The world outside Su Liying's window was silent, asleep under the vast, star-dusted blanket of the night. But inside her room, a universe of forgotten tragedy was about to unfold. Her finger, steady and resolute, hovered over the decrypt command for the file Oracle had sent her: [Genesis.dat].
She clicked it.
The file was not a simple text document. It was a complete, multimedia case file, a digital tombstone for a life that had been lost and another that had been impossibly born.
The first thing she saw was the police report, its text cold, official, and detached. It detailed a "freak micro-Rift incident" in a quiet, suburban park a decade ago. It spoke of the discovery of an eight-year-old boy, Qin Mo, found with "no vital signs." The report mentioned a strange, shadowy, organic residue on the ground around him that had dissipated before it could be properly analyzed.
Then came the paramedic's bodycam footage. The image was grainy, chaotic, the sound a frantic mixture of shouting and the wail of sirens. But through the chaos, she saw him. A small, still body lying next to a concrete fountain. She heard the desperate, clinical calls of the paramedics. "No pulse!" "No respiration!" "Pupils are fixed and dilated. We're losing him!" She witnessed the moment of his death. A small, insignificant tragedy in a world full of them.
Next, the medical logs from the hospital's emergency room. She saw the official declaration of death, time-stamped by the ER doctor. And then, three minutes and seventeen seconds later, the frantic, confused, almost hysterical notes from a nurse who had screamed that the boy's heart had, impossibly, started beating again. She read the baffled reports from the city's top neurologists, describing the event as a "one-in-a-billion medical anomaly," a "spontaneous Lazarus event."
They had no idea. They had seen a medical miracle. They had missed the cosmic one.
The true weight of the file, the part that made Su Liying's own soul ache with a profound, vicarious trauma, was the psychological evaluation section. After his "recovery," the young Qin Mo had been subjected to months of observation.
She read the psychiatrist's notes, each one a testament to a doctor completely out of his depth. "Patient exhibits extreme post-traumatic dissociation. He is calm, unnervingly so for a child who has just endured such an ordeal. He shows little to no emotional response to any stimuli."
"He speaks of... 'other places'. Not as memories of a dream, but as if he is perceiving them in real-time. He described, with perfect, chilling clarity, the star patterns of a sky that is not our own, the feeling of breathing methane on a world with three suns, the sound of a battle fought with swords of light. It's a form of fantasy so detailed it's almost a psychosis."
"His parents are deeply worried. They say the boy who came back is not the son they lost. The old Qin Mo was cheerful, curious, and loud. This new Qin Mo is a quiet, listless ghost in their home. They love him, but they are also afraid of him."
As an A-Rank Empath, Su Liying didn't just read the words on the page. She felt them. She felt the echoes of the emotions trapped within the decade-old report. She felt the frantic desperation of the paramedics. The stunned disbelief of the doctors. The heartbreaking, soul-crushing grief and fear of Qin Mo's parents as they realized their son had been replaced by a quiet, haunted stranger.
And most of all, she felt the profound, crushing, cosmic loneliness of the eight-year-old boy who had died and been reborn, his small, fragile consciousness suddenly shattered and expanded to encompass the joys and sorrows of 99,999 other lives.
Everything snapped into place. His unnatural calmness wasn't a personality trait; it was a survival mechanism, the only way to keep from going insane under the weight of a thousand simultaneous wars and a million simultaneous heartbreaks. His lack of emotional response wasn't a flaw; it was the inevitable result of a consciousness stretched to the breaking point across a thousand galaxies. His "triple-zero" status hadn't been a curse. It had been a mercy. It was the perfect mask, a shield of mediocrity that had allowed him to hide his shattered, expanded soul from a world that would have feared him, dissected him, and ultimately destroyed him as a monster.
She finished reading. The file closed. The screen went dark.
She was left in the profound silence of her room, but the world would never be the same again. The great mystery of Oracle was solved. But in its place was a truth that was far heavier, far more tragic, and far more profound than she could have ever imagined.
She thought back on all her interactions with him. Her "tests." Her probing questions. Her clumsy attempts to provoke a reaction from him. A wave of profound, burning shame washed over her.
She had been a child, poking a wounded, ancient god with a stick, demanding to know why it didn't cry out in pain.
Her mission, the personal quest that had driven her for months, had just been fundamentally reforged. It was no longer about understanding him for her own intellectual curiosity. It was about protecting him. Not just his physical body from the butchers of the Prometheus Initiative, but protecting his secret. His solitude. The fragile remnants of the human boy, Qin Mo, that still existed somewhere within the vast, silent cosmos of his soul.
She was no longer just his Chief Analyst. She was no longer just his secret partner. She had just become his first and only true Acolyte. The sole keeper of his sacred, painful truth.
The first rays of dawn began to creep through her window, painting the room in soft shades of grey and gold. A new day. Su Liying had not slept. She stood up and walked to her window, looking out over the sleeping city, her gaze directed towards the distant, unremarkable apartment complex where he lived.
She knew that in a few hours, the boy who carried the weight of 99,999 worlds on his shoulders would wake up, put on his mask of mediocrity, and face another day of being a ghost in a world he was silently trying to save.
And she now knew the true, crushing weight of that mask.
Her resolve was no longer just strategic. It was absolute. It was personal. She opened her secure terminal and sent a single, simple message to the user Oracle. A message she knew he would understand.
> Crystalline_Mind: I have read the file. I understand. A short pause, then she typed one final line. A vow. > Crystalline_Mind: My watch begins now.