The moment Luo Feng touched the meteorite, the world changed.
Jin Mu felt it ripple through the timeline like a thunderclap. The boy's spiritual force awakened, Babata's consciousness surged, and the Virtual Universe opened its gates. Jin Mu watched from afar, cloaked in probability, as Luo Feng's aura flared for the first time — raw, unstable, but unmistakably brilliant.
It had begun.
Jin Mu activated his own interface. The data shard Echo had given him pulsed with encrypted coordinates. He decrypted them slowly, carefully, feeding the information into his neural core. The Virtual Universe shimmered into view — a realm of infinite simulations, layered dimensions, and digital gods.
But this time, it felt… different.
He entered through a backdoor — a forgotten protocol buried in the Dojo's archives. The moment he stepped in, he knew something was wrong.
The sky was too quiet.
The avatars too still.
The system too clean.
He walked through the simulated city, watching trainees spar, study, and explore. But beneath the surface, he saw it — the Order's fingerprints. Probability distortions. Causality loops. Echoes of rewritten code.
They were here.
He followed the coordinates deeper into the system, bypassing firewalls and quantum locks. The architecture shifted around him — skyscrapers became temples, streets became rivers of light. He was entering the core.
And then he saw it.
A temple of paradox.
Floating in a void of collapsed simulations, the structure pulsed with forbidden code. Symbols danced across its surface — fractals of entropy, equations of erasure. It was the Order's anchor point.
He approached carefully.
Inside, the air was thick with static. Data ghosts flickered in and out — failed timelines, corrupted avatars, broken memories. And at the center, a figure waited.
Not cloaked.
Not hidden.
A child.
She looked no older than ten, with silver hair and eyes like glass. She sat cross-legged, surrounded by floating shards of reality.
"You're late," she said.
Jin Mu hesitated. "Who are you?"
"I'm the Architect," she replied. "I build the stories the Order wants."
He stepped closer. "Why a child?"
She smiled. "Because innocence is the best disguise."
Jin Mu summoned the Sigil. The temple trembled.
"You're rewriting Luo Feng's path," he said.
She nodded. "Not yet. But soon. When he enters the Sector Lord trials, we'll shift the outcome. He'll fail. The Beast God inheritance will be lost. Humanity will fracture."
Jin Mu's heart pounded. "Why?"
"Because the universe is tired of heroes," she whispered. "It wants entropy."
He attacked.
Reality bent. The temple screamed. Shards of failed timelines flew like daggers. Jin Mu dodged, countered, rewrote. The Architect laughed, her form flickering between child and shadow.
"You can't win," she said. "You're just a glitch."
He reached the core — a glowing orb of paradox code. He embedded a counter-sigil, anchoring the timeline to Luo Feng's original path. The orb pulsed, resisted, then accepted.
The temple collapsed.
The Architect vanished.
And Jin Mu fell.
He landed in the Virtual Universe's outer shell, gasping. His body was intact, but his presence was flickering. The Order had marked him. He was now a variable — unstable, dangerous, hunted.
But the timeline was safe.
For now.
He watched as Luo Feng entered the Virtual Universe officially, guided by Babata, unaware of the war raging beneath the surface.
Jin Mu smiled.
The stars were aligning.
But the final battle was still far ahead.
And the Order was just getting started.