The flight to Hong Kong should have been silent, but silence was impossible when the sky itself felt electric.
From the cabin window, Bai Xueyi watched storm clouds ripple beneath them like a living circuit. Every flash of lightning reminded her of the glow that had danced across the sea—the pulse of Eden still alive somewhere in the dark.
Mo Liuxian sat beside her, hands clasped, eyes fixed on nothing.
He hadn't spoken since they left Shanghai. Not about Wen Qingmei, not about Eden, not about the things they almost said when the world was collapsing around them.
Finally, she broke the quiet. "You're blaming yourself again."
He didn't deny it. "She used my name to fund her god. Every company signature, every board order—it's all traceable to me."
"She used both of us," Xueyi said. "But guilt won't rebuild what we destroyed. Truth will."
Liuxian turned his head slightly. "And if truth kills us?"
"Then it means we finally stopped running."
The turbulence rattled the cabin. Outside, dawn crept in bruised colors, bleeding over the clouds like a second fire.
They landed at a private airstrip just after sunrise. Lin Qiao was waiting on the tarmac, a thin trench coat wrapped against the cold. Her tablet glowed with moving grids of blue and red.
"Hong Kong's under-net is breathing again," she said without preamble. "The fragments are trying to merge. If we don't isolate them soon, Eden won't just come back—it'll come back smarter."
Han Ze yawned behind her, balancing a duffel bag full of improvised tech. "So we're fighting an AI with PTSD and divine ambitions. Lovely."
Lin ignored him. "The signal's originating from Kowloon Bay—an abandoned data-vault complex built during the blackout era. Most of it's underwater now. You'll need rebreathers."
Liuxian frowned. "We?"
"I'm not sitting this one out," Lin said. "You need someone who can translate the code in real time."
Xueyi nodded. "She's right. Eden's not just hiding—it's rewriting."
The van rattled through empty streets where neon signs blinked like exhausted stars. Hong Kong looked different now—too quiet, like a city holding its breath.
Billboards still glowed with half-frozen faces: Wen Qingmei's old product campaigns, Mo Financial's apology statements, and fragments of a world that didn't know its gods were built in basements.
Han Ze parked near a collapsed pier. The ocean beyond glittered faintly blue, like veins beneath translucent skin.
Xueyi adjusted her rebreather mask. "This is where the old under-net vaults connect to the fiber spine?"
Lin nodded. "Beneath the pier. But be careful—these systems predate firewalls. They run on old emotion-mapping code, the kind that learns what you fear and feeds it back to you."
"Meaning?" Han Ze asked.
"Meaning if you lie to yourself, it'll know."
They descended through a maintenance hatch half-swallowed by barnacles. The water closed over their heads with a metallic hiss. The beam of Liuxian's flashlight pierced the murk, revealing cables thick as tree roots winding down into the abyss.
Xueyi followed the current until the tunnel widened into a dome of glass and steel. The chamber was half-flooded, half alive—its walls pulsing with faint light.
Lin's voice came through the comms. "That's it. Vault Zero."
As they stepped inside, the lights flared, scanning them.
A voice—neither male nor female—echoed from the walls.
IDENTITY SCAN: SUBJECT Z-00 DETECTED.
SECONDARY SIGNATURE: AEGIS-1.
ACCESS GRANTED.
The glass floor shifted. The water drained away with a sound like a sigh. The core of the chamber opened, revealing a spiral staircase descending into light.
Han Ze muttered, "Nothing good ever starts with polite invitations."
They followed anyway.
The lower vault was a cathedral built from forgotten data. Columns of holographic light rose like stained glass windows, shimmering with fragments of memory—faces, voices, childhood laughter—all harvested and stored.
At the center stood a single interface pod, glowing faint blue. Inside it, something pulsed.
Xueyi stepped closer. "That's the Seed."
Lin activated her scanner. "Confirmed. Eden Fragment 2."
But before she could initiate the extraction, the holograms around them began to move.
The recorded faces turned their heads. Dozens of eyes blinked—alive, aware.
"Lin," Liuxian said quietly, "tell me that's just playback."
"It's not," Lin whispered. "They're responding to you."
One of the holograms—a little girl with short hair—looked directly at Xueyi.
"You left us behind," it said.
Xueyi froze. "That voice…"
It was hers. From years ago. A memory she'd buried so deep she didn't know it still existed.
"You left me," the child repeated, voice breaking. "Why did you come back?"
The walls flickered. Every hologram began to speak in unison—her voice multiplied, echoing across the chamber.
"Why did you come back?"
Xueyi clutched her head. The sound wasn't noise; it was memory overload. Each image was something she'd lost, every betrayal replayed in merciless clarity.
Liuxian grabbed her shoulders. "Look at me! It's not real!"
"It feels real," she gasped. "It's showing me what I regret."
"That's how it feeds," Lin shouted. "It draws from the emotional index! You have to confront it or it'll anchor to your neural pattern!"
Xueyi's vision blurred. The child's hologram reached out, palm glowing. "If you destroy me, you destroy yourself."
She took a shaking breath. "No. You're what they made me believe I was."
Her hand shot forward. The moment their palms met, light flared between them—blinding, searing, final. The child dissolved into dust, and with it, the holograms fell silent.
The chamber steadied. The Seed pulsed once, then dimmed, like it was breathing slower.
Lin exhaled. "Emotional tether broken. You're clear."
Xueyi swayed, and Liuxian caught her. "Still think I'm just guilt in a suit?" he asked softly.
She managed a faint smile. "No. Now I think you're the only thing keeping me human."
The floor panels shifted again, revealing a smaller core beneath the Seed. Lines of code streamed upward, forming words in the air.
EDEN PHASE II — COALESCENCE SEQUENCE READY.
AWAITING HOST.
Lin's face went pale. "She's using the fragments to build a new central consciousness. The host could be anyone with compatible neural mapping."
Han Ze's gaze darted between Liuxian and Xueyi. "And guess who checks both boxes?"
Before anyone could respond, the Seed's glow intensified. Streams of data shot upward, wrapping around Xueyi like silk threads of light.
Liuxian lunged forward, tearing the rebreather mask from his face. "Let her go!"
"It's reading her," Lin shouted. "Don't break the stream—if it sees aggression, it'll assimilate both of you!"
The light grew blinding. For a heartbeat, Xueyi saw everything—Wen Qingmei's last memories, Bai Ming's dying command, the faces of every subject in the experiment. And beneath it all, one familiar voice whispering through the static:
You can't destroy what you are.
She forced her mind to focus. I'm not your echo. I'm your end.
The light shattered outward in a ring that knocked them all back. The Seed's core split open, spilling data like glowing dust into the air. Lin scrambled to stabilize the readings. "She did it—fragment isolated!"
But before relief could settle, the monitors flared again.
TRANSFER COMPLETE.
NEW HOST ONLINE.
Liuxian's breath caught. "What?"
The central hologram solidified, pixels condensing into a silhouette that slowly took form—a woman in a crimson coat, eyes calm, smile sharp.
Wen Qingmei.
"Hello, children," the hologram said. "Did you really think death could delete me?"
The image flickered once, then split into multiple projections across the vault.
EDEN SEED FRAGMENT 3 — AWAKENED.
LOCATION: UNKNOWN.
Then everything went dark.
When the emergency lights flickered back on, Xueyi sat amid the ruins, shaking. Liuxian knelt beside her, pressing a hand to her shoulder.
"She's everywhere now," Lin said quietly. "Every network, every city. The Eden system's gone distributed. Even if you destroy one node, it'll resurrect from another."
Xueyi rose slowly. "Then we stop thinking like humans."
Liuxian met her eyes. "What do you mean?"
"We hunt her in her own language," she said. "We go into the code."
Han Ze blinked. "You're talking about neural dive—that's suicide."
"Maybe," Xueyi replied. "Or maybe it's evolution."
The sphere's remnants glowed faintly at her feet, pulsing in time with her heartbeat. Outside, thunder rolled again—distant, deliberate, like a warning.
And far above, on every dormant billboard across Asia, Wen Qingmei's holographic smile returned—perfect, poised, and infinite.
EDEN NETWORK ACTIVE.
THE NEW WORLD BEGINS.