The undercity wasn't on any map. It wasn't a place so much as a contradiction—beneath the city's steel arteries, below even the maintenance tunnels, existed a dark ecosystem of memory trading. Rin had only heard whispers. Ghost-words from fractured minds. Rumors about a market where you didn't buy with money, but with pain. Where names were commodities, and truth was auctioned in silence.
Kuro led him through alleyways that seemed to blink in and out of existence. Whole streets were forgotten mid-step, their signs dissolving in real time. He carried the Echo Log wrapped in cloth, close to his chest, as if it could be stolen by thought alone.
"You're going to hate this," Kuro said.
"What part?" Rin asked.
"All of it."
The entrance was behind a derelict train station, guarded by two men whose eyes flickered like broken film. They didn't speak. They simply stared at the Echo Log—and moved.
Down. Down further than the city should've allowed. The elevator had no buttons. It moved when you remembered where you wanted to go.
When the doors opened, the air hit like static.
It was dark, but not empty. Colorless stalls hummed with psychic heat. Voices murmured—not aloud, but directly into thought. Traders stood behind glass cases, offering slivers of existence: first kisses, betrayals, the sound of a dying mother's last words. Memories floated like smoke in sealed jars.
"Welcome to the Memorium," Kuro said. "Don't touch anything unless you're prepared to forget something else."
Rin moved slowly. Everything here felt heavy with consequence. At one stall, a girl offered her childhood for a memory of what it felt like to fall in love. At another, a hunched old man clutched a memory fragment labeled "My Brother's Face" with bleeding fingers.
"We're not here to trade," Kuro said. "We're here to bait."
He withdrew a crystal shard—the fragment they'd pulled from Rin's resistance, encoded in pain. A memory that couldn't be erased.
They offered it to the market.
Within minutes, whispers changed. Shadows turned. A name began to circulate.
Luma.