The city never truly slept, but tonight, Lagos groaned like something ancient trying to die. The sky was choked with red clouds, lightning twitching across them like veins. Kelechi stood beneath a broken billboard that once advertised hope. Now it blinked a corrupted phrase:
> "YOU WERE NEVER HERE."
He stared at the message, its letters warping into ash and code. The boy from the alley hadn't just been forgotten—he had been erased. Not just by technology, but by something older hiding within it.
Kelechi gripped the last relic his mother gave him: a pendant in the shape of an old circuit, burned and warped. She called it a ward. A code breaker. A curse absorber.
He wasn't sure anymore if it was protecting him… or binding him.
He entered the hospital ruins.
This was once where the city sent its broken data, sick code, and dying minds. Now it was just a skeleton—metal ribs twisted, glass lungs shattered, and silence held like breath before a scream. Kelechi had come here chasing one last clue: a record from thirty years ago, marked with a sigil of the Black Archive.
Room 311.
The elevator groaned like something alive as he forced it open manually. Inside, strange symbols were scratched into the walls—frantic, circular, repeating.
He climbed.
Each floor pulsed with wrongness. Static whispered in his ear. Shadows stretched longer than they should. Something kept tapping behind the walls, following him step by step.
By the time he reached the third floor, his hands were trembling.
Room 311's door was sealed with rust and darkness. He placed his palm on the scanner. The relic on his chest heated, pulsing like a heartbeat. Then the lock clicked.
The room opened.
Inside, time had collapsed.
Wires hung like vines from the ceiling. Monitors displayed flickering faces—some crying, others screaming, none alive. A wheelchair sat in the center, empty and blood-streaked. And at the far wall, a mirror reflected nothing.
No Kelechi. No room. Just void.
He stepped inside.
The door slammed shut behind him.
Suddenly, all monitors turned toward him. Dozens of eyes flickered. A chorus of glitching voices spoke:
> "Healer… of broken code. Or carrier… of infected truth?"
"I just want answers," Kelechi whispered.
"Truth is a plague," the voices hissed. "Do you really want to carry it?"
Kelechi's hand tightened on the relic. "I have to. For the boy. For my mother. For everyone they erased."
Silence.
Then… the mirror shattered.
From the darkness behind it, a figure crawled out—not walking, not floating, but dragging itself like it wasn't used to having a body. Skin like rotting wax. A face constantly shifting—man, child, woman, machine. It wore a tattered hospital gown with the number #0001 burned into its chest.
The original patient.
The failed cure.
The source.
"You called me," it croaked. "Now you must take my place."
Kelechi backed away. "I didn't summon you."
"You opened the door. You brought memory where there should be none. You woke the broken code."
It lunged.
Kelechi screamed as its hand passed through his chest—not physically, but digitally. He saw flashes: cities crumbling, data screaming, souls encoded and discarded. His mother's face—glitching, begging.
She had been one of them.
"I will not be forgotten," he growled.
With shaking hands, he smashed the relic against the floor. It exploded in light and sparks, releasing a wave of raw, unfiltered memory. The creature shrieked as the room began to collapse. Lights shattered. Walls bled numbers.
But in the wreckage, something was born.
A new code.
Kelechi reached into the air and pulled the symbols together with his hands. He didn't know how he knew them—only that they were part of him now. He rewrote the room, erased the shadows, reclaimed the forgotten.
The boy reappeared in the corner—half-data, half-soul.
"You're a real healer now," the boy whispered.
Kelechi looked at his trembling hands. They were glowing. Not with magic. Not with hope. But with memory. Truth.
And truth is always painful.