By: IMERPUS RELUR
---
Kai descended into the shrine's hidden layer.
The stairwell spiraled downward—not built by stone or hand, but by memory.
Each step pulsed softly beneath his foot, glowing with faint, flickering images. Snippets of childhood sketches. A paper dragon that never flew. A friend drawn and forgotten.
He wasn't walking into a basement.
He was descending into himself.
> [Accessing Personal Memory Layer: Partial Lock]
[Echoes Detected: Non-Player Entities Present]
At the bottom stood a sealed door made of blank white canvas, stretched like skin across a wooden frame.
On its surface, something had been torn away.
The girl—still unnamed—stood beside him.
> "This is the last place you visited before you stopped drawing. Before you erased me."
> "I never meant to erase you," he whispered.
> "You didn't. You just stopped remembering."
She handed him a piece of chalk. It was old. It felt familiar.
It felt like truth.
> "Draw the door back open."
---
His hand trembled, but he pressed the chalk to canvas.
A crack. A handle. A doorway in ink.
As the line connected, the door pulsed—opened—and everything rushed into white.
---
When he opened his eyes, he was back in the classroom.
Same desk. Same teacher.
Same unfinished sketchpad open on his lap.
But the drawing wasn't the same.
The shrine was complete now. And a tower stood behind it.
And in the corner of the page—
—a girl's face, staring back at him with those familiar eyes.
> [INKBORN ENTITY: STILL ACTIVE]
[WORLD LINK STABLE]
[WORLD 1: Shrine of Lost Patterns – CONNECTED]
The system had followed him back.
> [NEW DRAWING REQUESTED]
Draw: "Your Next World."
Kai stared at the blank page.
He didn't know why, but his hand began to sketch again.
A nation.
Divided. Unawakened. Waiting to remember what it once was.