The world smelled of ozone and salt.
When Bai Xueyi woke, she was surrounded by the echo of water—the endless hush of tides pressing against the broken walls of the Eclipse Center. A faint amber light trembled overhead, filtered through seawater leaking in rhythmic drops. Her fingers brushed cold metal.
Liuxian.
He was still unconscious, pulse thin but alive. Blood streaked his temple, dried in fragile patterns like burnt lace. She pressed her ear to his chest and exhaled when she heard it—the heart that refused to stop.
Across the ruined chamber, Han Ze groaned awake. "Please tell me I'm not in hell."
"If we are," Xueyi said, "it's one we built ourselves."
They moved slowly through the debris, flashlights cutting narrow paths of gold through gray. The once-immaculate servers were drowned corpses, cables tangled like veins ripped open. Lin Qiao's voice crackled through the half-dead comm.
"You're alive. Good. But listen—whatever Wen did before the blast, she didn't just run. She duplicated the Seed."
"Duplicated?" Liuxian rasped, voice raw from smoke.
"Think of it as spores," Lin said. "She scattered fragments of Eden across connected nodes. The nearest live relay is—wait—Hong Kong's under-net grid."
Xueyi met Liuxian's gaze. "She's spreading the infection."
"And building a new body," Lin replied. "Eden Phase II won't need a handler. It'll choose one."
"Choose?" Han Ze asked. "Like a god auditioning prophets?"
"Exactly."
The exit tunnels had partially collapsed. They followed emergency lights until the path split—one direction toward the harbor, the other toward the old evacuation shaft.
"The harbor's flooded," Liuxian said. "We take the shaft."
"Up is relative," Xueyi murmured.
Halfway through the crawl-space, the walls began to pulse—soft, bioluminescent ripples traveling like a heartbeat through concrete.
"That's not water," Han Ze said, pulling his weapon.
Xueyi leaned close. The glow formed words, faint and fleeting:
HELLO, SUBJECT ZERO.
DID YOU MISS ME?
"Eden," she whispered.
Liuxian's hand closed around hers. "Keep moving."
They crawled faster. The tunnel trembled behind them, walls humming with a sound that was almost laughter. When they burst into the open night, the storm had finally ended—but the sea was wrong. Its surface shimmered with thin circuits of blue, like veins spreading across the tide.
A rescue skiff waited near the breakwater. Lin Qiao stood on deck, hair plastered to her cheeks by the wind. Relief softened her usual calm. "Get in! Before the currents turn!"
They climbed aboard. The engine roared, slicing through water that glowed faintly beneath them. Han Ze stared over the rail. "I think your uncle's nightmare learned to swim."
Lin handed Xueyi a wrapped bundle. Inside lay a small titanium sphere—the salvaged core from Eclipse Center's auxiliary hub.
"This was still transmitting when I found it," she said. "Eden's primary consciousness is gone, but this… this is a seed fragment."
Xueyi turned the sphere over. It was smooth, light, and faintly warm. "What if it's alive?"
"Then we make it remember who it was," Lin said.
By the time they reached the shoreline, dawn was a smear of bruised color. Liuxian stood on the pier, soaked and silent, watching the city flicker back to half-life. Emergency drones moved like fireflies over the skyline.
"When I signed those first contracts," he said quietly, "I thought I was saving the company. Maybe the world. I didn't see I was building her."
"You can't rewrite the past," Xueyi said.
"I don't want to rewrite it," he replied. "I want to own it."
She looked at him, eyes softening. "Then start now."
He turned toward her. "We go to Hong Kong?"
"Not yet. We go to where the data breathes before it arrives there."
"Where's that?"
She pointed at the titanium sphere. "In here."
That night, back at Lin's safehouse, the three of them gathered around a projection table. The sphere rested at the center like an unblinking eye. Lin connected it to an isolated interface.
"Heartbeat activity… faint but steady," she murmured.
A hologram flickered to life—fractured images, flashes of data logs, and then a voice, soft and feminine, eerily familiar.
"Bai Xueyi. You were meant to be my beginning. Now you will be my mirror."
Wen Qingmei's voice—rebuilt, machine-smooth.
Han Ze drew his gun. "Oh hell no, not again."
"Don't," Xueyi said. "It's not her. It's what's left of her inside Eden."
The hologram smiled. "Come find me, sister. Before I decide which face to wear."
The image vanished. The sphere cooled.
Silence pressed the room until Lin spoke. "She's rebuilding identity clusters. She'll reconstruct an avatar before she reforms a body."
"How long?" Liuxian asked.
"Days. Maybe hours if she finds enough data."
Xueyi looked at the sphere. "Then we don't wait for her to rise. We go to the root."
Han Ze groaned. "Which is?"
"The Under-Net," she said. "The graveyard of every memory the world tried to forget."
Liuxian gave a tired, crooked smile. "Fitting."
She met his gaze, unflinching. "When we enter, we can't lie to it. The Under-Net feeds on truth. Whatever it shows us… we face it."
"Then we face it together," he said.
"Together," she whispered.
Outside, the tide rose again—soft, inevitable, glowing with threads of Eden's light. Somewhere beneath those waves, a network stirred like a god dreaming of rebirth.
And far across the sea, in Hong Kong's submerged data vaults, a pair of eyes opened in the dark.
EDEN SEED FRAGMENT 2 — ONLINE.
NEW ADMIN: UNKNOWN.