrative Core.
On the map, it appeared as a muted black zone—silent and unreachable.
They stepped through the final access threshold. Beneath their feet, the ground shimmered like fractured glass, flickering between memory shadows and raw system code.
"...This place is even more unstable than I imagined," Les whispered.
Shawn nodded. His Meta-Band continued to vibrate, pulsing with a low, resonant frequency.
"He's close. I can feel his signal—his consciousness frequency is nearby."
Before them stood the ruins of a collapsed computation tower—once part of the system's original Memory-Weaving Core. Now, its surface was overgrown with rust-colored data moss, like scorched biological tissue etched with forgotten code.
Shawn activated a stealth protocol. They slipped quietly through a breach at the tower's base.
Inside: silence.
Only the fragmented echoes of residual thoughts drifted in the darkness, like ghosts whispering through static.
Suddenly, Shawn held out a hand, halting Les.
"You hear that?"
Les closed his eyes, tuning in—
A faint sound, filtered through a gap in the data layer.
Not mechanical.
A song. A child's lullaby.
"Mirror, mirror, in the stream,
Show me more than just a dream.
Count the faces—one, two, three...
Which of them is really me?"
Les's eyes opened.
"It's him."
They followed the lullaby's ghostlike thread, winding deeper into the ruins.
Around a corner, a toppled data-screen lay twisted and scorched. Beyond it: a suspension chamber, floating in mid-air like a forgotten thought.
The chamber door hung open, torn and warped—its surface marked with fractures, as if silently screaming of past intrusion and struggle.
Inside, curled on a drifting data shard, was a boy-shaped consciousness.
He was thin, almost weightless, encircled by hundreds of "mirror fractures"— some solid, others dashed, all intertwined.
His eyes were closed. His face was calm. His breath was light.
He lay in the deepest layer of inner sleep—awaiting something far beyond waking.
Shawn knelt slowly, eyes steady.
His right hand brushed the Meta-Band on his left wrist.
Blue light emerged—soft, like a tide. It drifted gently toward the boy's forehead.
Then—
The boy opened his eyes.
In them, there was no fear.
Only clarity.
A clarity cold as glass.
He raised his hand. Slowly, deliberately, his fingers drew in the air:
First a dashed line. Then two solid lines.
☱
The trigram for Lake. Dui.
Instantly, the mirror space reacted. Reflections shattered into motion.
Each illusion—each false self—was pulled toward the center, coalescing into a blinding white beam that pierced the tower's upper layer, illuminating the polluted zone.
This wasn't destruction.
It wasn't escape.
It was restructuring.
Les stared, stunned.
"It's him… Eliya."
Shawn took a step forward—only to be violently repelled by a psychic barrier.
[WARNING: Mirror-State Active / Logical Reconstruction in Progress / Intrusion Will Trigger System Instability]
Les murmured:
"His ego's fragmented… dispersed into layered reflections. If we try to force a wake-up, it's like shattering one mirror inside a hall of thousands. The collapse would ripple in all directions."
Shawn's voice was steady.
"Then we break in from the inside."
He raised his Meta-Band.
[INTERNAL DIVE MODE ACTIVATED]
[SYNCING NEURAL THREADS…]
[TARGET IDENTIFIED: M-03 / Eliya]
[INITIATING REFLECTIVE LINK PROTOCOL]
Time fractured. Again.
They plunged into the mirrored mind.
Each pane showed Eliya—different places, different moments, but all scorched by the same era:
—Standing at the back of a People's Commune canteen line, staring at an empty cauldron, while a loudspeaker proclaimed: "Food is free!"
—Feeding scrap metal into the fire of The Great Leap Forward, melting pots and pans into rough furnaces under banners of impossible quotas;
—Crouching behind a thatch shed, clutching his breath as drums sounded in the distance—
The old school principal had just been labeled "Rightist."
Broken images looped in endless cuts, as if someone had smashed a reel of old film and re-spliced it at random.
Every version of Eliya whispered.
Not in language—but in sensation.
Pain. Shame. Grief. Silence.
"He didn't just hide," Les murmured.
"He stopped believing," Shawn whispered. "That he belonged… in the now."
He stepped forward, touching the last, blank mirror.
It exploded.
Memory shards cascaded in all directions.
A scream echoed across the mirrored vault:
"Don't make me see… myself again!"
The entire space convulsed.
Shawn and Les were pulled into a spiraling collapse of time and thought.
---
When vision returned—
They were somewhere else.
A faded era. A desaturated world.
Sun baked the cracked earth like open wounds.
The People's Canteen was abandoned—its ovens cold, slogans peeling from the walls.
Children squatted in the dust, gnawing at bark. Their eyes were empty.
At the edge of the field, a lone boy stood with his back to them.
Thin. Still.
In his hands: an empty bowl.
It hadn't held a grain of rice in days.
The wind stirred. Dust lifted.
The boy's shadow swayed—like it could vanish at any moment into the folds of history.
Shawn stood frozen.
"Eliya…" he whispered.
"What exactly… did you see?"
In the distance, drums echoed. Slogans rose.
A crowd was beginning to gather—