Rei's boots skidded to a halt.
He stood at the threshold of the Archive's beating heart.
A place once beautiful—where dreams were stitched into stability and identities were quietly rebuilt—now hung in mid-collapse, like a cathedral breaking apart in slow motion.
This is it, he thought.
The Core.
No floor. No ceiling. Just endless rotating layers of broken reality.
The pillars that once held memories upright were cracked, rotating slowly in space. Letters, names, emotions—literal fragments of people—floated between them like drifting embers.
And in the very center?
A figure stood atop a floating platform of spiraling light and crumbling code.
He wasn't human.
Not exactly.
But he was… familiar.
"Jay?" Rei stepped forward instinctively—but then stopped.
The boy on the platform wasn't Jay.
He was taller, translucent, his form shimmering like glass submerged in water. His hair was silver, unnaturally so, and his eyes...
They had seen eternity.
