The student council only resumed operations once everything had returned to normal.
No abnormalities were reported.
There was no collective shutdown.
Even the 'aftershocks' of the misjudged clean-up had vanished without a trace.
The world was as stable as a computer that had just been rebooted.
That's why they began to feel uneasy.
The meeting room lights were dim.
There were several documents on the table, few in number, but they had been reviewed repeatedly.
'The anomaly index has dropped.'
'Campus logical consistency has returned to above the baseline.'
The speaker paused.
'But the source hasn't disappeared.'
Silence filled the air.
The person sitting in the innermost seat tapped the table.
'What about the confirmation criteria?'
After a moment's hesitation, someone answered:
'Recording behaviour ceases.'
'Active intervention is interrupted.'
'But—'
He turned to the last page.
'The anomalous connection remains.'
'Like a severed signal line.'
'But the other end is still connected.'
The person by the window said softly, 'Mio?'
No one immediately denied it.
That name no longer triggered anomalies.
That in itself was a problem.
'She's muted.'
Her behaviour has completely returned to normal.'
The person standing there slowly shook their head.
'Not enough.'
He pointed to an almost invisible thin line on the screen.
The line was almost invisible.
'The real source isn't "saying".'
It's still being pointed at."
Someone is using her to locate something else."
There was a noticeable pause in the conference room for the first time.
"Impossible."
'The target has been cleansed.'
'What was cleansed was the substitute.'
'Not the core.'
The person looked up, his tone soft yet certain.
'The world is still reserving redundancy for a "non-existent object".'
"What does that mean?" Someone asked.
He didn't answer immediately.
Instead, he opened another file.
On the cover was only one line:
Reboot Log: 7th.
'This time, the source wasn't exposed directly.'
'But the world is taking a detour.'
'What does that mean?'
The person by the window smiled.
'It means it hasn't given up.'
After a brief silence, someone whispered,
'Should we just deal with her?'
The light flickered as soon as the words were spoken.
This wasn't a malfunction.
It was just a system refresh.
The person standing up closed the file.
'No.'
'She's a stabiliser now.'
Touching her will cause the world to shift again.'
He paused, then added:
'And she's already paying the price.'
Everyone understood what that meant.
Forget. Blank. Self-consumption.
This is the cleanest way to cleanse.
'So what should we do next?' He glanced up at the almost invisible line on the screen.
'Confirm the other end.'
'If "he" still exists—'
His tone turned cold for the first time.
'Then, at the next reboot,
The target must be more precise.'
The meeting ended.
The lights were switched off.
Students walked through the corridor, laughing softly.
Everything on campus seemed normal.
But in the deepest recesses of the system's markers,
a hidden status quietly refreshed.
Core Connection: Still valid.
The world had been confirmed.
The true source —
— is still alive.
Li knew he didn't exist.
This wasn't something he had been told; it was something he knew.
It was something he knew.
He stood in a nameless corridor.
There were no lights and no darkness.
It was like an uncoloured space.
He looked down at his hands.
The outline was still there, but the weight had gone.
He tried to walk forward.
but there was no sound of footsteps.
However, the act of 'moving forward' was real.
The world was still responding to him.
This made him want to laugh.
He hadn't seen anyone in a long time.
and he hadn't heard his own name for an even longer time.
To be precise,
That name no longer belonged to any language.
But Li remembered.
He remembered someone calling him.
He remembered the tone.
He remembered the pauses.
That was a part of the world that could not be erased.
He looked up.
The space in front of him trembled slightly.
It was like some kind of background scan.
[Anomaly being confirmed.]
There was not a sound,
But he had a direct understanding pressed into his mind. Li stopped.
He didn't dodge.
He had already been 'detoured'.
He reached out.
Not to touch,
but to align.
The next moment, the structure of the world unfolded before him.
like a blueprint that had been folded and unfolded repeatedly.
He saw the markings.
He saw 'error',
He saw 'cleansing',
and he saw that name—
Mio.
It wasn't just a label,
but an anchor point.
For the first time, Li's breathing became erratic.
Not because of danger,
but because—
Someone was still pointing at him.
even though she was no longer speaking.
Even though she was being slowly smoothed out.
The world had left a mark on her.
The other end of that line was connected to him.
[Core Connection Still Valid]
The moment this status appeared,
Li smiled,
not with joy,
, but with confirmation.
'I see,' he said softly.
The world didn't respond.
But the structure tightened slightly.
As if in defence.
Li didn't attack.
He simply did one very simple thing.
He acknowledged his existence.
Not by giving him a name.
Not through records,
But through refusing to be replaced.
At that moment, the world made a tiny mistake.
Not a logical break.
Not a temporal misalignment,
But redundancy that could not be recovered.
Li saw countless possible paths generated and then negated.
The system was searching for a 'more reasonable object'.
But it failed.
This was because Li wasn't within the realm of 'reasonableness'.
He was—
something that continued to respond even after being deleted.
'You're looking in the wrong direction,'
Li told the world.
This wasn't a provocation.
More like a reminder.
'She's not the source.'
Space began to tremble.
It wasn't collapsing,
but a computational overload.
Li took a step forward.
This small step,
in the real world,
corresponds to—
Mio suddenly looked up in the classroom.
Her heart skipped a beat.
She didn't know why.
But in that instant—
— she received a response.
Li stopped.
He knew it wasn't enough.
The world had acknowledged his existence.
But it wasn't ready to face him yet.
It's OK.
He could wait.
Just like he had waited for the restarts before.
Just like those restarts.
In the deepest part of space,
a state that had never appeared before was quietly recorded.
Abnormal object: Refuses to disappear.
For the first time, the world did not immediately correct itself.
The world didn't react immediately.
This in itself was a reaction.
In the first 24 hours after the anomaly was confirmed, everything seemed normal.
Classes ended on time and the bells rang precisely.
The weather forecast was unbelievably accurate.
Even the weather forecast was unbelievably accurate.
The student council didn't show up.
The bulletin board wasn't updated.
Even the system notifications remained silent.
It was as if the world was saying:
'I heard you, but I'm not in a hurry.'
However, Mio sensed it.
This wasn't intuition.
It was rhythm.
She found that time began to flow smoothly.
without any gaps.
The lunch break, from 12:30 to 13:10, was precise, as if sliced off.
Teachers didn't make any mistakes in their lectures.
Students were no longer interrupted.
The feeling of 'a leaky reality' disappeared.
This wasn't a repair.
This was solidification.
That evening, the student council held an unrecorded meeting.
There were no files or records.
No title.
Only a few instructions were written directly into the system.
'Consolidate abnormal paths.'
Reduce redundancy tolerance.
Pre-deploy and restart prerequisites.
Someone asked:
'The source has been identified. Why not locate it directly?'
The answer was brief:
'Because it refuses to disappear.'
The meeting room fell silent.
They all understood what this meant.
Previous anomalies were just deviations.
Noise.
Objects that could be overwritten or replaced.
But this time, the world was facing an entity that wouldn't negotiate.
'Then let it have no loops.'
The person by the window said.
'Cut off all connections.'
The screen lit up.
Mio's name appeared.
The status bar was clean.
Behaviour: Stable.
Logs: Interrupted.
Risk level: Low.
"Where is she?"
'She's a line, not a point.'
'A line can be buried.'
A new instruction slips into the system.
Reduce memory fidelity.
Weaken emotional anchoring.
Tighten the scope of personal causality.
This isn't cleansing.
This is—
preprocessing.
It makes a person
'unimportant' before restarting.
Meanwhile, some minor adjustments begin to appear on campus.
Not deletion, but replacement.
Replacement.
A streetlamp appears on the path that Mio usually walks along.
An event is scheduled to take place at her usual spot.
The time of her most familiar teacher's class is changed.
The world is quietly reducing her contact with the 'abnormal path'.
This makes her safer.
And further away.
At the bottom layer, another mechanism begins to operate.
It's not targeting Mio,
but rather—
the object that refuses to disappear.
The system starts generating 'alternative existences'.
These have similar outlines and behavioural patterns, as well as a plausible causal origin.
One failure, two failures,
The alternative cannot bear that line.
Because that line
is not constituted by 'existence'.
but by—
Mio woke up very early.
Not because of the alarm clock.
but because he felt he had slept enough.
It was still dark outside; a greyish-blue hue filled the sky.
The world was eerily quiet.
She sat up; her initial reaction was not confusion,
but confirmation.
She reached for the bedside table.
Her phone and her keys were there.
The keys were there, too.
Everything was where it should be.
Too tidy.
So tidy that it didn't feel real.
She suddenly realised something:
The feeling of being gently pressed down last night had gone.
Not removed,
More like ineffective.
Mio got out of bed and touched the floor with her feet.
In that instant, she could clearly feel the weight of the floor.
Not the weight of her body.
But a sense of judgement.
She walked to the mirror.
She looked normal.
Her complexion was even better than a few days ago.
But her eyes were too fixed.
She was so composed; not someone who had been weakened.
She whispered, 'Everything's normal today.'
But there was no response.
The world didn't speak for her.
This made her heart race.
She suddenly understood.
The so-called 'preprocessing' was
tightening her focus.
de-noising her emotions.
It was cutting away layers of unnecessary connections.
But the problem was that...
When everything was cut down to the core,
the core became even more apparent.
She didn't touch her notebook again.
Nor did she look for the scraps of paper.
She changed her approach.
She brushed her teeth at the sink, staring at the running water.
The rhythm of the water was breathtakingly perfect.
Too perfect.
She counted softly.
One, two,
Two.
Three.
Just before she reached four, she stopped.
Not forgetting.
But she refused to continue.
At that moment, the sound of the water faltered slightly.
Just a moment.
Mio smiled.
Not with joy,
, but with certainty.
She left for school.
There was indeed an extra streetlight.
The route had been changed.
The world was guiding her down a smoother path.
She followed it.
She didn't resist.
She didn't deviate.
But at every point where 'it should happen naturally',
she was half a step ahead.
Before the teacher spoke, she knew what he was going to say.
Before her classmates turned their heads, she knew where they were going to look.
This wasn't precognition.
It was as if the world had slowed down before her eyes.
At noon, she was sitting in her seat.
The seat that had once been 'empty' was now occupied by a new student.
Everything made sense.
But Mio suddenly realised something:
She hadn't 'tried to remember' anything in a long time.
The memory hadn't been severed;
Just the redundant parts had been deleted.
What remained were the irreplaceable parts.
The bell rang.
The whole class stood up.
Mio was a second slower.
In that one second, she heard—
not a sound,
an echo.
Very far away,
— but with a clear direction.
It was as if someone was on the other side of the world,
gently tapping a wall.
Mio's breath caught in her throat.
They didn't call out her name.
She didn't record it.
She simply aligned herself mentally with that tap.
The world didn't change immediately.
It needed time to process.
And, in that instant, Mio knew clearly for the first time:
She hadn't been weakened.
She was—
compressed.
Compressed enough to withstand a reboot.
She looked down at her hands.
She lightly traced a line on her palm with her fingertip.
very shallow.
Not a word.
Not a mark.
Just a reminder. Being awake is enough.