When I woke in the hotel room, the air felt wrong.
Not heavy.Not cold.Just… wiped clean.Like someone had passed a cloth through the entire room and removed anything that could be called "a scent."
Nothing around me had changed.I had changed.
My senses were too sharp.When I rolled to the side, my muscles reacted half a beat earlier than expected.Even the angle of my palm touching the mattress felt too controlled, too precise—as if my body had quietly updated itself overnight.
I pushed myself up.
The shadow on the wall lagged by one frame.A thin slit of time between me and it.
Patch, who'd been curled by the foot of the bed, stepped forward—then immediately stepped back.His ears flattened, pupils narrowing.
As if he was checking whetherI was still the me he remembered.
I barely inhaled before it happened—My source point throbbed once, soft but sharp, like someone tapping a sync key inside my chest.
The edge of my vision brightened for half a second.Clean, like the lens of the world had been wiped.
Emilia's instrument chirped.Not loud, but urgent—like it was trying to catch up with a wave still expanding.
She scanned the area across my chest, her brow tightening.
"Your body's data density… is still rising."She adjusted the device. "Your body is rewriting itself. Too quickly."
I swallowed."What's the reaction supposed to be?"
She didn't answer immediately.She increased the instrument's sensitivity, eyes locked on every fluctuation.
Then—The world flickered.
A ring fragment.A misaligned symbol.A thin horizontal slash of light lasting no more than 0.2 seconds.
So fast it could've been a brain glitch.
But Patch's fur exploded upward.He was certain: it was not an illusion.
From downstairs came steady footsteps.
ARC field agents—already here, but not approaching.
I moved to the window.
Three plain-clothes operatives stood outside the building, instruments pulsing faint waves outward, all converging on the direction of the lake.
Alden stood at the front.
Still.Anchored.He looked like he could hold the entire district in place if he had to.
He raised his head and looked directly at me.Not at my face.At the point on my chest.
As if confirming the intensity of the rewrite.
No wave.No gesture.Just monitoring.
ARC Backend – Vienna Node-2
On the giant map, two sync points glowed:
● Lake Core (Reading Node)● Jeff (Matcher)
Status:Matching Sequence – Low-Level Active
A monitor reported rapidly:
"Fourteen civilians nearby experienced minor delayering—brief spatial mismatch, three-second memory gaps, sudden jolt-awakening…All logged."
A calm figure stood behind the glass—one of ARC's higher ranks, part of the moderate faction.
Only his back visible.
"Lower all news traffic," he ordered."Report to the district office as a micro-pressure anomaly."
A pause.
"During rewrite, no one comes near the matcher.Maintain twenty meters distance."
The whole base quieted instantly.
Back in the room, my breath synced with my heartbeat too perfectly.Unnaturally.
As if my body was waiting for something to return from the outside.
Then—My thoughts skipped.
I meant to ask Emilia:
"How long will the rewrite last?"
But what came out was:
"…Where is it now?"
Not my sentence.Not my structure.Words arranged like something else had nudged them.
Patch rushed forward, crouching low, a growl stuck deep in his throat—not at me,but at the idea that something inside me wasn't aligned.
Wind leaked through the window frame—directionless, patterned.A rhythm.
It synchronized with my source point for half a breath.
From the lake, a thin pulse of light responded—pinging my position.
Alden looked up again, expression turning heavy for the first time.
"…The rewrite hasn't stopped."
The world stretched—vision pulled into a narrow slit.
Color, depth, space—compressed.
0.3 seconds.
In that thin slice of time,a figure appeared:
Human-shaped.Featureless.Weightless.A perfect void with a source point identical to mine glowing in its chest.
It stood in darkness.Waiting.Or approaching.
It lifted a hand—
—and my vision snapped back.
Air slammed into my lungs.My knees hit the floor.
Patch snarled toward the lake, fur raised like blades.
Below, Alden watched me—and for the first time, his expression shifted like the situation had just dropped into a deeper layer.
He asked only one question:
"…What did it say to you?"
I couldn't answer.
Because the symbol in my chestwas still pulsing—
Precise.Steady.Too steady to be my own heartbeat.