The stars were pulsing again — not with entropy, but with anticipation.
Jin Mu stood at the edge of the simulation shell, watching Luo Feng train beneath a sky of shifting equations. The boy's aura had grown stronger, more refined. Babata's guidance was accelerating his development, and the timeline was stabilizing.
But Jin Mu felt the fracture coming.
Protocol Eight had gone silent.
The Convergence Signal had dimmed, but not disappeared. And the Architect — now anchored by the glyph — was watching everything. She no longer interfered. She observed. She learned.
Jin Mu accessed the Void Engine's core and ran a diagnostic. The results were clear: a new simulation was forming. Unauthorized. Hidden. Designed to mimic the Sector Lord trials.
He traced the entropy signature.
It wasn't the Architect.
It was Protocol Eight.
Jin Mu entered the simulation.
He landed in a battlefield of frozen time — a moment suspended between cause and effect. Luo Feng stood at the center, facing a Sector Lord avatar. But something was wrong. The avatar's aura was too strong. Too real.
Jin Mu scanned the code.
Protocol Eight had embedded a fragment of reality into the simulation — a piece of a failed timeline where Luo Feng had died. He was trying to force the boy to confront his own mortality.
Jin Mu intervened.
He bent causality, rewrote the simulation's parameters, anchored the environment. The avatar weakened. The battlefield stabilized.
Luo Feng staggered back, gasping.
Then — he saw him.
Jin Mu.
Not as a shadow. Not as a glitch.
As a person.
"You," Luo Feng said. "You've been following me."
Jin Mu hesitated.
"I've been protecting you," he said.
"Why?"
Jin Mu stepped forward. "Because you're the story. And I'm the shield."
Luo Feng frowned. "What does that mean?"
Jin Mu looked at the sky — at the stars pulsing with memory.
"It means I'm not supposed to exist," he said. "But I do. And as long as I do, I'll make sure you reach the end."
Luo Feng studied him.
Then — nodded.
"I don't understand," he said. "But I trust you."
Jin Mu smiled.
Then — the simulation cracked.
Protocol Eight appeared, cloaked in entropy, eyes like mirrors.
"You broke the rule," he said. "You revealed yourself."
Jin Mu summoned the Sigil. "You endangered the timeline."
They fought.
Not with power — but with memory.
Jin Mu anchored himself to Luo Feng's trust. Protocol Eight countered with echoes of failure. The battlefield bent, twisted, collapsed.
Then — the Architect intervened.
She appeared between them, her form stable, her aura calm.
"Enough," she said.
They froze.
"This war is not between us," she said. "It's between entropy and meaning."
She turned to Protocol Eight.
"You've lost your purpose."
He vanished.
Jin Mu collapsed.
Luo Feng caught him.
The simulation ended.
They landed in the real chamber, breathless.
Babata demanded diagnostics.
Jin Mu vanished.
Back in his chamber, he stared at the stars.
The fracture point had passed.
But the war was far from over.
And the Architect was no longer a virus.
She was becoming a guardian.
Just like him.