Kael stood alone beneath a sky stitched together by broken logic.
Clouds moved in geometric patterns. Lightning struck upward. The sun blinked—not flickered, not pulsed—blinked, like something was testing whether it was still needed.
Around him stretched a vast, floating desert—an endless grid of inverted towers, staircases that led nowhere, structures folding in on themselves like architecture born from a glitch.
And it was moving.
Not rotating.
Not drifting.
Rebuilding.
The cube in Kael's hand vibrated again.
Black this time. Faintly warm. The moment he had taken it, the world began to reshape itself around him. As if this wasn't just a simulation—but a reactive organism, adapting to his presence.
And now, it was sick.
He looked to the sky.
The ⊗ symbol still burned there, vast and unmoving.
> "Protocol shift detected."
That wasn't a warning. It was a confession.
The system had lost control of its own rules.
And Kael was the reason.
---
Far away, in a monitoring chamber buried in the deepest layer of the system—a place never seen, never meant to be accessed—something stirred.
Dozens of black screens blinked awake. Code flooded in ancient language. Symbols corrupted.
A voice whispered from within the system's unconscious root:
> "UNBOUND has acquired two fragments."
> "Second Echo passed."
> "Recursion spreading."
And then, static.
The watchers—whatever they once were—stayed silent.
---
Kael began walking across the shifting landscape. Every step changed the path.
Somewhere ahead, a column rose from the ground like a tooth from sand. It pulsed faint blue, its surface covered in interlocking scripts—half circuitry, half ancient language.
It wasn't manmade.
He touched it.
> Tick.
The black cube in his hand vanished—absorbed.
And then—a shockwave rippled across the world.
Not violent.
Viral.
Kael fell to one knee as his mind was hit by raw data:
> — Syla screaming as her memories were forcibly rewritten.
— Subject 09 detonating their own Echo layer.
— A lab. Real, not simulated. Men in white coats arguing over the first Subject who remembered too much.
— A phrase repeated on every failed test log:
"The mind does not forget. It buries."
And then—
His vision cleared.
A new message hovered in front of him. Not from the system. From the world itself:
> "You have triggered a Memory Plague."
"Every step forward will now infect forgotten layers."
"Every layer infected will begin to wake."
Kael staggered back.
> "Good," he muttered. "Let them all wake."
Behind him, something rose from the sand.
A humanoid figure. Hollow. Metallic. Its face blank, but its chest cracked open—revealing a still-beating clock heart. One hand held a fractured mirror. The other a blade made from compressed memory.
The first Echo Plague Guardian.
A new voice echoed around him—not from the system, not from himself.
But from the buried truth.
> "If you spread memory, you must face what was forgotten."
The Guardian moved toward him, silent.
Kael didn't run.
He drew nothing.
Instead, he reached out his bare hand—marked and glowing—and touched the blade.
The Guardian stopped.
The clock in its chest froze.
And for a brief moment, Kael saw a glimpse of the truth: this Guardian was once Subject 02. Syla.
He whispered, "You never made it out, did you?"
No answer.
Only silence.
And then—her form shattered.
Not in violence.
In release.
A blue fragment dropped where she stood.
Kael picked it up.
> Third fragment acquired.
> Tick...
And then, everything changed again.
---
End of Chapter Seven