The corridor twisted like a broken helix, its walls stitched from mismatched stones and flickering memories—some Ren's, some not. With every step, he felt as though he were trespassing not just through a building, but through a mind unraveling. Echoes followed him. Not footsteps. Thoughts. Disjointed, foreign, angry.
"Are you sure this is the way?" Ren asked, glancing behind at Valka.
Valka adjusted the crystalline monocle she'd scavenged from the Reclaimers' archive. "According to this... yes. This place is remembering a part of itself that doesn't belong. That means we're getting close."
"The fragment?" Ren asked.
Valka nodded. "Or what's left of it."
Ren clenched his fists. His veins lit up like molten threads—traces of Soulburn still dormant but waiting. The more he walked through this place, the more the pressure grew behind his eyes. As if someone—or something—was whispering through the cracks of time, directly into his soul.
The corridor ended in a circular chamber that pulsed with a low, droning hum. In its center stood a dais, cracked and overgrown with arcane moss. Suspended above it was a sphere of condensed memory—shimmering and irregular. Not a perfect orb, but a tangled mass of thoughts hardened into form.
"Is that... a Core?" Ren whispered.
"Not just any Core," Valka replied. "That's someone's burned memory. Too corrupted to reintegrate, too valuable to erase."
As they approached, the chamber trembled. The sphere pulsed. Then the air was sliced open by a scream—a child's scream. High-pitched. Terrified.
Ren staggered back. "Did you hear that?"
"I did. And it didn't come from this room."
The Core twisted. From it spilled images: a child running down a hallway lined with broken mirrors. A scientist—eyes hollow, voice shaking—whispering, "We buried it too deep." A room filled with ghostlights. And then a shadow, massive and coiled like a serpent made of void, consuming everything.
Ren fell to his knees. His own memories trembled in response. But this wasn't his memory.
Or was it?
"You shouldn't be here," said a voice, low and artificial.
The chamber rippled. From the walls stepped a figure—half-machine, half-human. Its body was scorched, wires sprouting from its back like ruined wings. Its eyes glowed with sickly amber light.
"An Echoed?" Valka asked, stepping in front of Ren.
"No," Ren said slowly. "It's something worse. It's... part of Project Echoborn."
The figure cocked its head. "I am Experiment 0. I was the first memory they tried to burn."
The air froze. Even Valka seemed shaken.
"You survived the Protocol?" she asked.
"I did not survive," Experiment 0 replied. "I persisted. I am a wound in the system. A memory that cannot be cleansed, and cannot forget."
Ren rose, his arms glowing. "Why are you here?"
"To warn you," it said. "The Memory Core you seek is not a key. It's a lock. Inside it is the reason they started the Project."
"The Project to burn souls," Ren said bitterly.
"No," the figure whispered. "The Project to trap a god."
The silence that followed was heavy enough to crush.
Ren stepped forward. "What god?"
Experiment 0 didn't answer. It reached toward the sphere and touched it.
The chamber exploded in vision.
Ren stood at the center of a long-forgotten lab. He saw men and women in white coats chanting equations as if they were prayers. He saw a boy—just like him—strapped to a chair, screaming as his memories were carved and burned, piece by piece.
He saw a name etched into the wall behind the boy.
CALDER.
Ren's breath caught in his throat.
"I—That's me," he gasped.
"No," the figure said, its voice warping with sadness. "That's the first you."
Then the world collapsed again.
When Ren woke, the chamber was gone. The sphere was gone. Valka sat beside him, her arm bloodied but eyes wide.
"Ren... you were gone for two hours," she said. "You didn't move. You didn't breathe."
Ren sat up slowly. The pain in his chest wasn't physical. It was memory.
"I remembered something I never lived," he whispered.
Valka said nothing. She just placed the salvaged monocle in his hand. It was cracked. But still humming with data.
"What did you see?" she finally asked.
Ren's voice was a whisper. "The origin of my name. Of me."
He looked up. The hallway ahead was darker now. But he walked toward it anyway.