The Light That Ate Everything
Ne Job had been swallowed by light before.
Usually it meant something bad—explosions, divine malfunctions, performance reviews conducted via blast radius.
But this light—
Was quiet.
Cold.
Deep.
It wrapped around him like a cocoon made of living equations, fractal spirals of code drifting across the void. The chronal seed hovered overhead, no longer a molten cheese sphere but a star-of-text—every ray a stream of forgotten script.
"ANCHOR," the Seed intoned.
"PREPARE FOR MEMORY REINTEGRATION."
Ne Job tried to lift his arms.
He had no arms.
He tried to breathe.
He had no lungs.
He tried to scream.
He had no voice.
He existed only as awareness—weightless, suspended in a void made of lost years.
Yue's hand was the last physical thing he remembered touching.
Yue's voice the last anchor he had.
He held onto that memory with everything he had left.
---
Fragment One: The Door
A door materialized before him.
Wooden. Old. Familiar.
Ne Job felt a jolt—something primal, instinctual—because this wasn't a Bureau door, or a mortal door, or a divine door.
This was his door.
The one from his earliest missing memory.
The one he saw in nightmares he didn't tell Yue about.
A small whisper curled through the void—his own voice, age seven, trembling:
"Don't open it."
The door opened on its own.
Light poured through.
And he was no longer floating in void—
He was standing in a memory.
A memory he didn't know he had.
---
A Place That Shouldn't Exist
A child sat on the floor.
A boy.
Black hair. White robes too big for him. A small paper badge pinned crookedly to his chest:
INTERN TRAINEE — PROVISIONAL
Ne Job felt the bottom drop out of his soul.
"That's… me."
"I am you," the child said without turning. "The version they erased."
Ne Job approached cautiously. The floor wasn't marble. It wasn't cloud. It was… parchment—thousands of stacked pages, forming a room.
Scripts crawled across the walls like living vines.
This place was—
"An early Codifier vault," Ne Job whispered. "A place that doesn't exist anymore."
The child nodded.
"You lived here," Child Ne Job said. "Before you became the Bureau's intern. Before they put me asleep in your mind."
Ne Job swallowed. "You're the part of me they deleted."
"No," the child corrected gently. "I'm the part they locked away."
---
Fragment Two: The Lesson
A tall shadow stepped into the memory.
Robed.
Faceless.
A Codifier.
One of the old ones.
Ne Job felt his whole body stiffen with instinctive terror even though he currently did not have a body.
The Codifier gestured.
The parchment room rearranged itself into a classroom.
Child Ne Job sat obediently at a miniature desk. Adult Ne Job stood helplessly beside him.
The Codifier's voice was not a voice.
It was a decree.
A verdict.
"THE CHILD IS STABLE. CHAOS INDEX: MODERATE. PROCEED WITH TRAINING."
Ne Job felt like his heart had been replaced with a block of ice.
"I was trained," he whispered. "Since childhood. As an… Anchor?"
The child nodded.
"You were always meant to hold the cracks together. To be the pivot. The fulcrum."
"But I'm just an intern," Ne Job said weakly.
The child smiled sadly.
"That was the point."
Another Codifier entered. This one carried a scroll that hummed with temporal weight.
"INITIATE PROTOCOL: PARTIAL ANCHOR SUPPRESSION."
Ne Job blinked rapidly. "Wait—suppression? They suppressed me?"
And the child—
His younger self—
Looked down.
"After the first incident."
Ne Job froze.
"What incident?"
The room darkened.
Everything shook.
And a new memory unfolded like a blade.
---
Fragment Three: The Incident
Screams.
Not mortal screams.
Divine screams.
The parchment room tore open, revealing a rip in reality—like someone sliced open the universe with a cosmic box cutter.
The child was crying. Holding his head. Glowing with chaotic resonance so strong the air shredded.
Codifiers surrounded him, chanting, forming multi-layered seals.
"CONTAIN THE ANCHOR. CHILD IS DESTABILIZING."
"REALITY IS BREACHING—"
"ANCHOR RESONANCE EXCEEDS ACCEPTABLE FREQUENCY—"
Ne Job's stomach twisted.
He knew that feeling.
That chaos swirl.
That pressure.
He still felt it today, whenever things spiraled out of control.
"Yue…" he whispered. "Did Yue ever know?"
"No one alive knows," Child Ne Job whispered. "The Codifiers wiped everything clean. Except the scars."
"But… why did this happen? Why was I losing control?"
The child looked at him.
Eyes full of fear.
And loneliness.
"Because Anchors aren't supposed to be children."
Ne Job's breath caught.
"They forced the role onto me," the child said softly. "Too early. Too fast. And when it overwhelmed me, they erased every memory of it."
The Codifiers' chant intensified.
A seal slammed onto the child's chest.
He shrieked.
The world twisted violently.
Ne Job reached forward instinctively—
And the memory collapsed.
---
The Core Speaks
The void returned. The chronal seed hovered overhead.
"ANCHOR. PROCESSING OF SUPPRESSED MEMORY COMPLETE."
Ne Job trembled.
"I… I was never meant to be an intern."
"CORRECT."
"I wasn't recruited. I was… put here."
"CORRECT."
"And my memory wipe wasn't about chaos accidents or paperwork malfunctions."
"CORRECT."
"So what was it really for?"
The void shook.
Reality trembled.
And the chronal seed responded:
"THEY ERASED YOUR MEMORIES TO HIDE YOU FROM THE ENTITY THAT TRIGGERED YOUR FIRST BREACH."
Ne Job's heart stopped.
"Hide… me?"
The Core pulsed.
"YES. BUT THE ENTITY HAS RETURNED."
A chill ran through him.
"Is that what froze the Bureau?" he whispered.
"NO."
Ne Job's fear deepened.
"…Then what did?"
The chronal seed dimmed.
"THE ENTITY IS APPROACHING."
Ne Job felt the air disappear.
"Approaching… here?"
"YES."
"In what way?"
The void split open around him.
And he heard it.
A sound that pierced through every layer of memory, every fragment of self, every crack in the Bureau:
A knock.
One slow, heavy knock.
On the same wooden door from his childhood vault.
The knock came again.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
Child Ne Job appeared beside him.
Expression pale.
Voice tiny.
"She found us."
The void shattered—
And the chapter ends here.
---
END OF CHAPTER 152 — "Anchor Restoration: Phase One (The Memory That Was Never Meant to Return)"