[ The Mind Realm ]
Kai opened his eyes.
He wasn't in his apartment anymore. He was floating in a void of static darkness.
The Abyss stared back at him.
Suddenly, a neon blue square manifested in the darkness. It was a grid. A Sudoku puzzle.
But as Kai looked closer, he realized the numbers weren't ink; they were lines of raw code.
[TRI AL INI TIA TED : SU BJE CT K AI - COG NIT IVE IND EX V ER IFI ED]
[TIM E LI MIT : 2 HO URS]
Kai let out a dry, humorless laugh. "Is this a joke? You're testing the Creator with his own tutorial puzzle?"
His eyes scanned the grid. He processed the patterns instantly.
Row 4, Column 9... Missing integer is 7.
"Done," Kai whispered.
He solved it in less than a minute.
[LEV EL UP.]
[DIFF ICU LTY INC REA SED . TIM E RED UCED BY 33%.]
The grid shifted.
It wasn't a 2D square anymore. It folded into a 3D Cube. Numbers floated on all six faces, interconnected like a nervous system.
"What the..." Kai muttered.
He solved it.
[LEV EL 3 CLE ARE D.]
[LEV EL 10 CLE ARE D.]
[LEV EL 15 CLE ARE D.]
The timer didn't just tick down; it plummeted.
1 hour.
30 minutes.
5 minutes.
"How many levels are there?" Kai shouted into the void, his mind burning with exertion.
The system didn't answer. It just threw the next puzzle at him.
[LEVEL 27 : THE HYPERCUBE]
[TIME LIMIT: 0.124 SECONDS]
A 4D Tesseract appeared, rotating in impossible directions.
To the human eye, it was madness—geometry that defied physics.
To Kai, it was a challenge.
Click.
0.03 seconds. First layer solved.
Click.
0.08 seconds. Second layer solved.
Click.
0.12 seconds...
There were only 0.004 seconds left. One row remained. Kai's synapses fired like lightning.
He reached out to place the final variable—
[ TIME EXPIRED.]
The Tesseract shattered. The floor beneath him opened up, and Kai fell.
[ The Abyss of Memory ]
[ANOMALY DETECTED: TRAUMA
RESPONSE LINKED]
He wasn't falling through air. He was sinking into a deep, cold ocean.
Kai tried to swim, but his limbs were heavy.
Through the murky water, he saw bubbles drifting near him. Inside one bubble was a man—younger, 24 years old.
It was Kai, two years ago.
The younger Kai looked depressed, a bottle of cheap alcohol in his hand.
On the table, his phone began to ring.
[Caller ID: Mom & Dad]
Realization struck Kai like a physical blow.
Anxiety filled his heart, squeezing it tight.
"Stop!" Kai screamed, though no sound came out in the water. "Don't pick it up! Please, don't answer it!"
If he didn't answer, they wouldn't die.
"Don't touch the bubble," a distorted voice whispered from the deep.
Kai didn't listen. He reached out to stop his past self.
The moment his fingers brushed the bubble, the memory corrupted.
The image of his younger self twisted.
The phone melted into black sludge. The bubble expanded, turning into a jagged, glitching monster made of guilt and static.
It shrieked, lunging at him.
The realization struck him like instinct.
I have to cut it off.
He moved.
His left hand began to glow. Not with fire, but with a total absence of heat. As he had contact with monster.
The Monster froze in place.
The memory became still.
A blade of Violet Energy formed in his grip.
Slash.
He cut through the monster. He cut through the memory. The guilt stopped screaming. The bubble shattered into a million pixels.
[ Reality - District 9 ]
Kai gasped, bolting upright on his apartment floor.
His body was drenched in cold sweat. His chest heaved as he tried to separate the nightmare from the room.
"Haa... haa..." Kai gripped his head. "Why did it have to be that memory?"
He looked down at his left hand. It felt numb. No, not numb—absolute.
A frost-blue crest had appeared on the back of his hand, intricate and sharp like a snowflake made of circuitry.
[SYS TEM NOT ICE]
[NEW ABI LITY ACQ UIR ED: ZER O
KEL VIN]
[DESCRIPTION: The user can reduce thermodynamic entropy to Abso—]
[DATA RESTRICTED.]
Kai stared at the crest. Slowly, a smile crept across his face. A cold, dangerous smile.
"Finally," he whispered. "I have the power to stop fate."
[City Hospital - 2 Hours Later]
The hospital lobby smelled of antiseptic and despair.
Kai stood at the counter, still wearing his dusty work clothes. He looked out of place among the clean white walls.
On the counter, he noticed a file listing missing persons—rows of small children who had vanished without a trace.
"I'm here to make the monthly payment," Kai said, his voice flat.
He placed a small bag on the counter.
Inside were the Lumens he had earned from a year of back-breaking labor in the crystal mines.
The cashier, a bored-looking young man, opened the bag. He scanned the credits.
"Room 369, right?"
"Yes."
As the cashier processed the payment, Kai watched a child holding her mother's hand in the hallway.
The cashier glanced up at Kai, curiosity getting the better of him.
"You come here every month like clockwork. That patient... she's been in a coma since the Black Day. Is she related to you? Are you her son?"
Kai remained silent. His eyes were dark, unreadable pools.
Just then, a nurse walked by, holding a clipboard. She recognized him.
"Oh, you're here for the woman in 369," the nurse said, looking at his worn-out clothes with a mix of pity and suspicion.
The nurse glanced at his hand and froze for half a second.
She whispered: "…You survived District 9?"
He covered the crest on his hand. "No. Just a burn mark."
"Hmm," she muttered, not convinced.
"Well, the doctor was asking about the next payment. It's expensive to keep a 'Radiation Drift' victim on life support."
She paused, looking at his paperwork.
"Sir, if you aren't her son... who are you to her?"
Kai adjusted his coat, turning to leave. He paused at the door, his hand resting on the glass.
"I'm nobody," Kai said, his voice carrying the weight of a gravestone. "Just the man who owes her a life."
The nurse hesitated, then asked the question that had been bothering her.
"Then... where is her daughter?"
Kai doesn't answer immediately.
He looks at the missing persons list.
He sees one familiar name.
Remorse filled Kai's eyes, but no tears came out. He had forgotten how to cry long ago.
"She is dead," he whispered.
And he walked out into the cold night.
As he left, a security camera in the corner flickered.
For 0.2 seconds , the screen did not show Kai. It showed a Rotating Hypercube.