They kept him awake until he learned how not to be surprised by his own past.
Not by force.
By repetition.
Mizuki's simulations were precise and unceremonious. She would trigger a tiny sensory cue — the smell of old incense, a flicker of fabric in the peripheral screen — and watch the way his mind responded.
At first it was chaos. Thrones and streets folded into one another. He would see a marketplace stall and then a burnt altar; reach for a cup and feel fingers pressing wax into clay.
Mizuki timed the overlays. Yuna held a hand on his shoulder and counted breaths.
Three in. Two hold. Five out.
It became a rhythm.
Slowly, the overlays stopped blowing through him like storms and began arriving like weather reports he could prepare for.
The morning after a late-night session, he woke from a fitful nap to the sound of quiet in the lab.
Mizuki was hunched over a bank of screens. The shard sat behind a pane of glass, unloved and humming.
"You trained late," she said without looking up.
"You called me an experiment," he replied, amused despite the tiredness. "I aim to fulfill your inbox expectations."
She didn't smile. "We're stabilizing the bleed windows," she said. "Your overlays are shorter now. The afterimage fades faster. But they leave more detail in your memory. That's the price."
He touched his temple where the echoes started. "What does that mean?"
"It means your mind is storing fragments instead of discarding them as noise," she said. "You'll remember more. Good for identity. Bad for trauma."
He let the words sit. Memory was a dangerous luxury.
Arios stirred — a pressure at the edge of thought. We must catalog the new input. Partition memory by reliability. The voice in his mind had become methodical, almost like a curator marking files.
"Do you trust Arios to sort this?" he asked.
Mizuki tilted her head. "I don't trust systems. I trust data." She gestured to the screens. "The partitions are coherent. The risk is not in storing the memory but in who reads it."
He understood. The more he remembered, the more others could want those memories.
They tested the containment routine that afternoon.
A simulated breach projection. Low energy. A fragment of pattern meant to evoke a corridor of columns.
Shinra stepped into the mock seam and allowed the overlay.
This time, the memory was clearer.
Not shards. A scene.
A man kneeling before a raised cloth, hands folded in a bruised patience. The cloth bore a spiral mark.
The man spoke a name in a low, steady voice.
Shinra felt the syllables settle into his bones like small stones.
Then he felt his own mouth form the name without permission, and the sound was not his.
He staggered, groped for the room's edge, and Yuna caught his elbow.
He breathed and repeated the count.
Three. Two. Five.
Mizuki's face was unreadable. She scribbled notes as fast as she could.
"Good retrieval," she said. "Bad emotional valence. You need to learn to segment the feeling from the fact."
"How?" he asked.
"By practicing leaving a mark but not a wound," she said. "By teaching yourself that remembering is an action, not a collapse."
He liked that phrasing. Remembering as an action.
It implied agency.
That evening, the guild held a meeting with a different urgency.
Authority had sent another dispatch.
Kurogane's envoy wanted updated access to Sanctum's field logs. Requests were polite but pointed: deeper biometric feeds, unredacted footage, and a classified liaison to be stationed inside the guild for "collaborative safety."
Kaizen's reply was blunt and immediate: no.
They argued the line between cooperation and surrender until the air tasted like old iron.
Ryou stood in the doorway, quiet as usual, his expression a ledger of compromise.
"Envoy insists," Ryou said, "that this is for the city's safety. The central committee forwarded the request. They want transparency."
Mizuki tapped a bar on her tablet. "Transparency invites control," she said. "We provide what protects the people. Not what satisfies curiosity."
Kurogane's envoy framed it differently in his later message. "We will not act hastily. But we must be given the means to ensure no single point of failure exists."
Kaizen's answer was a short, clean sentence that read like a promise: "Sanctum retains custody of its members."
Politics pressed on them like a slow tide.
Shinra watched the meeting from the edge. He did not speak much. The room's words were a distant noise, and yet each phrase could shape rules that might one day press a cage around him.
He learned to watch the cage before it was built.
Work continued. Study, patrol, drill — a litany of small defences.
News feeds churned with commentary. Some called him a savior. Some wanted his head. Those two calls were not mutually exclusive in the world.
A child left a knitted hat on the steps of Sanctum with a note: For the one who fixed the sky. It made him ache for reasons that had nothing to do with fame.
He walked the courtyard and found Akari by the herb beds, fingers closing around a stem of rosemary.
"You're getting better," she said.
"You noticing my breathing pattern when I sleep?" he asked.
"No." She glanced at him, small and straightforward. "You look more like a man and less like a horizon."
He let that land.
"Do your grandmother's books ever speak to you?" he asked suddenly.
She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "They speak. Mostly they whisper to each other. Sometimes the ribbon hums."
"You think someone is moving those ribbons?" he asked.
She considered. "People who collect names trade in small things. A pendant. A strip of cloth. A page. They are messengers who don't like to be seen."
"Like the man in the library," he said.
She nodded. "He was careful. Not a brute. He had a kind of hunger."
Hunger was a precise word. The root's adaptations created hunger in strange places.
The training that night allowed him a fractional mercy.
Mizuki introduced a new technique: deliberate recall.
He would conjure a memory at will, and then he would anchor it to a harmless object. A pebble. A spoon.
When overlay came, he would let the scene in, then close it down and touch the pebble to cement the recall outside of himself.
"In this way," Mizuki explained, "the memory has a physical marginalia. You don't carry it as a tidal wave. You carry a page marker."
He tried it.
The memory that came was not grand. It was two hands threading a cord through a pendant. The hands were old but steady.
He placed the pebble in his palm, let the feeling anchor there, and breathed out.
Arias approved in a dry, careful whisper. Partition stable. Indexing complete.
It felt like learning to lay down a plank across a ravine.
Not safe. Not final. Useful.
Days bled into a pattern.
The net adjusted.
The root's threads sometimes found bait and sometimes found bait that was not theirs to take.
One week later, a new alert blipped: a guided avatar had attempted to materialize near the old docks. The team moved as always.
This time, the avatar bore a strange motif on its shell — a spiral that matched the insignia on Akari's pendant and the ribbon.
Mizuki's hands went cold. She muttered into her comms: "Cross-reference with library finds. Alert: motif match. Probability: significant."
They confronted the avatar in a tight alley ringed with stabilizers.
It was mean, efficient. But its pattern betrayed an unfamiliar instruction set, like a grafted limb.
Shinra stepped forward and read the thing's motion. He guessed its intent and moved pre-emptively.
In one motion he redirected its balance and let one seam collapse into nothing.
It was a small victory with a bitter metal aftertaste.
When the residue cooled they retrieved a sliver of its shell. The spiral was etched into the fragment.
Mizuki's screen lit with data.
"This is not random," she said. "The motif isn't just a marker. It's a vector signature—an identifier the root uses to call specific architectures. Someone seeded that symbol into multiple anchors."
Shinra looked at Akari.
Her fingers were white around her pendant.
"Who would do that?" he asked.
She swallowed. "People who remember the old maps. People who keep names to find doors."
He thought of the man in the library — the one who said he came because someone lit a name.
People lit names either to call a friend or to lure a predator.
They had to find which.
Mizuki's suggestion was surgical and unwelcome. "We trace the motif," she said. "We follow its spoor back through the anchors. We don't assume intent until we have nodes."
"Can we do it without triggering a cascade?" Kaizen asked.
"Maybe," Mizuki replied. "If we move slow and keep the lattice hidden. If we don't let the root know we are following its breadcrumb trail."
Shinra felt the logic like a rope. He would follow. He would keep his hands clean.
They followed the motif through three small anchors, then another residue in a market stall, then a discarded pamphlet that had been folded and refolded until the spiral printed itself on the underside.
Each time the motif turned up, it carried a different weight. Sometimes it was a memory anchor. Sometimes it was a trap. Sometimes it was a ledger entry of a life.
By the time they reached a derelict warehouse at the edge of the river, the trail felt like a thread that had been pulled from a grand tapestry.
On the warehouse floor lay a circle of salt-cracked paper with the spiral at its center. Around it were scrawled words in a script that matched nothing in the city records.
Akari crouched and ran her fingertips over the spiral.
"This is a meeting point," she said. "Not for the root, but for people like him."
"People like who?" Shinra asked.
She looked up. "Archivists," she said. "Collecters. Memory-keepers who don't trust institutions."
He thought of the man who had said he forgot his own name.
He thought of a network of people threading old sigils into modern knots.
He thought, once more with sharper clarity, that names were maps and maps could be weapons.
They set a watch.
Not a trap. An observation.
At midnight, figures moved in. Not many. Careful steps. Voices muted.
They spoke in a language that sounded almost like bargaining. Snippets crossed into the open: name, ledger, safe-house.
One of them touched the circle and murmured a phrase; the paper folded into itself like a mouth.
Mizuki's comms recorded everything.
They watched from the dark and took nothing.
When the figures left, Shinra stepped into the circle.
The memory overlay arrived then, not as a storm but as a corridor he could walk down.
A child with ash-black hands pressed a spiral into wet clay. A woman with a worn voice taught the child to hum a lullaby that was also a code.
He felt the name again. This time he kept hold.
He let Arios catalog the phrasing, the cadence, the way the syllable tightened around his throat.
When he left the circle his chest felt heavier, but not empty.
He had a page now, a small, raw page with writing he could look at later.
Mizuki whispered, "Good recovery."
He let himself believe her.
Outside, the river moved soundless, carrying the city's discarded weight away into a dark mouth.
Akari stood in the doorway, her pendant dim with exertion.
"You carry a lot," she said.
"You keep names," he answered.
She gave him a small, closed smile. "Then let us be careful how we hand them out."
He nodded.
The seal remembered.
So would he. But he would practice choosing which memories to show the world and which to tuck under his collar, where only he — and those he trusted — could find them.