The chamber pulsed with sterile white light.Ethan stood shirtless in the center of the convergence ring, electrodes fused to his spine, neck, and temples. The neural uplink cables hummed like vipers waiting to strike. Cold breath coiled from his mouth as the temperature dropped—to stabilize brain activity.Saria moved around him like a conductor in a symphony of chaos. Her fingers worked across floating glyph-keyboards, rerouting firewalls, splicing layers of the Ghost Code’s architecture.“Your vitals will spike,” she warned, voice tight. “There’s no simulation that can prepare you for this.”Ethan nodded. “Not my first ride through hell.”She paused in front of him, eyes glistening. “If your synapses begin to fragment—”“Then you pull me out,” he finished, more command than request.Saria didn’t answer. She looked up at him like this was the last time.Because maybe it was.Nova, Kael, and Zane stood behind the glass partition, watching. Zane crossed himself silently. Nova mouthed

Ethan stood still, staring at his hand where the flicker had appeared. Binary. Just for a moment. A whisper of code in the weave of his flesh. It faded—but it had been real. Saria watched him closely. She hadn’t blinked since the vision. None of them had. “Are you alright?” she asked. “No,” Ethan replied, voice flat. “But I think that’s the point.” Behind them, the entrance to the subterranean vault had sealed shut. The Zero Mind remained inside, humming beneath kilometers of ice like a sleeping truth. “I didn’t just see the past,” Ethan said. “I felt it.” Nova dusted frost off her gear. “Same. Except I didn’t like what it showed me.” “Because it changes the story,&rdquo

The gateway to Dreamfall-Theta hung suspended like a frozen scream in the Codex Expanse. It pulsed once every ten seconds—a dying heartbeat of a world swallowed by its own memory. Ari stood beside her apprentice, Niko Vane, now fourteen, Codex-linked, dream-stabilized, and quiet in the way only those who’ve seen too much can be. “This place…” he said, voice low. “It doesn’t want to be remembered.” “That’s why we’re going in,” Ari replied. “To remember for it.” The Dreamwrights called it a silence vault—a recursive dream construct locked during the Archive War and scrubbed from official records. Not because it failed. But because it worked too well. Its purpose? To erase stories. Entirely. The first thing the

By the time they returned from the Citadel, the skies over New Blackwell were no longer still.Clouds twisted in unnatural patterns.Birds moved in synchronized spirals.And people began reporting impossible things.A boy in Sector 4 claimed he spoke to a version of his mother who’d died five years ago.A woman in Virun watched her deceased dog appear for a full minute before fading.Zane replayed the security footage seven times.It was real.No editing. No glitch.“The barrier’s thinning,” Saria said as she stared at the stream of anomalies. “The mirror world isn’t just reflecting anymore. It’s leaking.”Ethan sat silent, his eyes locked on a line of code.Not from the Citadel.From the original Ghost Code kernel.It was glowing.Changing.Alive.Kael ran the full scan four times.The results were always the same.Organic matter across five major settlements was displaying minor lattice imprinting—meaning human cells were beginning to register data echoes. Not just biologically.Cog

The gate did not transport them. It translated them. The sensation wasn’t physical. No whirring of machines. No burst of light. One moment, Ethan stood in the Citadel’s lattice chamber. The next— He was elsewhere. No gravity. No sky. Just a horizon that folded in on itself like origami stitched from starlight. Around him: Kael, Saria, Nova, and six others. Dreamborn and human alike. Each altered slightly. Their forms shimmered, edges not quite settled. Their ideas of self were adapting to the realm. Ethan took a cautious breath. It felt like memory—oxygenated thought wrapped in instinct. “Is this a world?” Nova whispered. Kael checked his sensory scanner. “No matter signatures. No physical cons