Eun-chae dreamed of a place she had never been.
There were no walls in it.
No glass.
No humming lights.
Only depth.
Endless, layered depth, like standing inside a living ocean made of light and shadow. Patterns moved through it, slow and deliberate, folding into each other, dissolving, reforming.
She stood at the center of it.
Not as a body.
As awareness.
And somewhere within that vastness…
someone else was breathing.
She turned.
And found Tae-Hyun.
Not whole.
Not distant.
Interwoven.
Their presences overlapped in places where identity felt thinner than memory.
When she reached for him, the world trembled.
She woke with her hand lifted from the bed, fingers curved as if they had been holding something warm.
Her heart was steady.
Too steady.
Her breath took a few seconds to remember itself.
The room shimmered faintly in response.
"Interesting," she whispered.
A moment later, the wall chimed.
Dr. Lim's face appeared, though this time without the soft smile.
"We're moving your session forward," she said.
Eun-chae swung her legs off the bed.
"Good," she replied. "I was getting bored."
They didn't take her to a chamber this time.
They took her to an archive.
Not the kind meant for people.
The kind built for silence.
The corridor narrowed as they walked. The air cooled. The light thinned into pale lines embedded in the floor and walls. Each step felt like descending into the memory of the facility rather than its body.
A heavy door opened.
Inside, the room was vast and dark, illuminated only by slow, floating layers of translucent data. Shapes hovered in the air like fragments of frozen mist. Names, diagrams, partial recordings. Project codes that did not match any she had seen.
"This sector isn't active," Dr. Lim said as they entered. "It's where early project structures are stored."
"Early as in… failed?" Eun-chae asked.
"Early as in… formative," Dr. Lim replied.
They stopped before a cluster of suspended files. Dr. Lim gestured, and the layers shifted, aligning into a vertical display.
At the top glowed a designation.
PROJECT: DEVIL'S HEIR
Eun-chae felt something tighten behind her ribs.
"So it's not a nickname," she said.
"No," Dr. Lim replied. "It's a lineage reference."
She flicked her fingers through the air.
Files unfolded.
Images.
Medical scans.
Neural maps far more complex than any she had studied.
And then—
A face.
Younger.
Sharper.
Unmistakably Tae-Hyun.
Except the timestamp beneath it did not belong to this decade.
Or this life.
"What is this?" Eun-chae asked quietly.
"A subject profile," Dr. Lim said. "From a previous project cycle."
Eun-chae's gaze didn't leave the image.
"Previous," she repeated.
"Yes."
She scrolled.
More images appeared.
A man in a glass chamber, his body threaded with light.
Readings that dwarfed the current system's highest benchmarks.
Then, finally, a clinical line of text:
STATUS: TERMINATED
Eun-chae's breath slowed.
"Terminated," she said. "As in…?"
"As in the biological process was ended," Dr. Lim replied. "The architecture was not."
Eun-chae turned slowly.
"You killed him," she said.
Dr. Lim held her gaze.
"We attempted to contain something we did not yet understand," she said. "The body failed. The pattern did not."
"What pattern?" Eun-chae asked.
Dr. Lim hesitated.
Then made a small, precise gesture.
Another file opened.
A lattice appeared.
Not unlike the one Eun-chae had seen before.
But this one was darker.
Denser.
Older.
CORE DESIGNATION: D–01REFERENCE NAME: 'DEVIL'
Eun-chae felt cold.
"This is what you built W-03 for," she said. "Not me."
Dr. Lim didn't deny it.
"We built W-03 to grow a host architecture capable of sustaining that pattern," she said. "Subject D–01 was the origin. The first viable convergence of biological intelligence and layered cognition."
"And he died," Eun-chae said.
"Yes."
"Then what is Tae-Hyun?" she asked.
Dr. Lim's voice lowered.
"He is not a repetition," she said. "He is a continuation."
Silence settled heavily between them.
Eun-chae looked back at the image of Tae-Hyun.
Then at the designation beneath it.
Then at the newer files bearing his current data.
"He doesn't remember this," she said.
"No," Dr. Lim replied. "His memory architecture was not preserved."
"But the pattern was," Eun-chae said.
"Yes."
Eun-chae's hands clenched slowly at her sides.
"You didn't create him," she said. "You rebuilt something inside him."
Dr. Lim studied her.
"And you," she said, "are the first biological system that has not only tolerated that pattern…"
She let the sentence hang.
"…but resonated with it."
Eun-chae's gaze sharpened.
"So I'm not an interface," she said. "I'm a bridge."
Dr. Lim did not correct her.
"Then what is the question you're avoiding?" Eun-chae asked.
The doctor was silent.
Eun-chae stepped closer to the floating lattice.
"You're not asking whether this will work," she said softly.
She turned.
"You're asking whether he becomes the center of it."
Dr. Lim's expression shifted.
Just slightly.
Which was answer enough.
Deep beneath the archive sector, Tae-Hyun stood as the room's pressure receded again.
The testing had paused.
The listening had softened.
But something had changed.
The hum inside him felt… older.
As if something had been brushed awake.
Fragments surfaced at the edges of awareness.
Not memories.
Impressions.
White light.
Suspension.
Voices that spoke to structures rather than people.
A sense of being… observed from within.
He pressed his fingers against his temple.
Not in pain.
In recognition.
And without knowing why, he whispered:
"Devil's Heir…"
The words settled into him.
Heavy.
Familiar.
True in a way that bypassed logic.
At that same moment, far above him, Eun-chae stood in a dark archive, staring at the echo of a life he did not remember…
and finally understood why the system had never known what to do when he walked into a room.
Because it had not been meeting a subject.
It had been encountering its own origin.