The deeper you went under Neo-Ilium, the older the city became.
And the more it remembered.
Here, the lights flickered with memory. Concrete sweat. Steel groaned with heat cycles decades out of date. Vents hissed with old breath from a world that should've been dead.
They called it the Belowline—the city's original transit grid, long buried beneath the Corp lev-rails and erased from public maps.
Which made it the perfect place to hide something no Corp could overwrite.
Someone like the Archivist.
---
Jian descended into the dark, each step echoing off rusted stairwells that vibrated faintly with trapped chi. His HUD dimmed to preserve battery. Connection faded.
> [WARNING: NO CORP SIGNAL DETECTED]
[SEED PATH: AUTONOMOUS MODE ACTIVE]
[CHI RESERVES: 64u | STABILITY: FLUCTUATING]
He had no network. No map. No backup.
Only a whisper from Wren:
> "The Archivist keeps the styles they tried to erase. Find her. She won't teach you. But she might let you write."
---
The air changed as he passed the third threshold.
Dust. Machine oil. Something older—like burnt ink.
He followed fading graffiti down the walls: outlaw sect marks, fractured gang emblems… and one symbol repeated, stenciled in chi-reactive paint:
A flame inside a closed eye.
Jian's fingers tingled.
He followed it.
Eventually, he found the platform.
Or what was left of it.
Half a station overgrown with rooted cables and pulse-vines. A shattered mag-train fused with antique server stacks. And at its center, sitting cross-legged atop a throne of old terminals—
Her.
The Archivist.
She wore dataweave robes stitched with retired protocols. Scroll barcodes flickered across her arms like tattoos. Her face was veiled, but chi-glass eyes glowed behind it—scroll-code dancing in every blink.
"You brought the seed," she said. "Didn't you?"
Jian stepped forward. "How do you know?"
"I can hear it in your step," she murmured. "Seed Path walkers echo forward."
---
He knelt. Pulled back his sleeve. Showed the chi-laced interface in his wrist.
Flame. Root. Motion. Disruption. A tangle of living code trying to become something.
She studied it silently.
"Flame-root divergence. Broken lineage. Unauthorized branching. You are either a miracle…"
"…or a mistake," Jian finished.
Her smile bent. "No difference."
"I didn't come for legacy," he said. "I came to build something new. Something they can't control."
The Archivist stood. Her limbs moved like data run on unstable current—fluid, disjointed, mesmerizing.
"No one builds," she said. "They blend. They steal. They forge."
She reached out and tapped his temple.
> [EXTERNAL ACCESS GRANTED – LEVEL 0 SCROLL ARCHIVE UNLOCKED]
[DOWNLOADING: DELETED FORM MEMORY | ETA: 6s]
Jian staggered.
His mind erupted.
A flood of corrupted chi-forms poured into his neural field:
Razor Petal Step.
Sevenfold Disconnect Palm.
Thread of the Infinite Needle.
Whisper Pulse Chi Shell.
Movements coded like viruses. Forms encoded in rage and desperation. All forbidden. All alive.
He dropped to a knee.
"How do I learn this?"
"You don't," she said. "You remix. You burn the clean lines. You write new ones."
She pulled a scroll from within her robe—black silk weave, humming with old blood chi.
It shimmered in his hand the moment he touched it.
> [NEW STYLE SCROLL INITIATED: CUSTOM PATH RECOGNIZED]
[NAME YOUR TECHNIQUE:]
He hesitated. Then remembered Skyfall.
The burn. The stillness. The counterweight of Rooted Thread and the ferocity of Flame.
He entered:
> "Glassfire Pulse Form v0.1"
The scroll absorbed it. The chi inside him shifted—aligned.
> [STYLE REGISTERED – SEED PATH COMPATIBILITY: 92%]
The Archivist nodded, satisfied.
"You've written your first page," she said. "Now the city will try to erase it."
She turned away.
Jian was already backing toward the tunnel, scroll clutched tight—
"Wait," she called. "One more thing."
She tossed him a small chip.
He caught it.
"What's this?"
"A door."
"To where?"
Her smile sparked.
> "The Arena of Ash. Where the scrolls bleed before they're read."
---