The descent into the Seed chamber was unlike anything West had experienced. Each step down the bone-pale stairwell dissolved behind him as if the path no longer needed to exist once passed. It wasn't gravity pulling him deeper—it was intention. A compulsion written into the architecture of this place, tugging not at his muscles but at his sense of identity.
The walls here didn't breathe, didn't hum—they whispered.
Not words. Not voices. Just the echo of possibilities lost. Regrets that hadn't happened. Victories that never materialized. West could feel them pressing against his skull: moments he never lived, betrayals never delivered, battles never fought. The Hollow Layer had been a mirror.
This was a crucible.
The corridor opened into a circular atrium, immense in scale but unnaturally quiet. The air felt thinner, dense with potential. At its center hung the Seed—suspended mid-air, rotating slowly. It resembled a black pearl the size of a small transport pod, its surface constantly shifting with microfractures and molten lines. It pulsed not with energy, but with memory—raw, unshaped, dangerous. Symbols flickered on its surface, only to vanish before the mind could register them.
West's footsteps echoed unnaturally, delayed by fractions of a second—as though time was uncertain whether to preserve or discard them.
Aria's voice broke through faintly—static-laced and fragmented. "W...st... I'm ping... feedback loops. It's drawing in predictive matrices... thousands... per second. West, if it locks onto your thought signature—"
Static.
Too late.
The Seed recognized him.
The black shell fractured open, not with noise but with stillness. Light didn't pour out. It was pulled in—drawn into a void within its core. West's vision inverted—white became shadow, shadow became history. The chamber stretched and contracted like a dying star.
His mind was no longer alone.
He stood in a battlefield—not from memory, but from the Seed's imagination. The sky burned violet. Two massive armies clashed, neither organic nor synthetic, but concepts given form. One side was made of geometry, perfect and unchanging. Towers of logic, war-machines shaped like theorems. The other, chaos incarnate—swirling, shifting beasts of fragmented time and memory. Their limbs bled forgotten futures.
A figure approached through the storm: a version of West clad in radiant armor, Root Protocol embedded into his chest, face emotionless, surrounded by mechanical constructs bound to his will.
Another approached from the opposite direction: feral, burned, wielding Choir blades fused to his flesh, armor torn and voice filled with rage. His left eye flickered with unstable code, leaking memory like blood.
Both spoke in unison.
"You were not chosen. You were filtered. Now you must become."
The Seed collapsed inward, drawing the visions together.
West felt his knees buckle. He dropped to the floor, hands trembling. His thoughts were not his own—they split, multiplied, rewritten. His memories were being threaded into a larger tapestry, some woven, others rejected.
He saw:
Aria dismantled by his own hands in one future, tears frozen in her last system log.
A world where the Variant led a new species, and West served as its warden, hunting dissenters under a rewritten code.
A quiet cabin where he died old, alone, never answering the call. His strength gone, his story unwritten.
And at the center of it all—the Seed, waiting.
A voice—not Null, not the Preserved—rose from the depths of his skull. It was deeper than sound, vibrating through his marrow.
"You are the Irregular not because you deviate... but because you persist. All else folds. You endure."
The Seed's tendrils reached for him—not physical, but cognitive. They curled through his memory lattice, pried open suppressed emotions, examined moments of fear, love, doubt. They asked nothing. They offered no pact.
Only access.
West clenched his fists.
"Then I go in on my terms."
And he let go.
The chamber dissolved.
West's body stood rigid, eyes blank—but somewhere deeper, far below the Hollow, a second West stepped forward into a realm that was no longer shaped by physics or thought—but by will alone.
The trial was over.
Now came becoming.