The Weald deepened.
Not in the way forests normally deepen—trees growing thicker, underbrush denser, light fading incrementally. This was different. The air itself grew heavier, as though centuries pressed down from above, compressing each breath into something thick and ancient.
Sai Ji felt it in the fragment. It pulsed now at regular intervals, a heartbeat that didn't sync with his own but wanted to. Reaching. Searching.
For what, he didn't know.
The others felt it too. Fern walked with shield half-raised, muscles coiled. Nyx's hands never strayed far from his hilts. Aeliana's diagnostics flickered constantly, overwhelmed by readings that shouldn't exist.
Only Lura moved normally. Since the arena, since the corridor, since Sai Ji had pulled her from the white room with the unopening door, she seemed… grounded. As though surviving her worst memory had burned away something that had been holding her back.
The path forked.
Left: a corridor of trees so ancient their trunks had merged, forming living walls of bark and moss. Bioluminescent fungi lined the ground, casting everything in soft blue-green.
Right: open ground, scattered ruins, mist lying low like a sleeping animal. Easier terrain. More visible threats.
Sai Ji stopped.
The fragment pulsed. Once. Twice. Three times.
Each pulse aligned with the left path.
"The fragments are planted," he said quietly. "Not scattered. Planted. Like seeds."
Midnight Wolf's HUD flickered. "Planted by who?"
"The god I used to be. The forest that remembers him. Something in between." Sai Ji's claws extended slightly, responding to tension he couldn't name. "Doesn't matter. What matters is they're growing something."
Aeliana stepped forward, diagnostics sweeping both paths. "Left path has higher ambient memory concentration. Off the scale, actually. My readings are—" She stopped. Frowned. "My readings say the left path is digesting something."
"Digesting?"
"Like the memory-cycles. But slower. More… deliberate." She looked at Sai Ji. "Something's in there. Something the forest is breaking down. And it's been breaking it down for a long time."
Fern's shield came up. "Then we go right."
"We can't."
"The fuck we can't—"
"The fragments are left." Sai Ji's voice was calm. Absolute. "We go left because left is where the answers are. Where the next piece is. Where whatever's being digested is waiting."
Fern's jaw tightened. "You don't know that."
"I know the fragment pulled me toward Lura. I know it pulled me toward the Guardian. I know it's pulling me now." He met Fern's eyes. "I'm not guessing anymore."
Silence.
Then Nyx, surprisingly: "He's right."
Fern spun. "You're taking his side?"
"There are no sides." Nyx's voice was quiet. Unusual for him. "There's just survival. And surviving this forest means following the thing that's been surviving it longer than we have."
He nodded at Sai Ji.
"I don't like it. I don't understand it. But I'm not stupid enough to ignore it."
They couldn't all go left.
The path was too narrow. Too enclosed. Too vulnerable to whatever was digesting in the depths. If something attacked, they'd be funneled, trapped, killed.
If something attacked from both sides—
"We split," Sai Ji said.
Fern's head snapped up. "Absolutely not."
"We split. Half left, half right. Right path circles around, provides flank coverage. Left path pushes through, finds the fragment."
"That's—" Fern stopped. Swallowed. "That's leaving you exposed."
Sai Ji almost smiled. "I'm always exposed. Doesn't seem to matter."
"It matters to us."
The words hung in the air.
Fern wasn't arguing tactics. He was arguing fear. Fear of losing his friend to something he couldn't fight. Fear of watching Sai Ji become something that didn't need protecting. Fear of being left behind.
Lura stepped forward.
"I'll go left with him."
Fern's eyes widened. "Lura—"
"I was in the memory-cycles. I know what it feels like when the forest starts digesting. If it happens again, he'll need someone who can recognize it." Her voice was steady. "Also, I'm not asking."
She looked at Sai Ji.
"You pulled me out. I'm not letting you go in alone."
Sai Ji held her gaze. Saw the seven-year-old still waiting in her eyes. Saw the woman who had stopped waiting.
"Left path," he said. "You and me. Everyone else circles right. Stay within signal range. If either side finds trouble, we converge."
Fern opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"…If you die, I'm going to be so fucking angry."
"Noted."
They moved.
The left path closed behind them like a throat swallowing.
Within twenty steps, the outside world had vanished. No glimpse of the fork. No sound of the others. Just Sai Ji, Lura, and the living walls of fused trees.
The bioluminescent fungi cast everything in blue-green. Shadows moved where nothing moved. Roots covered the ground so thickly that walking felt like wading—each step required pulling free of grasping tendrils.
The Thorn-Rose Mark pulsed steadily.
The fragment pulsed in response.
Lura walked close. Her injured leg had healed—partially—but she didn't favor it. Didn't complain. Just matched his pace and watched the walls with sharp, scanning eyes.
"Something's wrong," she said.
"Everything's wrong."
"No. More wrong." She gestured at the roots. "They're not just growing. They're moving. Look."
Sai Ji looked.
She was right. The roots shifted constantly—slowly, almost imperceptibly, but shifting. Coiling. Uncoiling. Pressing against each other like snakes in a pit.
Not random.
Communicating.
"They know we're here," Lura whispered.
"They've always known."
He kept walking.
The roots didn't attack. But they watched. And as Sai Ji and Lura pressed deeper, the watching became something else.
Attention.
The kind of attention a predator gives prey that has entered its territory voluntarily.
The kind of attention that says: You came to me. You wanted this. Don't be surprised when you get it.
They found the first body at the hundred-step mark.
Or what had once been a body.
It was fused into the root-wall. Armor—ancient, rusted, almost unrecognizable—protruded from the bark like fossilized remains. A helm hung at an angle, empty eye-sockets staring at nothing. One gauntleted hand reached outward, frozen mid-grasp.
Reaching for something.
Or someone.
Lura stopped breathing.
"Sai Ji."
He saw it.
The hand wasn't reaching randomly. It was reaching toward another figure—smaller, also fused, also ancient. A child's armor. A child's helm. A child's remains, preserved in wood and memory.
"They were running," Lura whispered. "They were running and the forest—"
"Caught them."
Sai Ji's voice was flat. Not from lack of feeling. From focus. The fragment was burning now, hot against his palm, pulling him forward.
They're not the ones, it seemed to say. Keep moving. Keep moving. Keep—
Another body.
Then another.
Then a cluster.
Dozens of them. Hundreds. Fused into the walls at every angle—standing, kneeling, reaching, falling. Some still clutched weapons. Some still clutched each other. All of them frozen, preserved, digested.
Lura's hand found Sai Ji's arm.
"This is—" Her voice cracked. "This is a graveyard."
"Worse." Sai Ji's claws extended fully. "It's a garden."
He pointed.
Between the bodies, growing from the spaces where roots had pierced armor and flesh and bone, were flowers.
Pale. Delicate. Bioluminescent in soft gold.
And each flower's center pulsed with light.
The same light as the fragment.
"The god didn't scatter his fragments," Sai Ji said slowly. "He planted them. In the dead. In the ones the forest digested. In the ones who came looking for—"
He stopped.
For what?
For him?
For the god he used to be?
For answers none of them had ever found?
Lura's grip tightened. "Sai Ji. Look."
At the end of the corridor, where the roots converged into a wall of solid wood, one figure remained unfused.
Armor black as obsidian. Crown of twisted roots. Face—
Sai Ji's face.
Older. Weary. Eyes closed.
And in its chest, where the heart should be, a fragment blazed with light.
Sai Ji approached slowly.
Not from caution—from recognition. Every step felt like walking toward a mirror that showed not reflection but origin. The Thorn-Rose Mark screamed. The fragment in his palm blazed. The roots pulled back, clearing a path to the figure.
Lura stayed close. Weapon drawn. Eyes scanning.
"It's you," she breathed.
"Was." Sai Ji's voice was strange. Distant. "Was me. Before."
The figure's eyes remained closed. But its chest—the fragment—pulsed in rhythm with Sai Ji's heartbeat. With the Mark. With the forest itself.
"You came back."
The voice was the same as the fragment's. The same as the one in the camp. But older. Weary in a way that transcended exhaustion.
"I waited."
Sai Ji stopped arm's reach away.
"You're not a fragment."
"No."
"You're the rest of him. The part that didn't scatter."
"The part that couldn't."
The figure's eyes opened.
Gold. The same gold that bled into Sai Ji's when the Werewolf King rose. But older. Dimmer. The gold of a sun that had been setting for millennia.
"I am what remains when a god chooses to fall but cannot bear to land."
Lura's weapon wavered. "That's—that doesn't make sense."
"Nothing about dying makes sense. Especially not to the dying."
The figure—the body, the remnant, the almost-corpse—raised one hand. Slowly. Painfully. As though moving through centuries of accumulated weight.
"You carry my name. You carry my death. You carry my fragment."
Its fingers brushed Sai Ji's chest.
"Now carry my choice."
The world dissolved.
Not gently. Not gradually. Completely—as though someone had erased reality and forgotten to draw it back.
Sai Ji stood in white space.
No forest. No Lura. No fragment. Just him, the Thorn-Rose Mark, and—
The god.
Not the fused figure. The living god. Younger. Fiercer. Crowned in light. Standing on a battlefield of stars.
Before him: the enemy that existed in negative space.
Sai Ji couldn't look at it directly. Every time he tried, his vision slid sideways, his mind refused to process, his very sense of self protested. It wasn't darkness. It wasn't void. It was absence. The shape left behind when something that should exist simply… doesn't.
The god spoke.
"You cannot be fought."
The enemy said nothing. It was nothing.
"You cannot be reasoned with."
Nothing.
"You cannot be fled."
Still nothing.
The god's shoulders straightened. His crown blazed brighter.
"But you can be forgotten."
He raised his hands.
And Sai Ji understood.
The First Reset wasn't a weapon. It wasn't a cataclysm. It wasn't an accident.
It was a sacrifice.
The god—the one with Sai Ji's face, with Sai Ji's name, with Sai Ji's self—chose to erase everything. Himself. His name. His memory. His existence. So completely that the enemy, which fed on existence, would have nothing left to consume.
It would starve in the void between realities.
It would fade into the absence it had always been.
It would die.
The god began to dissolve.
But at the last moment—the smallest moment, the most human moment—he hesitated.
I want to be remembered.
The thought was barely a whisper. Barely a heartbeat. Barely anything at all.
But it was enough.
Seven fragments of himself. Seven seeds of memory. Seven chances for someone, someday, to find him and choose.
Choose what?
Sai Ji didn't know.
The vision ended.
He was back in the corridor.
Lura was holding him. When had that happened? Her arms were around his chest, her face pressed against his shoulder, her entire body trembling.
"You were gone," she whispered. "You were gone for—I don't know how long. Minutes. Hours. Your eyes were open but you weren't there and I couldn't—"
"I'm here."
He said it automatically. But as the words left his mouth, he realized they were true.
He was here.
Not there. Not in the white space. Not on the battlefield of stars. Here, in the root-corridor, with Lura holding him and the fused figure watching with ancient, dying eyes.
"You saw."
Sai Ji nodded.
"You understand."
"I understand you chose to erase yourself." His voice was rough. "I understand you left fragments because you couldn't bear to be forgotten completely. I understand the enemy is still out there, somewhere, starving in the void."
"Yes."
"I understand the forest has been growing your fragments in the dead, waiting for someone to come collect them."
"Yes."
"I understand that if I collect all seven, I'll have to choose."
The figure's eyes closed. Opened. Closed again.
"You will have to choose what the fragments become. Memory. Power. Resurrection. Oblivion." A pause. "You will have to choose what I become."
Sai Ji looked at the figure. At the body that had waited. At the remnant of a god who had saved everything by losing himself.
"What do you want?"
"I wanted to be remembered."
"And now?"
Silence.
Then, so quietly it barely registered:
"I want to rest."
Sai Ji reached forward.
His hand passed through the figure's chest as though through mist. Closed around the fragment. Pulled.
It came free easily. Too easily. As though it had been waiting for this moment since before the First Reset.
The figure's eyes closed one final time.
"Thank you."
The body crumbled.
Not violently. Not painfully. Just… settled. Into roots. Into soil. Into the forest that had held it for millennia, waiting for someone to come release it.
The roots closed over the space where it had been.
And Sai Ji stood in the corridor, two fragments burning in his palm, Lura's arms still around him, the weight of a god's choice pressing against his chest.
[SOVEREIGN FRAGMENT — ACQUIRED]
[2 / 7]
[New understanding achieved: THE FIRST RESET]
[New understanding achieved: THE ENEMY IN NEGATIVE SPACE]
[New understanding achieved: THE CHOICE]
[TRIAL STATUS: CONTINUING]
[ZONE PERMISSION: EXTENDED]
[The forest that remembers kings now remembers why.]
Lura's voice was small. "Sai Ji."
"Yeah."
"What do we do now?"
He looked at the fragments. At the roots closing over a god's final rest. At the corridor of bodies and flowers and memory.
"We keep walking," he said. "There are five more."
"And after that?"
He didn't answer.
Because after that, he would have to choose.
And he still didn't know what choice to make.
They emerged from the corridor to find the others waiting.
Fern's shield was raised. Nyx's swords were drawn. Aeliana's diagnostics were screaming. Midnight Wolf's HUD was flickering through a cascade of errors.
But they were alive.
And when they saw Sai Ji and Lura emerge—covered in root-dust, carrying two fragments instead of one, eyes holding something none of them recognized—they lowered their weapons.
"You're back," Fern said.
It wasn't a question.
Sai Ji nodded.
"The forest showed me things." His voice was strange. Not his own. Not the god's. Something in between. "About the First Reset. About what I used to be. About what I'm going to have to choose."
Fern's jaw tightened. "Choose?"
"When we have all seven. When the fragments are complete. When the god I used to be is whole again." Sai Ji met his eyes. "Then I choose what happens next."
Silence.
Then Nyx, unexpectedly: "Good."
Sai Ji blinked. "Good?"
"Good you know. Good you're telling us. Good we're not walking blind into whatever comes next." Nyx shrugged. "I've followed worse leaders. Most of them died. You keep not dying. I'll take it."
Lura laughed. It was a small sound, almost swallowed by the forest, but it was real.
Fern's shield lowered.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. We keep walking. We find the rest. We figure out the rest later."
He looked at Sai Ji.
"But if you try to sacrifice yourself—if you try to pull some noble bullshit at the end—I will personally drag you back from whatever god-realm you've ascended to and kick your ass."
Sai Ji almost smiled.
"Noted."
They walked.
The forest watched.
And somewhere in the depths, five more fragments pulsed in rhythm with the heartbeat of a god who had waited long enough.