The stars were whispering again.
Jin Mu sat alone in the meditation chamber, surrounded by silence. The glyph from the Beast God inheritance pulsed faintly in his palm, but his focus was elsewhere. The memory bleed had worsened. He saw flashes of lives he hadn't lived — battles he hadn't fought, choices he hadn't made.
And one name kept surfacing.
"Zhen Mu."
He ran the name through the Virtual Universe's archives. Nothing. No records. No simulations. No echoes.
But the Void Engine responded.
A hidden protocol activated — buried deep in his neural core. A message appeared, encrypted in paradox code.
"Zhen Mu: Echo Protocol #1. Status: Erased. Reason: Self-awareness breach."
Jin Mu's breath caught.
He wasn't the seventh reincarnation.
He was the first.
The others had come after — copies, simulations, attempts to replicate what the Void Engine had failed to contain. He was the original. The prototype. The anomaly.
And he had been erased.
But something had brought him back.
He accessed the protocol's memory shard. It showed a vision — a moment frozen in time. A battle on a dying world. Luo Feng, wounded, surrounded. Zhen Mu — himself — standing between the boy and a collapsing star.
He had sacrificed himself.
And the Void Engine had rebooted the timeline.
Jin Mu staggered back, overwhelmed. His existence wasn't just a mistake. It was a rebellion. A refusal to let the story die.
He looked at the glyph again.
It pulsed brighter.
Then — a tremor.
The Virtual Universe shook.
Jin Mu raced to the observation deck. Luo Feng was in the central arena, sparring with a Sector Lord avatar. But something was wrong. The simulation was unstable. The avatar was adapting too quickly. The environment was shifting.
The Order was testing him.
Jin Mu activated a stealth protocol and entered the arena's backend. He traced the entropy signature — not the Architect's. Someone else. A new agent.
He found them in the code — a figure cloaked in red, manipulating the simulation's parameters. Jin Mu confronted them.
"You're late," the agent said. "The story is already bending."
Jin Mu summoned the Sigil. "Not while I'm here."
They fought.
The arena flickered. Luo Feng continued sparring, unaware of the war beneath the surface. Jin Mu bent probability, rewrote causality, anchored the simulation. The agent countered with entropy spikes, memory fractures, and timeline loops.
But Jin Mu was stronger now.
He forced the agent out, sealed the backend, and stabilized the simulation.
Luo Feng landed the final blow on the avatar and collapsed, victorious.
Babata cheered.
Jin Mu watched from the shadows.
But the agent had left a message.
"You're not the only Echo anymore."
Jin Mu returned to his chamber, heart pounding. He accessed the Void Engine's core again. A new protocol had appeared.
"Echo Protocol #8: Activated."
Someone else had been reborn.
Another Paradox Wielder.
And this time, they might not be on his side.