The forest was too quiet.
Not the kind of quiet where birds rested or wind settled—this silence had weight. Ren felt it press against his chest like static-filled cotton. Every step he and the scouting party took into the twisted treeline made the world flicker slightly, like a video buffering at low bandwidth.
"Is this place even… real?" Lira whispered behind him. She was one of the newer survivors—part seamstress, part medic, and easily the most sensitive to corrupted areas. Her skin had already broken out in faint digital veins, glowing white beneath her gloves.
"No," Ren muttered. "But it remembers being real."
The trees were tall but impossibly thin, rising like black needles into a pale green sky. Their bark shimmered in and out of texture—sometimes mossy, sometimes metallic, sometimes covered in fragments of forgotten code. Symbols drifted across their surfaces like unreadable runes.
Thread Reader pinged softly at Ren's side. The landscape was unstable, marked in red overlays. Distortions in sound, gravity, and time scattered ahead like invisible landmines.
Ren crouched beside a data-scarred stump and let his fingers brush the soil. His interface flared.
> [ZONE MEMORY FOUND]
Timestamp: 1.9.0 Archive
Play Memory? [Y/N]
He hesitated—then accepted.
The forest around them shimmered… then shifted. The trees became fuller. Birds chirped. Sunlight filtered down through unbroken leaves. For a split second, it looked… alive.
A voice played. Distant. Female. Familiar.
> "We shouldn't build here. The logic's too thin. It'll collapse if no one maintains it…"
Then it was gone. The world snapped back. The chirping cut off like someone had pulled a power cord.
"Who was that?" asked Eon, the grizzled mapmaker beside Ren. He gripped his scanner tightly.
Ren stood. His eyes narrowed.
"I think I knew her. From before."
"You mean—before the reset?"
He nodded. "Maybe even before I woke up here."
The forest made no response. But in the far distance, deeper within, a single tree's bark peeled away, revealing a glowing eye-shaped glyph, blinking once.