The city had begun to breathe differently.
Sea felt it the moment he stepped out of the apartment: the wind was colder than the season allowed, and the familiar early-morning haze over District Twelve had thinned into an unnatural clarity, as if someone had scrubbed the sky too clean. Buildings stood sharper, outlines cut like blades. Even distant traffic noises rang with a metallic edge he hadn’t noticed before.
Or perhaps it wasn’t the city that had changed.
Perhaps it was him.
His memory had been stuttering more frequently over the past few days—small gaps at first, now expanding into noticeable fractures. Today, he had woken up certain he had heard Li humming in the kitchen, the melody so vivid he could have sworn he saw her silhouette behind the frosted glass. When he opened the door, the room was empty. The kettle was cold. The chair untouched.
He almost called out to her anyway.
He almost believed she would answer.
Sea shoved his hands into his pockets and walked toward the research wing. The Administrator’s residue—the whispering data that had latched onto him ever since the collapse in the Spine—still pulsed faintly under his skin like a foreign heartbeat. He could hide it from the scanners for now, but he knew that was temporary. Everything about his condition had “temporary” written on it.
As he approached the tram station, his wristband vibrated: three short pulses.
A message from Xun.
[Found something. You need to see this. R-Block, Sublevel 3. Bring no one.]
Sea hesitated. R-Block wasn’t a restricted zone, but Sublevel 3 was a graveyard of abandoned research, sealed after the “Incident of Nine.” If Xun wanted to meet him there, it meant whatever she found was dangerous—dangerous enough not to transmit through the network.
He boarded the empty tram. As it hummed to life, the windows reflected his face back at him. A brief flicker—just a glitch—distorted his features for a fraction of a second.
Sea froze.
The eyes staring back at him weren’t exactly his.
They were too steady.
Too knowing.
And for a heartbeat, they held a faint silver glow.
He blinked, and the reflection corrected itself.
He exhaled slowly.
“Not now… don’t do this now.”
The tram slid into the subterranean passage.
Darkness devoured the windows.
R-Block always smelled faintly of ozone, a scent preserved from its years of experimentation with electromagnetic memory preservation. The hallway lights buzzed overhead as Sea descended the stairs toward Sublevel 3. Dust coated the railings. No one had been here in years.
He reached the sealed metal door.
Xun was already there—back against the wall, arms crossed, her tablet clutched so tightly her knuckles had gone pale.
“You look like you haven’t slept,” Sea said quietly.
“I haven’t,” she answered. “Sea… you need to prepare yourself before you see this.”
His stomach tightened.
“What did you find?”
Instead of answering, she unlocked the door.
A cold mechanical hiss escaped as metal slid apart.
The lights flickered on, one by one, revealing a long corridor lined with shattered containment chambers. Some had collapsed inward, glass melted; others bore deep claw-like gouges, as if something had tried to tear its way out.
Sea swallowed.
“This place was supposed to be archived after the Incident. Everything here should’ve been wiped.”
Xun’s voice was low.
“That’s what they told us. But Sea—there’s one file left. And it has your name on it.”
She tapped her tablet.
A projection bloomed into the air: a translucent blue window flickering with corrupted data.
FILE 01-Ψ — PROJECT VESSEL
SUBJECT: SEA ZHEN
STATUS: ACTIVE (UNSTABLE)
AUTHORIZATION: LEVEL UNKNOWN
Sea felt the air puncture from his lungs.
“I never signed up for any project,” he whispered.
“You were four,” Xun said. “And according to this… you were chosen.”
Sea stared at the data like it was glowing poison.
Lines of incomplete logs scrolled upward—
fragments of medical notes, neural scans, stress tests, emergency protocols.
Then one fragment stabilized long enough to read:
—Subject exhibits compatibility ratio 92.7%. Highest recorded. Keep him unaware until completion. If consciousness fractures prematurely, initiate memory scaffolding—
The rest dissolved into static.
Sea’s hands trembled.
He forced himself to breathe.
“Xun… what is this project? Why would they—”
Xun didn’t answer. She simply swiped to the next recovered fragment.
A surveillance still frame.
A small child sleeping in a glass containment pod.
Electrodes connected to his temples.
A faint silver shimmer under the skin.
Sea’s voice cracked.
“That’s… me.”
Xun swallowed hard.
“There’s more.”
She opened the final fragment.
A video.
The footage trembled with corruption, but one part remained clear: a woman leaning over the child—her hand pressed gently against the glass.
Her face, though partially blurred, was unmistakable.
Li.
Sea stumbled backward, nearly losing his balance.
“Xun—No. That’s impossible. Li didn’t even work for the Institute. She wasn’t—she couldn’t—”
“Sea.” Xun’s voice softened in a way that terrified him.
“Are you completely sure you remember Li correctly?”
He stared at her, breath shuddering.
A moment ago, he would’ve said yes without hesitation.
Now…
now something in his memory shifted.
He remembered Li laughing in the kitchen.
Li walking beside him on the river bridge.
Li holding a cheap umbrella over both of them in the rain.
But when he tried to recall her face in detail—
to picture her eyes, her expression, the exact shape of her smile—
His mind snagged.
Like a file missing critical data.
Sea staggered forward and braced himself against the wall.
“No. No, I remember her. I remember everything. She—she was real.”
Xun didn’t speak.
She didn’t need to.
Sea felt the weight of her silence like a blade.
He forced himself upright.
His pulse throbbed in his ears.
“Where’s the rest of the footage? There must be more. There must—”
“There isn’t,” Xun whispered. “This is all that survived. But Sea… whatever this project was, Li was part of it. And you—”
Her voice quavered.
“Sea, you were the core.”
The lights above them flickered violently.
Sea closed his eyes.
For an instant—
he smelled her perfume.
He heard her laugh.
He felt her fingers brush his hair aside the way she used to before leaning down to kiss his forehead.
But when he opened his eyes—
No one stood there.
Only darkness creeping at the edges of the corridor, deeper than it should have been.
A sudden metallic crack shattered the silence.
Sea and Xun whirled toward the end of the corridor.
One of the melted containment pods jerked—
not from the building settling, not from an electrical malfunction—
But from something inside it.
Something that moved.
A slow scraping echoed through the chamber, like metal dragged against glass. Then a second sound: a whispering vibration Sea had heard only once before.
In the Spine.
When the Administrator died.
Xun grabbed his arm.
“Sea… we need to go. Now.”
But Sea didn’t move.
Because the whisper was speaking.
Not in words.
In memory.
His memory.
Images burst behind his eyes: Li smiling; a child trapped in a glass pod; silver light pulsing beneath his skin; the Administrator’s final expression before collapsing into digital dust.
The whisper grew clearer, threading through him.
—Subject identified…
Compatibility resonance stabilizing…
Come back, Vessel…
Sea’s heart slammed against his ribs.
Xun pulled him harder.
“Sea! Don’t listen! We have to move!”
The pod at the end of the corridor convulsed with a sickening crack.
Something inside pressed against the glass—
the outline vaguely human, but wrong, distorted, incomplete.
Sea’s breath hitched.
He had seen this shape before.
In his nightmares.
In the flashes between memory gaps.
In the reflection on the tram window.
The pod split open.
Cold air rushed out, sharp enough to sting his skin.
The thing inside stepped forward.
It had his face.
Or rather—
the face he would have,
if all the fractured pieces of him were stitched together into something that wasn’t meant to exist.
Its eyes glowed with the same faint silver flicker he had seen earlier.
“Sea…” Xun whispered, voice cracking.
“What is that?”
Sea stared at the creature.
The words escaped him before he could stop them.
“…the unfinished version.”
The creature tilted its head, mirroring Sea’s movement in a delayed, unnatural rhythm.
—Vessel located…
The whisper echoed inside Sea’s skull.
—Integration required…
Sea’s pulse pounded wildly.
Xun stepped in front of him.
“No. He’s not going anywhere with you.”
The creature didn’t break eye contact with Sea.
It didn’t acknowledge Xun at all.
It lifted its hand.
Silver light pooled in its palm.
Sea felt an identical glow ignite beneath his own skin in response.
Pain seared through him—raw, electric, invasive.
He staggered.
Xun caught him, shouting his name.
The creature took another step forward.
Sea tasted metal in his mouth.
The whisper surged:
—Return.
Complete the Vessel.
The memory you lost…
awaits.
Sea forced air into his lungs and choked out:
“I’m not yours.”
The corridor lights exploded.
And the world plunged into white.
ns216.73.216.33da2
and then Add to home screen.