Zhao didn't speak. He didn’t know how to speak anymore. He just stood there, hand frozen in mid-reach, mouth half-open, watching his friend—his quiet, expressionless, always-controlled friend—become someone else. Lin Cang was standing, but his back was too straight now, his arms too still. His face looked like Lin Cang’s, but something inside it wasn’t holding the pieces together like before. The eyes glowed not like flame, but like a forge—not wild, but focused. Zhao took one careful step backward and whispered, “B… what’s happening to him?” Prototype B stood across from him, one hand outstretched as if he could stop what was happening through sheer intent. His voice came out hollow. “He’s being read.” Zhao frowned. “Read?” “Everything the core wrote into him—the parts, the diagrams, the threading—it wasn’t just shaping his body. It was recording. It’s been listening to every decision, every moment. Now that the construct activated the protocol, it’s opening the archive.” Z

Zhao’s breath caught somewhere in his chest. His sword arm stayed frozen, blade held out between them, but even he knew it wouldn’t matter. Not here. Not in this place.Prototype B said nothing. He simply took a single step back—not in fear, but in recognition. His lips parted, but no sound came out. Not a warning. Not a curse. Only a quiet disbelief.Lin Cang stared at the man in front of him, the one who had stepped from the mist and seized the black shard like it belonged there. No. Not like. As if it had been waiting to return to him the entire time.Lin’s voice was quiet, but steady. “You’re not part of the Carver’s records. No chamber, no seal, not even a mention. If you were the first... where have you been?”The man walked closer now, slowly, calmly, as if the mist beneath his feet was a familiar road. “Records are for survivors. And I wasn’t built to survive. I was built to begin.”Zhao gritted his teeth. “Begin what?”The man stopped just within reach of Lin’s outstretched h

Zhao didn’t breathe. He forgot to breathe.Lin’s voice hadn’t changed completely, but something inside it bent—like three people were arguing inside a well and one of them finally rose to the top. His words weren’t shouted, and they weren’t spoken in that slow, controlled rhythm Zhao had grown used to. No, this was casual. Almost amused.Zhao took a cautious step forward, sword still in his grip but lowered slightly. “Lin,” he said carefully. “That thing… that’s not you talking.”Lin blinked once more. The black on the edges of his eyes retreated—just a little, like it was shrinking back beneath the surface but still watching. “It is,” he said. “It’s part of me. That’s what no one told us. These forms, these blueprints, these ‘gifts’—they don’t just add tools. They leave shadows behind.”Prototype B spoke quickly now, stepping in front of Zhao like he expected Lin to snap forward any moment. “You need to isolate it. If you give it context, it’ll spread deeper. Don’t think in full sent

Zhao didn’t step back, but he wanted to. Every instinct in him screamed to leave—to pull Lin by the arm and run straight back down the mirror-path, break through the diagram, and seal the entrance shut behind them. He couldn’t see what was cracking through the far wall, but he could feel it. And what he felt wasn’t power. It wasn’t hatred.It was hunger.Lin stayed still, eyes locked on the version of himself across the room. That other Lin—the one who walked with too much ease, who stood like memory itself couldn’t weigh him down—didn’t show even a flicker of fear. He looked at the crack forming in the wall, then back at Lin, and sighed quietly.> “I tried to warn you,” he said. “I left signals. Shadows. Echoes in the blueprint.”Zhao stepped between them again, his hand on the hilt of his blade. “Start talking. Right now. Or I swear I’ll cut off the smug parts first.”The second Lin didn’t blink. “It won’t help.”B stood a few paces back, scanning the shifting diagram floor, his han