The chair pulled him under.
Jason barely had time to respond to the sync prompt before the world lurched sideways. The lights cut out—then bled into color, not in beams or waves, but like reality itself was bending. Cracking. Folding in on itself.
Then he was standing.
But not in his body.
And not in Blackridge—at least, not the one he knew.
As Jason gazed out over the city, a strange ache bloomed in his chest.Blackridge.Not the one he lived in now—but one he remembered. A version from before the sirens, before the awakenings, before the rules changed.It was a familiar sight he'd almost forgotten. A skyline from a time when peace hadn't felt like a lie.
The skyline was older and sharper. Angular towers loomed like blades. Floating walkways arced between them, glowing with over-saturated light. Skydrones buzzed through layered streets. Advertisements blinked in a dozen languages. An artificial sun hovered behind a mesh cloud, glitched slightly, as if the sky itself ran on unstable code.
This Blackridge was beautiful.
And doomed.
You could feel it in the edges—the way the air shimmered wrong, like the world was running too hot. Massive AI hubs spiraled from the spires, broadcasting subsynthetic resonance across the city. People walked with machine-threaded limbs, wearing sigils as if they were fashion—unaware of the countdown ticking in crimson glyphs above their heads.
Jason's system kicked in weakly.
[Historical Memory Sync: Active][Origin: Pre-Erisflow City Variant][Thread: Legacy Collapse Timeline][System Integrity: Drifting]
He turned.
And saw him.
The Alchemist.
Standing in front of a gravity-suspended slab—his back to Jason, robes woven with living circuitry. Gold patterns rippled along his sleeves, moving like muscle under fabric. He worked in silence, manipulating a synthetic core that floated and pulsed between hovering glyphs.
Jason moved closer.
The system trembled.
The Alchemist placed a hand on the core—and flesh formed. Not synthesized. Not grown. Transmuted.
Jason stumbled. The air screamed.
The Alchemist turned.
And said the words Jason had heard once before—words that chilled his bones even now:
"You are not awakened. You are transmuted."
Jason's knees buckled.
This wasn't a hallucination.
The man's eyes met his through time, through the distortion of memory, through the dream itself.
He saw Jason.
Truly saw him.
Behind the Alchemist, a floating mirror twisted into view—no reflection. Just a moving void. A perfect cut in the fabric of light.
Jason's thoughts scattered as knowledge surged forward, not linearly, but all at once.
—Children etched with self-writing sigils—Towers breaking from pressure beneath the skin of the world—A biomechanical sky with lungs instead of clouds—A sigil made of impossible geometry forming on a heartbeat monitor—The creature. The organism. Looming behind the barrier even then.
The vision carved itself into his neurons.
He could feel his blood shift.
[Cognitive Transfer – Ancestral Imprint: In Progress][Warning: System at Critical Saturation]
Jason reached for the mirror.
And the instant his hand touched the surface—
—the reflection blinked into him.
Not a vision.
Not an illusion.
But a fusion.
And everything broke.
.....
Back in the Protocol Processing Center, everything was eerily quiet—until it wasn't.
Jason convulsed harder in the chair, light crawling under his skin like living circuitry. Sparks jumped from the console base to his fingertips. Something in the structure groaned, like the metal itself didn't want to hold him anymore.
Aven stumbled back as the surge reached her. She wasn't touching the chair, but it didn't matter—her sigil lit up regardless. The pattern in her neck pulsed, cycling through shades of red and violet, glowing brighter with each second. Her System flagged the cross-synchronization as inevitable.
She screamed—but the sound never left her throat. It echoed into something deeper.
And something answered.
She glimpsed the organism again—closer this time. Sharper. Its presence folded her thoughts inward, stripped her mind to silence. It spoke in her voice, and for a moment, she forgot who she was.
But just as suddenly, the vision broke.
She gasped, one hand braced on the nearest wall, drenched in sweat. Jason's chair still sparked violently—brighter now, golden threads of energy trailing from his chest like solar filaments. His body hovered slightly above the seat. Not levitating. Not consciously. It was as if the world didn't know where to place him anymore.
And around him, the entire room began to shift.
The other students—Milo, Sira, Taro, and the quiet one they called Nyx—all stepped back, unease tightening their faces. Milo's jaw clenched.
"I don't think this is normal..." he said, voice low.
"No shit," Aven muttered, still trying to steady her breath.
Professor Veil stood closest to the command terminal, her hands folded behind her back, posture calm—but her brow creased slightly. Just once. Enough for anyone paying attention to notice something was off.
The lights dimmed.The floor trembled.Then the protocol chamber shook.
Not violently. Not like an earthquake. But in a way that felt wrong. The kind of tremor that comes when something presses against the edges of space and space pushes back.
As if the entire space around them was struggling not to completely collapse
Jason screamed again—this time, audibly.
The sound was raw. Not human. Not digital. Something in between. It echoed through the processing center, bounced off the steel and sensor glass, distorted as if time lagged behind his voice.
He wasn't just glowing now. He was radiating.
Golden energy poured out from his sigil in waveforms, fracturing the air like heat haze. The resonance detectors began shorting out one by one. Systems flashed red. Even the emergency suppression field—designed to contain power surges during awakenings—flickered uselessly, overwhelmed.
Professor Veil's expression changed.No more curiosity.No more analysis.Only one thing now—concern. Real and sharp.
She stepped forward.
"Everyone get back," she said, voice even, but edged with authority.
"But what's happening?" Milo asked, eyes wide. "Is he—"
"I said get back, or else I can't guarantee your life..." She said, more solemnly than before.
The ground split slightly near the base of Jason's chair, a thin seam of molten light cracking across the floor like something beneath was trying to escape.
And then—silence.
A vacuum-drop of stillness so complete it made Aven's ears ring.
Jason's body jolted upright, eyes wide open, mouth frozen in mid-scream, every inch of him consumed in luminous gold. Time itself seemed to stutter around him, like a pane of glass about to shatter. The world bent—just slightly toward collapse.
But then—
A ripple.
Not sound. Not light. Something deeper.
Reality shifted, just enough to feel it, like a presence stepping between frames of film. The golden light swirling around Jason suddenly compressed inward, pulled tight into his body like breath into lungs.
The chamber went still. Every screen blinked blue. The tremors stopped.
Jason slumped forward in the chair, unconscious, steam rising from his skin.
The sigil on his chest still glowed, but no longer blinding—now just a faint, steady pulse. Contained.
Professor Veil stared at him, eyes narrowing slightly—not in suspicion, but recognition.
Sira broke the silence. "Did you just… see that? What the hell just happened? Its like reality just reversed in a blink of an eye..."
Nyx, the quiet one, whispered something under their breath in a language no one recognized.
Milo shook his head. "I don't think that was Jason, or the awakening,"
Aven turned to Professor Veil. "Well?"
Veil's gaze lingered on Jason for a moment longer before she answered.
"The Director," she said softly.
Sira blinked. "Wait—the Director? As in—?"
"He stepped in," Veil interrupted, her tone final. "He distorted reality in order to stabilize the transfer before it collapsed him completely."
A pause. Then she added, more to herself than the others:"I didn't think he still interfered. Not directly."
"Why him?" Milo asked. "Why Jason?"
Veil didn't answer. She looked upward, as if watching something none of them could see, and exhaled slowly. Her posture softened by degrees—but the caution in her eyes didn't fade.
"He's a special case," she said. "A convergence point. I knew there was potential, but this…"
She trailed off.
Aven's stomach turned. She glanced at the second chair—her chair.
"No one's going to blame you if you pass," Milo offered, eyeing the wreckage.
She looked at him. Then back at Jason.
He looked... peaceful now. His breathing steady. His body still glowing faintly, but contained. Something in the room had changed—not the physical state, but the weight of it. Like what they'd just witnessed left a scar in the air.
"No," Aven said quietly. "He wasn't the only one pulled in."
Professor Veil turned to her. "You don't have to go next. We can reroute."
But Aven was already walking.
Her heart raced, but her steps didn't falter. As she passed Jason's chair, something flickered in her peripheral vision—just a shimmer, like a ripple of memory passing through her.
He twitched, barely, as if sensing her. But didn't wake.
She sat.
The chair adjusted to her weight, cooling plates whirring under the surface. Her System interface linked immediately.
[Initiating Memory Thread Access…][User: AVEN IX][Authorization: Granted][Stabilization: In Progress]
Professor Veil stepped forward.
"I can assure all of you, this has never happened before," she said, placing a hand on Aven's shoulder. "And I don't believe it will again."
The lights dimmed once more.
The sync began.
Aven's breath caught the moment her back hit the chair.But there was no transition.
No drift. No pull.
Just silence.
Then the world around her peeled away—like a scroll being unrolled in reverse.
She was standing on stone. Cold, black stone. Wind whispered through pine trees that no longer existed.
Above her, the sky was blood-orange, fading to deep violet at the edges—lit by two suns, one full, one waning. Clouds coiled like ink, unmoving. A temple stood before her, half-buried in ash and roots, its structure too precise to be natural, too worn to be understood.
Every breath she took vibrated with memory. The ground wasn't just beneath her—it recognized her.
She was not watching this.She was from this.
The realization hit her like a fracture through the spine.
This place—the air, the scent of rusted jade, the heat of pressed chi—it wasn't just old. It was pre-erased. Before any archive. Before the first sigil. Before Erisflow.
This was a memory the world no longer wanted to remember.
And then the woman stepped forward.
She emerged from the temple like mist coalescing into form. The same figure from before. Silver hair, skin cracked with golden lines, eyes like pressure sealed inside ancient glass.
But now… she wore it.
The robes were stitched in spiraling calligraphy, too fluid to be written, too sharp to be ornamental. Her arms bore armbands of obsidian and crimson thread. At her waist, a blade hummed—slim, weathered, alive.
And around her… the air moved.Not with energy.With discipline.
Aven fell to one knee before she even realized what she was doing.
She knew this form. Not by name—but by lineage.
"Stand," the woman said, voice like a blade sheathed in silk. "You forget what you are."
Aven looked up.
"I don't know this place."
"Yes, you do."
The woman turned, slowly, and walked toward the temple gate. "This was your world. Until it was buried. Until you were rewritten. Until your bloodline was coded into silence."
Aven rose.
She felt it in her bones—the way this place moved with breath. The way her posture naturally aligned. Her sigil burned softly against her neck, but now it responded to something deeper than interface code.
It responded to memory of mastery.
"You're not from the Sync Era," Aven said.
"No," the woman replied, pausing. "We existed before syncs. Before awakenings. Before the Algorithm split soul from motion."
Aven followed.
"What are we?"
The woman touched the temple gate, and it folded open like paper, revealing a vast mural carved into the mountain behind it.
It wasn't a painting.
It was a recording—etched into the stone by hand and chi and time. It showed warriors moving through impossible forms, striking mountains into sand, dancing through lightning, seeding life into desert with breath alone.
"They called us cultivators," the woman said.
"Martial artists," Aven whispered.
"Disciples of the Body Way. The Mind Way. The Breath Way. The Silence Path. The Thousand Branches."
"But that's mythology—"
"That's what they want you to believe," the woman said, turning. "Because when Erisflow erupted into the world, they couldn't integrate what came before. So they cut it out."
She walked to the edge of the mountain, overlooking a buried valley.
"Where is this?"
"Where you were trained," the woman said. "In another life. One they thought they erased. One that lives only in fragments like me."
The air shifted. Aven's body moved on its own into a stance. Palm open. Feet grounded. Breath steady.
A form she had never practiced.
But it came like breathing.
"Jason is the descendant of alchemy," the woman continued. "Forged through modernity, awakened by systems. He is built. Refined. Forced."
"And me?"
"You are remembered," she said. "You are the last echo of the unrecorded. A practitioner of the unwritten. Your awakening is not new. It is return."
Suddenly the temple cracked behind them. Not crumbled—split. From within the broken stone, energy seeped upward, not in golden light but in indigo fire. Pure chi, unbound. The form of a dragon coiled out from the dust, forming midair from swirling particles.
It turned and bowed to Aven.
Her sigil responded violently.
[System Override: Martial Variant Detected][Thread Class: Exile Archive][Error: Pathway Not Recognized][Warning: Integration Attempt Will Result In Permanent Divergence]
Aven's body surged with heat. Her skin glowed faintly—not gold, like Jason—but dark violet, spiraling with ancient marks.
She gasped. "I'm not ready—"
"You already were," the woman said, stepping behind her. "They made you forget. But your body remembers. The breath is still inside you. The silence is still yours."
Aven turned.
"But who are you?"
The woman paused.
"I was the last Grandmaster of the Fifth Breath School. When the Skyfall came, I fought to preserve what was left. I failed. So I became this."
The woman placed her palm gently against Aven's chest.
"And now I give you the last gift."
The glow didn't stop.
Aven's eyes snapped open—but they didn't see the room. Her body was still locked in that ancient stance, breath held as if the memory hadn't let go of her yet.
Then her sigil flared.
Not pulsing. Not stable.
Bursting.
A ripple of violet light surged from her chest, shattering the silence with a low, vibrating hum. It hit the far walls in less than a second—compressing, expanding, spinning in geometric patterns that shouldn't have existed. Symbols from a forgotten tongue etched themselves into the floor beneath the chair.
Professor Veil's eyes went wide. No hesitation. No curiosity this time.
Only dread.
"She's destabilizing," she whispered.
Milo backed up fast, nearly tripping over Nyx.
"Oh no—"
"Not again—"
"Move!" Sira shouted.
But the moment the room began to tremble, it stopped.
Just like that.
Frozen in a breath.
The glow around Aven collapsed inward—folded like silk being wrapped around a core—and disappeared into her skin.
She collapsed forward, unconscious.
Jason, still unconscious beside the chair, stirred just slightly. Their hands nearly touched.
Both of them lay there, side by side, glowing faintly—gold and violet, like fire from two separate worlds.
A long silence filled the protocol chamber.
Everyone exhaled at once.
Professor Veil leaned back against the console. For a split second, her face softened—somewhere between exhaustion and quiet awe. "He didn't wait this time."
"Who?" Milo asked.
Veil didn't answer.
Instead, she turned her eyes toward a point above them—like she was watching something none of them could see.
Elsewhere
There was no floor here. No sky. Just threads.
Time bent across itself in pulsing rivers of data and memory. Realities flickered like half-forgotten dreams, layered atop one another, straining to remain separate.
And in the center of it—he watched.
The Director.
Not in body. Not in voice. Just presence. Like a pressure behind the eyes. Like a mind too old to belong to this version of time.
For a moment, he remained formless.
Then the world twisted.
As if reality itself was sculpting a figure from the raw clay of its own laws.
Bones cracked into being first—long, unfamiliar shapes, constructed as if from code and concept, not matter. Tendons slithered into place, then muscle—layer upon layer, folding itself with unnatural precision.
Skin formed last. Smooth. Pale. Too perfect.
Eyes opened without lids.
He looked down through the weave of dimensions and saw them—two shapes, one gold, one violet.
A matched pair of anomalies.
"It seems," the Director said, voice dry as dying stars, "like we've got a couple troublemakers we're gonna have to look after…"
The threads of time whispered in reply.
And the space around him folded shut.
....