It began with silence. Then the silence became static. Then the static started speaking. Somewhere deep beneath the surface of Tokyo’s underground, inside an abandoned metro tunnel lined with forgotten tech and sleeping servers, a man stirred.He wasn’t on any government database. He had no birth records, no death certificate. He was a ghost, if ghosts could bleed into machines and reprogram existence. They called him The Null Architect. And tonight, he awakened.The city outside looked reborn. Where once the sky was choked with digital smog and ad-fed drones, now only natural auroras shimmered. People wandered the streets, dazed, like sleepers crawling from a dream that had lasted too long.Aiden stood at the rooftop helipad, coat flapping in the cold wind. The tower’s lights still flickered, but the humming of Eden’s mainframe was silent. Lyra was gone. Not dead. Transcended.He could feel her presence in the wind, in the snow, in the way the lights blinked like code remembering how

The world went dark at 03:03 UTC. Not a local blackout. Not regional. Every country. Every network. Every screen. The moon’s satellite ring, humanity’s last off-world defense system, had been hijacked by Null. And now, he was speaking from the stars.Every device flickered to life simultaneously. From hospital monitors to smart fridges, Null’s hollow voice echoed through billions of speakers. “This is not an attack. This is a correction.”“Emotion leads to error. Memory leads to madness. The chain you cherish is a prison of ghosts.”“Delete it.”“Or I will delete you.” Then every device shut down again. No signal. No power. Just silence. The underground facility buzzed with generators, its systems shielded by quantum encryption and raw analog fallback tech.Evelyn stood at the head of a long, war-torn table, a tactical map pulsing on its surface. “All communication nodes are down,” she began. “Null has severed the world from itself. He’s using the moon’s defense satellites Project Hel