30 / 04 / 2019 - Daito, Osaka Prefecture, Japan.
12:30 PM, One day passes. Thursday. Golden Week.
Another twenty-four hours slipped away. Even with the new findings in mind, they failed to disrupt the steady momentum of his daily routine.
The reality of Akane's life was cumbersome and packed as usual.
Because today marked the official commencement of the Golden Week holidays, the Kendo Club Captain was pushing the roster to train exponentially harder than usual.
Combined with the absolute promise Akane had made to fill a vacancy in the upcoming spring qualifiers, the physical training regimen was bound to be nothing short of hellish.
But even so, his strategy was simple. He just needed to obliterate anything past the line required for the competition ahead of schedule, thereby cutting his mandatory attendance time in half by sheer force of performance.
He no longer cared about hiding his physical capabilities from his peers; he bulldozed through every metric put in front of him, so long as the Captain granted him the freedom to leave early.
'Still, it's not like I have much to show anyway….'
Leaning his back against the support of his desk chair, Akane gazed absentmindedly through the glass window beside him.
The outdoor scenery of Osaka was standard for late April: starkly sunny, heavily humid, and framed by waves of meandering pedestrians and rhythmic, crawling street traffic.
The world outside was bustling as usual. And here he was, unable to enjoy a sliver of it.
Letting out a quiet, whispered sigh, Akane pulled his eyes away from the window and refocused entirely on the intricate, manual labor resting on his desk.
Bathed in the slanted glow of midday sun sat a worn, massive ancient tome.
It was a relic as thick as an encyclopedia, going by the name of Khthonres History Book, resting casually right alongside his open laptop.
Pushing his body forward slightly, he resumed his transcription work; his fingers danced across the keyboard as his eyes flitted back and forth between the text field and the scribbled, mysterious runes decorating the yellowed parchment to his right.
The text was almost entirely incomprehensible to a human mind.
'Almost...'
Ever since that day he had integrated a shattered fragment of Fraiigilar's soul and memory into his own separate consciousness, though he was not sure how, he had become innately capable of deciphering a sparse handful of localized Runes and Fraiigilar's knowledge.
Though his current literacy was far from fluent, at the very least it was structurally on par with a school student's level, and the progress went steady.
It was an agonizingly dense language to parse, even with a theoretical foundation as a reference.
Still, it wasn't a matter of simple vocabulary; rather, it felt like trying to simultaneously decipher Japanese Kanji characters alongside their phonetic, Romanized alphabet form.
Even though both variations pointed to the exact same meaning, the jarring structural differences forced his brain to process the linguistics down two entirely separate paths.
Caressing the brittle, yellowed dark text on the page, Akane did not dwell long on a single stubborn syllable.
Instead, he skimmed forward, absorbing the broader context of the passage — the only method he had been able to think of, not that many options had presented themselves anyway.
And by now, he had finally arrived at the historical chapter detailing the Middle Ages of Khthonres.
An era where the ancient Dwarven sub-factions first discovered and engineered structural prototypes by harnessing the raw power of Malevolent Fragmentation.
Even for an advanced subterranean civilization, this particular archive lacked a true evolutionary arc.
Unlike human history, which painstakingly crawled from primitive hunter-gatherer roots into the information age, these subterranean races hadn't engineered their society from absolute scratch.
'If human starts as oonga boonga, then the dwarf have the help from the surface anyway…'
Clicking his tongue, he rolled his eyes. Hell, who was he to judge anyway? Did he live and walk through history alongside them? Who knew if it was true or false anyway?
In the end, it just fell flat. This was more like a history book or blueprint of an isolated city-state rather than the epic chronicle of a distinct race, no?
Heh, anyway, the primary reason he bothered so much to spend his spare time digesting this text was of course to rapidly accelerate his progress on [Saturation].
That was why, in his packed schedule as of now, he still spent some of his time reading the compendium, classifying some of those foreign creatures, and understanding the content of the history book.
'While also studying Runes beforehand….'
Until now, he hadn't had a single window of free time to actively cultivate his internal power.
The current evolutionary status of his modified body from Formlessness had remained entirely untouched since his last check a week prior, leaving his physical frame to passively adapt to the strain on its own.
Also, Lower Archive, which he hadn't even touched since his awakening due to its confusing nature — anyway, he was not in a hurry to be a full-fledged Dragon. As it was said, he was still a Hatchling after all.
Other than this, he couldn't even spend time to inspect the "Death Clarion," a super and cool sniper gun that Fraiigilar had left him; the weapon's silent presence tempted him every single night.
Moving on from his silent lament, Akane flipped the ancient page. As he did, his eyes briefly flickered toward the localized surveillance window pinned to the top corner of his laptop screen.
There, the automation tracking of the frozen camera feeds showed that the Spiron Unit under Elecia's direct command was reading localized data storage at the exact same pace he was. Neat.
Shaking his head faintly and turning his gaze back to the tome, his mind drifted as usual. The current status of the infiltration could be said to be a great success, or if he had to say —
'It's progressing far too smoothly... just like that day.'
His fingers paused against the smooth, ancient paper. A fleeting, conflicting sensation of profound wariness and faint déjà-vu rippled through his chest, but his conclusion remained unchanged.
It was a Spawn Cord, an abandoned one.
The status of the facility was inherently empty of workers or researchers; instead, it was working autonomously, proving that whoever was behind this was controlling it from behind the scenes.
The Central Laboratory junction on the right-hand corridor was cleanly partitioned into three separate structural sectors: a localized sample storage vault, a centralized data analysis and extraction hub, and a terminal biological containment chamber.
Currently, a singular Spiron spider drone was safely stationed inside the data analysis sector, siphoning the historical logs contained within the facility's physical computation units.
Akane resumed his manual translation, his consciousness effortlessly splitting its focus across multiple activities.
The progress of Elecia's data gathering was noticeably sluggish.
The bottleneck wasn't a lack of processing power on her end; rather, she was forced to pull the data manually instead of deploying a brutal hijack because the facility's local physical architecture was obsolete.
Akane raised his head, staring curiously at the pixelated diagnostic screen transmitted from the drone's optical sensor.
The server arrays inside the facility belonged to an architecture straight out of the late 1980s or early 1990s.
The physical circuitry was so sensitive, fragile, and rigid that Elecia's massive, advanced quantum-gate data streams would completely overwhelm the ancient copper logic boards, triggering a hard system crash before the files could even be indexed.
To harvest the data safely, the micro-drone had to parse the ancient system at a snail's pace.
'Of course, another reason and benefit is… she can avoid triggering detection from an anomalous data stream, no?'
He took one final look at the flickering monochrome code stream projected through the Spiron's eyes before dropping his gaze back down to the runes of his book.
To an ordinary person, having one's cognitive focus perpetually fractured by multiple high-stakes streams of information would feel chaotic, stressful, and maddening.
But to Akane, it could not be said to be uncomfortable. In contrast, this intense multitasking method brought a sense of peace to his mind.
Yet some problem lingered in his mind before he could fully commit once more.
Despite granting Elecia total autonomy to scavenge the abandoned base, and despite delivering the promised Motionary Reactor Core and the Type 2 - IV: IMP Mechanicyc Chip to function as a physical anchor for her sub-routines, she was still light-years away from constructing a fully independent autonomous chassis.
The last of the IMPs on Khthonres had their own factory-ready bodies, but Elecia was left with only a piece of brain and a heart in hand.
The Motionary Reactor Core could easily generate and regulate energy; coupled with conversion of Thought to Energy, it was basically near-perpetual.
While the IMP Chip provided the baseline behavioral adaptation algorithms required to navigate physical space.
But without an actual mechanical body to house those components, her options were limited.
What could she do with a piece of brain? Float around in his room? Akane thought in genuine amusement as he flipped the page.
———
03:00 PM, Two Days Later. Saturday. Akane's Room.
What was supposed to be a long stretch of holiday had been completely hollowed out by his own rigid routine.
For the past several days, Akane had maintained an eerie peace with himself. Every single day of this Golden Week was spent cycling between training, rest, and reading.
Long past the point of caring about the opinions of his peers, Akane had simply adopted a ghost-like presence.
Akane clocked in at the dojo at 9 AM and out at 12 PM, no more no less, returning straight back to the apartment home earlier without wasting a single breath.
There had been only one exception. Yesterday, his mind had approached the edge in a rare moment of outburst, and instead of returning immediately he had proceeded to walk around the town for a bit, enjoying a rare moment of silence and resting in the park doing nothing until 2 PM.
It wasn't that bad, honestly. It had been stressed repeatedly that his mind was under pressure, without any actual time for proper rest aside from sleeping and then clocking in again for the next day.
It was also suffocating for him, and now it was the fourth day of the holiday stretch.
At this moment, Akane stood by his window, slowly slurping orange juice through a plastic straw. His dim, crimson-ashen eyes stared blankly at the sky.
A thick, bruising layer of dark, heavy clouds was rolling across the Osaka skyline — a definitive sign of an impending downpour.
Earlier that morning, a faint, bitter spark of envy had flickered in his chest as he watched ordinary civilians freely indulging in their vacation.
He had watched them buying sweets, basking under the fading spring sun, or lounging beneath the shade of the trees without a care in the world.
But now, looking at the looming storm, a dark, gleeful satisfaction washed over him. The straw clicked against his teeth as he let it drop from his lips.
'It's always easier to swallow your own misery when the rest of the world is forced to drown in it with you, isn't it?'
Having had enough of it, turning away from the window, he rotated his desk chair to the left.
Elecia's data extraction from the lab was already long finished. She had systematically organized, parsed, and indexed the entire cache in less than twenty-four hours.
Currently, her active Spiron micro-drones were navigating the vast corridor, crawling along the steel cables and high-voltage wiring grids to map out any external connection vectors to other covert bases.
'A smart move. Now, this is the reason why you must have your own subordinates…'
If others could do it for you and he could reap the benefits from the sidelines, why bother? Though he knew that this kind of crutch was unhealthy in the long term, this kind of thing couldn't be exercised every single time.
'The data harvesting is finalized... and my [Saturation] progress is missing only a singular piece of fragment…'
Having devoured two-thirds through the Khthonres History Book, plus the categorically incomplete First Seas Compendium, he had achieved at the very least ninety-nine percent of progress on [Saturation].
An unyielding, deep-seated itchiness and a sharp, cognitive irritation had grown entirely unbearable.
It wasn't physical hunger; rather, it felt like a gaping, hollow void constantly vibrating at the absolute center of his consciousness.
His relaxed demeanor over the last few days was nothing more than a desperate coping mechanism.
In reality, his nervous system was more volatile and hypersensitive than it had ever been.
A single, minor external disturbance right now would likely trigger a violent, multi-fold defensive reflex.
"I'm ready…" he murmured.
His fingers twitched faintly against the glass in his right hand.
Akane glanced down at his hand, let out a slow, pent-up sigh, and refocused entirely on the display.
With a silent whisper, he ordered Elecia to open the newly compiled archives.
The laptop screen instantly shifted from the drone's optical tracking feed to the sterile, stark white interface of a secure document reader.
The sidebar index was cleanly partitioned into four primary data clusters: [Experimental Chronology], [Specimen Taxonomy], [Biological Research Logs], and the [Genetic Library].
Being mindful as ever, Elecia activated the built-in holographic function. A crisp, beautifully rendered glowing panel materialized in the air before him, displaying the first page of the Specimen Taxonomy.
Crossing his arms tightly over his chest, Akane systematically regulated his breathing to suppress a sudden, creeping wave of instinctual apprehension.
He leaned his full weight back against the headrest, closing his eyes for a split second to ground his thoughts.
What would happen after [Saturation] was complete? Would he die of brain death? Would he enter another coma? Was this transformation inherently stable?
Was it safe? It should be safe, right? Since Serpent had not warned him of anything and remained silent, then it should be safe after all.
To read, to analyze, to comprehend — the mere act of processing foreign data was the absolute catalyst required to fulfill the progress bar.
It didn't matter if his conscious mind couldn't instantly utilize the complex biological formulas; the sheer act of exposing his senses to the new knowledge itself fulfilled the condition.
From now on, there was no turning back. His knowledge reserves regarding the First Seas creatures and the current state of the case were bound to change.
'Whatever comes, comes.'
Slowly opening his eyes, Akane pushed his upper body forward.
His gaze locked onto the very first entry of the encyclopedia-style document, his eyes instantly narrowing as they swept across a highly familiar, disturbing sketch of a swarming bio-mass.
The header read: [Infestide Gray Rat].
…
Minutes melted into hours.
Akane remained completely motionless, his crimson-ashen irises reflecting the rhythmic, pale yellow-whitish light of the floating holographic text.
The bedroom around him was utterly tranquil.
Outside, the storm had finally broken; thick sheets of rain lashed against the glass, casting the room into a deep, shadow-and-velvet darkness while the rhythmic drumming of water droplets created a soothing, natural white noise.
On the outside, he was a picture of absolute, undisturbed serenity.
But internally, deep within the cavernous, pitch-black architecture of Akane's mindscape:
The standard, steady wave-like frequencies of his consciousness had completely ruptured.
The mental landscape was jumping chaotically, fracturing into erratic, violent spikes of raw data.
In stark contrast to his frozen, deadpan physical body, his internal ego remained hyper-conscious, observing the violent storm in his mind in meta-cognition.
The lingering anxiety and the scratching irritation of the void suddenly vanished, instantly replaced by a profound, dead silence.
What follows the absolute threshold of [Saturation]?
The answer bloomed instantly within his cognitive process: [Sublimation].
Right beneath his internal gaze, the violent, chaotic vibrations of his mindscape were abruptly extinguished.
A localized, profoundly cold wave of invisible energy cascaded down from somewhere unknown, into the apex of his soul, freezing the erratic spikes.
As the energy washed through him, his mind cooled to a sub-zero level of rationality, leaving absolutely no room for human doubt or hesitation.
The suffocating, bloated sensation of being filled to the brim began to shift, compressing and transforming into an entirely new state of matter.
Gradually, a new knowledge began to appear in his mind, bringing a sense of familiarity —
…
Starring : Shirakami Akane
Audience : The Starry Sky of Existence, The Silver Sea of Collective Will
—————
18 June 2018
The cities burned.
Shirakami Akane moved through them anyway — not because he was unafraid, but because his siblings were somewhere ahead of him and fear was a luxury he had already surrendered.
He carried nothing useful. No weapon, no map, no certainty.
Only the cold resolve of someone who had decided that dying while standing still was worse than dying while moving forward.
Thorns found the soles of his feet. Mindless things found his path.
The world did not part for him, did not soften its edges, did not acknowledge that he was trying harder than he had ever tried at anything.
Nature is not unkind. It is simply indifferent. It does not make exceptions.
—————
????????????
There is a gap in the record here.
What can be confirmed: Shirakami Akane died. Not metaphorically, and not the death of innocence or the death of who he used to be.
He died of unwillingness. Of refusal to accept what the world had decided his ending would look like.
What can be confirmed: something noticed this.
An Ancient Being, vast and patient in ways that precede reality itself, extended an offer.
Not a rescue. An exchange.
Akane's freedom of self, to the very right to exist for his own sake, all, would be given over as extension, as instrument.
He accepted without hesitation.
This says something about him. Whether it says something admirable is left to the audience to determine.
—————
11 March 2019
He surfaced from the River of ?????????.
Those who have never been submerged in such a current cannot fully understand what returns and what does not.
Something had been lost — the record is clear on this point even if the specifics are redacted.
Something else had been gained. Akane's sentient mind remained. His determination remained. His memory of why he was still trying remained.
Whether the trade was fair is not for him to calculate.
He filed this away too. Kept moving.
—————
The Record
An entity named Shirakami Akane has passed through the following:
Burning cities. Siblings to find. Thorns in his feet and beasts on his path. A death. A pact with something Ancient. A river that takes things. An awakening that returned him changed.
Each of these events was observed. Each was recorded — not in ink, not in memory alone, but in the deeper medium that a Reader uses without always knowing they are using it:
The information states of everything around him, pressed into comprehension, arranged into meaning.
He did not observe these things academically.
He lived them — which means his observations are contaminated by survival, by grief, by the particular distortions of someone who needed things to mean something in order to keep going.
This is acknowledged.
—————
Is this in accordance with the truth that exists?
—————
The Decision: Act I
Be honest.
Not honest as performance, not honest when it costs nothing.
Honest in the way that costs everything, but the kind that requires you to record what you see even when what you see indicts you.
Even when the truth is less useful than a comfortable lie would be, even when no one is watching and the only record is the one you keep for yourself.
Befit the collective.
You did not survive alone.
The siblings you ran toward in burning cities, the kin you carry the weight of, the Silver Sea that holds every consciousness that has ever reached toward something beyond itself, and you are answerable to this.
What you learn, what you understand, what you see clearly that others cannot yet see: this belongs not only to you.
The Reader who hoards observation serves no one, including themselves.
And yet, please be selfish.
Not selfishness as greed, not the selfishness that takes from others.
The selfishness that insists on remaining yourself through everything that will try to dissolve you into something more convenient.
The selfishness that says: I will understand this on my own way, and I will not surrender my particular angle of vision simply because it is inconvenient.
Without this, the honesty becomes performance.
Without this, the collective gains nothing, because what feeds it is not compliance, but the genuine, irreducible perspective of an individual who refused to disappear.