This time, the dream did not shatter.
When Li opened his eyes, he found that the world was stable again, with no displaced corridors or stretched time.
He stood in a silent space; the ground was like water, but he didn't sink. There were no distant objects, only a clear figure: Mio.
It was Mio.
She wasn't an afterimage or a pieced-together outline; her presence was complete and definite, as if she had finally been allowed to exist.
Li didn't speak immediately.
He only confirmed one thing: this time, she wouldn't be interrupted.
'You've come,' said Mio, her tone soft.
Li nodded. 'So... now it's the complete version?'
Mio paused slightly, then gave an almost imperceptible smile. 'I suppose so.'
There was a distance between them — not estrangement, but a deliberately maintained safe zone.
Li suddenly realised that this might be the distance she had been maintaining all along.
'Those dreams,' he began, 'weren't random, were they?'
Mio didn't deny it; she simply replied softly, 'When you start to be erased, the world leaves blanks.'
Li frowned.
'Blanks cause instability,' she continued, 'so someone needs to fill in those gaps.'
Li's breath hitched.
He remembered those sluggish gazes; he remembered someone who couldn't call him by name, yet who felt that they shouldn't forget. He remembered those memories that weren't his own, reaching out to him.
'So...' he said in a low voice. 'That other half of reality—'
'Is with me.' Mio finished.
This wasn't a declaration of pride or sacrifice, just a statement of fact.
Li suddenly didn't know what to say.
It wasn't that the world was targeting him; it was that she had always stood between him and the world.
'You didn't have to go to this extent,' he said.
Mio was silent for a moment.
'If I don't catch it, you'll be overwritten directly.' She looked up at him.
She spoke the words so calmly, as if describing a formula already calculated.
Li looked away and, after a long pause, spoke. 'So that's why you've started losing control lately.'
Mio didn't answer, only giving a soft 'Mmm.'
The dream was so quiet that even the emotions had been smoothed out.
'Li,' she suddenly said. 'You need to remember one thing.'
He looked at her.
'You're not abnormal; you were just marked in advance.'
These words finally landed in the right place.
Li nodded. 'And you?'
Mio looked at him, not answering immediately.
After a moment, she said, 'I was the one who walked a little further for you.'
The dream began to tremble slightly; not because it was collapsing, but because time was running out.
Li knew this conversation was about to end, but at least the most important part hadn't been cut this time.
'After the restart,' he asked, 'will you still remember?'
Mio's expression was calm yet resolute.
'I've always remembered.'
'It's just that you finally know.'
The scene began to darken.
Before the dream ended, Li suddenly realised something: he hadn't been forgotten by the world; someone had been bearing the weight of being forgotten for him.
And now, that person could no longer bear it.
The pressure level of the seal had reached a dangerous equilibrium.
It neither increased nor decreased.
It was as if the world itself had ceased to update this data.
The campus was no longer just a place; it had become the structure bearing the conflict itself.
The spiritual pressure in the air had lost its layered quality and spread too evenly. Those with sensory abilities were the first to notice the anomaly — they could no longer distinguish between the barrier and reality.
Ordinary people began to react.
Some entered familiar classrooms, but stood blankly at the door — not because they were unfamiliar with the space, but because they suddenly didn't know what it was supposed to contain.
'What was this place for before?'
This question was quickly forgotten, as if the brain had automatically skipped that part.
Misidentification began:
Some mistook strangers for familiar faces, but couldn't recall their names. Others nodded politely to classmates they had known for years as if they were meeting them for the first time.
The rupture in the sense of time became even more subtle.
The bell rang, but no one stood up. The second hand ticked normally, but the sense of what to do next was lost.
Concepts were disappearing.
It wasn't that memories were being erased, but rather that the frame of reference was being removed.
The question "What was this place originally?" began to become meaningless.
Yet everything on campus seemed normal.
Sunlight shone on the playground, announcements were made on time and vending machines stood ready with their lights on.
The world began to pretend that nothing had happened.
It was as if, as long as the collapse wasn't acknowledged, the rules could continue to operate.
Li stood in the crowd, experiencing a clear sense of unease for the first time.
This wasn't fear, but confirmation.
If "normality" even needed to be maintained, then it had ceased to exist.
The seal remained; the campus remained.
But something had silently slipped out of the world's narrative.
At one point, the anomaly was abruptly and forcibly halted.
Neither the seal was stabilising nor the enemy retreating.
It was as if the entire system had been taken over.
The noise of spiritual pressure suddenly ceased, the displaced space stopped spreading and the areas that were failing to load froze in place.
Someone whispered, 'Who tampered with the permissions?'
The next second, White Raven appeared.
He didn't appear from anywhere in particular; he simply stood there, as if he belonged to this layer of reality.
He made no declaration and had no imposing presence, yet all monitoring devices automatically downgraded simultaneously.
'I've taken over the situation,' he said calmly, as though he were handling an anticipated anomaly report.
This wasn't a hero saving the day, but rather the system administrator coming online.
White Raven bypassed the Nightwalker's command chain directly and entered the control layer of the dream structure.
Mio sensed his intervention almost instantly.
The boundaries of the dream were forcibly tightened, the layers were renumbered and all unstable branches began to be reclaimed, folded and compressed.
Her breathing became rapid.
This wasn't due to repulsion, but because this was the first time someone had touched her core permissions.
'If this continues, the entire dream will reverse and overwrite reality,' echoed Bai Ya's voice within the structural layers.
Mio gritted her teeth. "I know.
'I know, but you still did it.'
Bai Ya didn't blame her; he simply stated the facts.
He paused, then concluded:
'Forced convergence can be executed, but the price is that you must abandon anchoring everyone.'
The moment these words were uttered, the dream structure trembled visibly.
Mio looked up. '... Everyone?'
"Yes." Bai Ya looked at her. 'What you're doing now is multi-point anchoring, which is not allowed in the first place.'
The rules were laid bare.
She could either let the dream spiral out of control or sever all anchors except one.
She could only choose one. Mio's fingertips trembled slightly, not from hesitation, but from determination.
The names she had protected surfaced in her consciousness one by one, and then she set them aside one by one.
In the end, only one remained.
Bai Ya glanced at the result, offering no comment, and simply activated the final command.
The dream layer began to shrink rapidly and the boundary between reality and dream separated once more.
Before the structure was completely stable, Bai Ya uttered a single sentence in an almost inaudible voice:
'A decisive choice. I hope you understand what this means.'
Mio did not reply.
She simply stood in the gradually quietening dream, fully realising that from that moment on, there was no way out for her.
There was no celebration when the seal stabilised.
The barrier parameters returned to the safe zone, the spiritual pressure values became 'reasonable' again and all the systems gave the same assessment: 'Anomaly handled.'
The world resumed its course,
as if nothing had happened.
Li stood at the edge of the training ground. The wind had returned to normal, and the temperature, direction and speed were consistent with what he remembered. The battle was over, and he was alive.
But the sense of unease hadn't disappeared.
The first thing that felt wrong was the name.
During the Night Squad's post-battle check, someone had glanced at him, lingering on his appearance as if waiting for something to emerge.
'You are...?'
The other person quickly followed up, as if they had found a reasonable explanation.
'Never mind, it's nothing.'
Li was stunned. He stood there, fully equipped and in good condition, yet he was dismissed with a simple 'never mind'.
The second time, it was someone he knew.
They walked alongside him for a while, chatting about the battle they'd just fought. The conversation was natural and the tone was familiar, but when the person turned to leave, they didn't call his name.
It wasn't deliberate avoidance; they simply couldn't remember.
It was as if a field that should have been automatically filled in had suddenly become blank.
Li began to understand.
He hadn't disappeared; he'd simply transitioned from being 'the one being identified' to 'an existence requiring additional confirmation'.
The world hadn't deleted him, it had just relegated him to the periphery.
Some people could still remember what he had done, but not who had done it. Some records remained, but the signatures were blurred.
The cruelest part was that nobody thought this was abnormal.
The world operated so smoothly that even the 'missing person' wasn't considered an anomaly.
Li stood in front of the school building, watching the crowds come and go. They didn't truly avoid him; their routes just happened not to include him.
He suddenly remembered what Mio had said.
Not forgotten, but preordained.
Now, he had finally reached that point.
The seal is stable; the crisis is over.
As the one left behind, he knows clearly that this is only the beginning of the reckoning.
The world remembers being saved, but has almost forgotten who was at the heart of it.
Before disappearing, Mio said no farewell.
She knew perfectly well that farewells were meaningless when the world begins to rewrite memories and emotions become mere noise.
What she left behind were notebooks.
More than one.
These notebooks were scattered in different locations, at different times and in different states of preservation.
Some resembled diaries, recording changes in dream structure, the stability of anchor points and reactions to anomalies in world regeneration; the language used was calm, like that of an operational log.
Others clearly weren't written for the system.
The corners of the pages were repeatedly folded and some sentences were crossed out and rewritten.
Li found the first notebook very late.
It was tucked at the bottom of the filing cabinet; the cover was clean and unsigned.
He opened the first page and knew who had left it.
The handwriting was all too familiar.
She didn't explain what had happened, nor did she mention 'sacrifice' or 'choice'.
She simply wrote everything down clearly and in order:
'The world will forget you. This is a side effect of the convergence, not a mistake.'
Don't try to repair memories; that will trigger a secondary overwriting.
She even anticipated his reaction:
'If you've read this far, it means the anchor point is still working and the conditions for restarting have been met.'
Li closed the notebook, his breathing slowing.
He finally understood that 'restarting' wasn't about returning to the past.
It was about redefining who tells the story of this world.
On the last page, Mio's handwriting was noticeably lighter.
It didn't feel like an instruction, but more like a note left for someone:
'Don't rush to find me.'
'When you begin to be actively excluded by the world, that's the entrance.'
Li put the notebook away.
The campus was quiet; everything seemed to have returned to normal.
But he knew the old narrative was over.
In the next chapter, the world wouldn't decide who was important anymore.
Restarting, ready.