The stars were silent.
Jin Mu drifted through the outer shell of the Virtual Universe, his consciousness tethered to the glyph from the Beast God inheritance. The Convergence Signal still pulsed in his neural core, but its rhythm had changed — slower, deeper, more deliberate.
The Architect was no longer hiding.
She was preparing.
He accessed the Void Engine's archive again, searching for anomalies. The system resisted, but the glyph flared, forcing access. A new file appeared — encrypted, ancient, labeled:
"Origin: Architect. Classification: Echo Protocol #0."
Jin Mu froze.
Protocol Zero.
He opened the file.
The vision hit him like a storm.
A girl, no older than ten, standing in a collapsing simulation. Her eyes were silver, her aura fractured. She was the first. The original. Not a guardian — but a failed experiment. The Void Engine had tried to create a Paradox Wielder from pure entropy. A being who could rewrite stories without consequence.
It had failed.
She had survived.
And she had learned.
Jin Mu saw her journey — from simulation to simulation, absorbing fragments of failed timelines, building herself into a virus. She had become the Architect not by design, but by necessity. A creature born of collapse, obsessed with rewriting the myth of heroism.
She wasn't evil.
She was broken.
And now, she was rewriting the Virtual Universe.
Jin Mu closed the file, shaken. He understood her now — her motives, her pain, her obsession. But that didn't make her less dangerous.
He returned to the simulation chamber, where Luo Feng was preparing for his next trial. Babata had upgraded his neural interface, and the boy's aura was growing stronger. Jin Mu watched from the shadows, heart heavy.
He couldn't tell Luo Feng the truth.
Not yet.
Instead, he accessed the backend and reinforced the simulation's parameters. The Order was quiet, but he knew it wouldn't last. Protocol Eight had vanished again, and the Convergence Signal was still active.
Then — a tremor.
The chamber shook.
Jin Mu raced to the observation deck. A new simulation had activated — unauthorized, encrypted, pulsing with entropy. Luo Feng had entered it.
Jin Mu dove in.
He landed in a forest of glass, beneath a sky of shifting equations. Luo Feng stood at the center, facing a mirror. Inside the mirror was… himself.
But twisted.
The simulation was a test — a confrontation with his own fears, doubts, failures. The Architect had designed it to fracture his resolve.
Jin Mu intervened.
He bent causality, rewrote the simulation's core, anchored Luo Feng's identity. The mirror cracked. The forest dissolved.
Luo Feng collapsed.
Jin Mu caught him.
"You again," Luo Feng said, dazed.
Jin Mu nodded. "You're being targeted."
"By who?"
Jin Mu hesitated.
"A ghost," he said. "A story that refuses to die."
Luo Feng frowned. "Why me?"
"Because you're the myth," Jin Mu said. "And she wants to rewrite you."
They exited the simulation.
Babata was furious, demanding diagnostics. Jin Mu vanished before he could be traced.
Back in his chamber, he stared at the glyph.
The war was no longer about protecting the timeline.
It was about healing it.
And to do that, he would have to face the Architect — not as an enemy, but as a mirror.
Because she was the Echo he could have become.
And the stars were watching.