The light that woke her was wrong. It filtered through an unfamiliar window, casting patterns of shadow from an elegant, wooden lattice onto a ceiling she had never seen before. For one blissful, disoriented moment, Yuan's mind was blank, adrift in the softness of the bedding. Then, the reality crashed down with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
The high, coffered ceiling. The faint scent of tatami and sandalwood. The profound, warded silence that felt both insulating and isolating. The deep, bone-aching soreness that had nothing to do with physical exertion and everything to do with a soul strained to its limit.
She was not in her cramped, modern apartment. She was in Raiden Mei's bedroom. In Raiden Mei's body. The memories of the previous day—the infirmary, Kiana's smothering affection, the shattering simulation, the oppressive emptiness of the mansion, the ritual to establish the ward—all coalesced into a cold, heavy lump in her stomach.
With a groan that was entirely her own, Yuan pushed herself up. The silken nightgown—another detail from Mei's life that felt intensely personal—slid over skin that was still a shock to inhabit. She swung her legs over the side of the bed, her feet meeting the cool, smooth grain of the floor. Her gaze immediately found the small, carved rune beside the bed. It was inert now, the ward having dissolved with the dawn as intended, but its presence was a tangible proof. It hadn't been a dream.
The System interface, ever-present, pulsed softly in the corner of her vision.
[Daily Passive Assimilation Progress: Host/Vehicle Synchronization: 33%. Minor neuromuscular optimizations detected.]
So, even sleeping, the fusion deepened. The thought was unnerving. Was she becoming more Mei, or was Mei's vessel simply adapting better to its new pilot? She pushed the existential dread aside. There were more immediate concerns.
The morning routine was a minefield of unfamiliarity. The bathroom was a spa-like expanse of marble and dark wood. The face in the mirror, pale with sleep and framed by long, lavender hair, still triggered a jolt of dislocation. Brushing that hair, washing this face, attending to the needs of this body—each action was performed with a clinical, careful distance, a conscious partitioning between the self and the vehicle. She dressed in the Chiba Academy uniform, the fabric and fit perfectly tailored to a form that was not her own.
Downstairs, the mansion's emptiness was even more pronounced in the sharp morning light. The kitchen was a showroom of stainless steel and dark appliances, utterly devoid of the warmth of a lived-in home. A check of the refrigerator revealed meticulously organized, high-quality ingredients, and little else. Mei, it seemed, had been existing on simple, solitary meals.
Yuan's own culinary skills were limited to survivalist cooking, but between Mei's indexed knowledge of where things were and her own basic understanding, she managed to prepare a simple breakfast. Sitting alone at a dining table that could seat twelve, the only sound the careful click of her chopsticks against the bowl, the loneliness of Mei's life became a taste, bland and profound.
The walk to school was a repeat of the previous day's dissonance—the body moving with effortless grace, the mind churning with strategy and fear. The Honkai Energy Perception she'd acquired was a low, constant buzz at the edge of her awareness. Nagazora looked pristine, but she could now feel the faint, sickly-sweet static in the air, a background radiation that seemed to cling to certain corners and flow like an unseen current through the streets. It was faint, but it was everywhere. The calm before the eruption was not truly calm; it was a saturation.
She arrived at the school gates, steeling herself for another day of Kiana Kaslana's relentless, affectionate scrutiny.
She didn't have to wait long.
"MEI-SENPAI!"
The voice, bright and carrying, cut across the courtyard. Today, Kiana was a streak of white and blue, hurtling toward her with the force of a jubilant comet. There was no hesitation, no trace of yesterday's faint confusion in her eyes. Kiana's logic had solidified: strange Mei was still Mei, and therefore subject to the full force of her friendship.
Yuan braced herself, but the impact still nearly knocked her off her graceful footing. Kiana wrapped her in a full-bodied hug, squeezing tightly. "You look way better today! See? I told you a good night's sleep would fix everything!" she declared into Yuan's shoulder.
The sensation was, once again, overwhelmingly intimate. The warmth, the soft pressure of Kiana against her, the faint, clean scent of her hair—it short-circuited Yuan's attempts at clinical detachment. She managed a stiff pat on Kiana's back, the gesture achingly awkward.
Kiana pulled back, holding Yuan by the shoulders at arm's length, her blue eyes sparkling with mischief and concern. "So! Did you rest? Did you eat? You didn't push yourself, right?" The questions came rapid-fire. Then, her expression shifted to one of theatrical conspiracy. She leaned in, her voice dropping to a loud whisper that likely carried several meters. "Hey, hey. About yesterday… you were really out of it. You… you didn't see anything weird, did you? Like, flashes of light? Or hear any… voices?"
The question was so specific, so loaded, that it froze the blood in Yuan's veins. Flashes of light. Voices. Was Kiana… probing? Did she suspect the Herrscher? Or was this her clumsy, husky-like way of asking about concussion symptoms? The paramecium's intuition was a terrifying wild card.
Yuan, calling upon every ounce of her new Emotional Partitioning, kept Mei's face carefully neutral, a mask of gentle confusion. "Voices? No, Kiana. Just a very bad headache. It's mostly gone now." She offered a small, practiced smile—one she'd seen in Mei's memories.
Kiana scrutinized her face for a long, heart-stopping second. Then, as if a switch had been flipped, her worry evaporated into sunny relief. "Phew! That's good! For a second I thought—" She cut herself off, shaking her head with a laugh. "Never mind! It's nothing! Come on, senpai, we'll be late!"
She looped her arm through Yuan's with practiced ease and began pulling her toward the school building, chattering about a new video game she wanted to try. Yuan let herself be led, the smile still fixed on her lips.
But inside, the alarms were blaring. 'For a second I thought—' Thought what? That her friend was becoming a Herrscher? That she was possessed? The casual, almost-knowing way Kiana had asked… But that's impossible as far as she knows Karina was unaware of Mei Herscher persona waking until the third eruption has already happened... Unless something has happened before warranting Kaina suspicion.
The school day passed in a blur of half-understood lessons and the constant, warm pressure of Kiana's presence. Every casual touch, every shared smile felt like a performance, a high-wire act over a pit of exposure. The 25 remaining Paradigm Points burned a hole in her awareness. She needed more. She needed skills that weren't just for hiding, but for understanding, for fighting, for surviving the conspiracy Kiana had just inadvertently hinted at.
As the final bell rang, Kiana again made her swift exit, mumbling about "errands" with a frown that suggested her search for her 'deadbeat old man' was ongoing. Yuan was once again left in the emptying classroom, the waning afternoon light painting long shadows.
This time, she didn't wait. She activated the System.
[Simulation Search: Parameters: Information Gathering. Low-Conflict. High Knowledge Yield.]
The interface whirred, options flashing.
[Match Found: Cyberpunk Neural Network (Fragment): 'Data-ghost Whisperer' Simulation. Infiltrate a decaying corporate server hub to retrieve buried data on experimental energy signatures. Primary threats: Digital sentries, data-corruption, neural feedback. Physical combat: None.]
It was perfect. A realm of pure information, where her lack of martial skill wouldn't matter. Where she could learn to navigate complex systems, to uncover secrets. Secrets about Honkai? About Herrschers? About the world she was now trapped in?
She needed to know what Kiana almost said. She needed to know what was coming.
With a determined thought, Yuan selected the simulation. The classroom dissolved once more, not into a storm of emotion, but into a cold rain of neon-lit code and the deep, electric hum of a dying machine heart.
The transition was less a shattering and more a corrosive decay. The solid world of wood, paper, and cherry blossoms dissolved into a sickly, electronic fuzz. The light bled from warm gold to the cold, pulsating glow of corrupted neon—pinks, cyans, and deep purples that stained the digital void. Yuan felt her consciousness not floating, but *streaming*, pulled through fiber-optic veins toward a hard, angular destination.
Sensation resolved into a bleak, limitless plane. Underfoot was a grid of fading, translucent light, stretching into a horizon choked with towering, glitching structures—the jagged, polygonal skeletons of dead data-towers and corporate fortresses. A perpetual, silent rain of ones and zeroes fell, dissolving before they hit the ground. The air thrummed with a bass note of massive server banks and the high, skittering whine of predatory algorithms.
[Simulation: Data-ghost Whisperer. Initializing.]
[Directive: Infiltrate the 'Aethelred-Sigma' archival node. Locate and secure data packet labelled [Project: Promethean Echo]. Avoid detection by ICE (Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics) and Data-ghosts.]
[Paradigm Synchronization: 33%. Neural Interface Compatibility: Moderate. Caution advised.]
A new, gritty layer of instinct slotted into Yuan's mind. This was the 'Interface Hack: Level 1' knowledge, now contextualized and alive. She understood, on a fundamental level, that her consciousness here was a fragile packet of self-aware code. She could perceive the data-streams around her as rivers of colored light—cool blue for inert archives, hot red for active security, a sickly green for corrupted or toxic data.
Before her, rising from the grid like a blackened tooth, was her target: the Aethelred-Sigma node. It was a dense, obsidian pyramid, its surface crawling with shifting red hexagons—a basic ICE wall.
"First obstacle: Perimeter ICE. A standardized Parker-Ford VII sentry protocol," her new knowledge supplied. "It looks for signatures of corporate auth-key or the chaotic noise of brute-force attacks. It does not look for… silence."
The idea came not as a flash of inspiration, but as a logical deduction from the cyberpunk fragment. She couldn't fight it. She couldn't trick it with credentials she didn't have. But she could mimic the environment.
Focusing, Yuan drew her consciousness in, compressing her digital signature from a bright, obvious beacon to a faint, diffuse whisper. She then began to align her code's rhythm with the dormant, cool-blue data-streams that flowed like groundwater around the base of the pyramid—the forgotten, uninteresting archives no one watched. It was a mental strain, like holding her breath and walking in perfect step with a metronome. She approached the wall of red hexagons, not as an intruder, but as a piece of ambient data-drift.
The hexagons pulsed. A scan-lattice of light passed over her. She felt it like a static tingle, probing. She held her form, a ghost in the machine.
The red light faded. A single hexagon directly in front of her switched to a passive, cool blue, then dissolved. A doorway, just wide enough for her consciousness to slip through.
[ICE Breached: Passive Evasion. Security Status: Unaware.]
Inside, the architecture changed. The pyramid was a honeycomb of crystalline data-chambers, each holding frozen, glittering structures of information—financial records, personnel files, obsolete research. The air here was colder, thicker with the dust of disuse. But Yuan's honed Honkai Energy Perception, translated into this digital realm, picked up a faint, discordant hum. A familiar, sickly-sweet static. It was a different frequency from Nagazora's, more refined, more… intentional. It led her like a scent trail through the labyrinth.
She found it in a deeply buried chamber, its walls scarred with old encryption burns. Floating in the center was the data-packet: [Project: Promethean Echo]. It shimmered with a dangerous, oily rainbow sheen, the visual representation of the corrupt energy signature she'd been sensing.
As she reached for it, the chamber writhed.
From the shadows between data-strands, figures coalesced. Not ICE sentries, but something worse. Data-ghosts. Twisted, humanoid shapes made of glitching pixels and stolen identity fragments—the psychic impressions of researchers, guards, and test subjects who had died connected to this network. Their faces were screaming voids of static. They didn't move to attack; they simply existed in her path, their very presence a corrosive wave of despair, confusion, and rage.
[Alert: Psychic Resonance Hazard. Data-ghosts are non-conscious memory-echoes. Direct engagement will result in neural feedback and identity contamination.]
The memory of the storm simulation flashed before her. This was not a battle of force, but of coherence. The ghosts fed on attention, on fear, on the attempt to confront them. They were the digital equivalent of Mei's emotional storm—trauma given form.
Her fight-or-flight instinct screamed to hack at them, to use her nascent neural-shock knowledge. But the system's warning held her back. Identity contamination.
Instead, she did the counter-intuitive thing. She applied the lesson from the Herrscher's storm. She observed. She partitioned.
She let the waves of stolen anguish—the ghost of a scientist's guilt, a guard's numb horror, a subject's betrayed terror—wash through her. With her Emotional Partitioning active, she acknowledged them: Not mine. This pain is not mine. She didn't absorb it; she let it pass, a horrific but harmless data-stream.
To the ghosts, she became uninteresting. A null point in the network. A rock in a river of suffering. Their wailing faces turned toward her, then away, unable to gain purchase on her partitioned consciousness. She walked forward, a serene island in their chaotic sea, each step an act of immense will. The oily data-packet was within reach.
Just as her fingers of light brushed its surface, the entire chamber blared with a new, piercing alarm.
[ULTRAVIOLET-LEVEL INTRUSION DETECTED. SOULKILLER-CLASS COUNTERMEASURE DEPLOYED.]
A new presence manifested at the chamber's entrance. Not a ghost, but a sleek, predatory shard of pure, silver ICE. It had no face, only a single, rotating red eye. It was a soulkiller—a program designed not to eject intruders, but to shred their digital consciousness into unrecoverable noise.
There was no evading this. No partitioning would work. It was a hunter, and she was its prey.
Time seemed to slow. The soulkiller shot toward her, a blade of annihilating logic. In that microsecond, Yuan's mind—the modern, analytical mind that saw systems within systems—made a desperate leap. The Promethean Echo data pulsed with that corrupt, familiar energy. The soulkiller was a pure, ordered security protocol.
Chaos versus order.
With a mental scream of effort, Yuan didn't try to grab the data. She shoved it. Channeling every ounce of her will through the Interface Hack principles, she didn't attempt to understand the oily data; she simply destabilized its encryption field and hurled it directly into the path of the soulkiller.
The two incompatible digital entities collided.
The Promethean Echo, a barely-contained knot of anomalous energy, unraveled upon contact with the soulkiller's pristine erasure protocols. There was no explosion. Instead, a sphere of absolute, screaming wrongness erupted—a digital cancer that gnawed at the soulkiller's code, causing it to glitch, stutter, and consume itself in a frantic attempt to eradicate the corruption. In the chaotic maelstrom of dissolving logic and erupting static, Yuan's consciousness was violently ejected, like a cork from a bottle.
***
Yuan slammed back into her physical body with a gasp that tore at her throat. She was on her knees in the empty classroom, clutching her head. This time, the pain was different—a sharp, electronic migraine centered behind her eyes, and a phantom numbness in her fingertips. The taste of ozone and burnt copper filled her mouth.
[Simulation 'Data-ghost Whisperer' Terminated. Emergency Ejection.]
[Rating: D+ (Catastrophic Success)]
[Analysis: Primary objective (data retrieval) failed. Secondary objective (survival) achieved via unorthodox paradigm collision. Rewards adjusted.]
[Rewards: Interface Hack Proficiency increased to Level 1 (Practical). 'Data-ghost' Resistance (Low) acquired. Understanding of Advanced Energy Signature Encryption (Fragment) acquired. Paradigm Points: +30.]
[New System Function Unlocked: 'Paradigm Collision Theory' (Basic). Under certain conditions, skills or energies from disparate paradigms can be forced to interact with volatile, unpredictable results.]
[Paradigm Points: 55.]
She knelt there, breathing heavily, as the digital aftershocks faded. She hadn't gotten the data, but she'd learned something potentially more valuable: a new, dangerous way to fight. And she now had a name for the energy she felt in Nagazora and had seen in that data-core: it was an Echo. A Promethean Echo.
As she gathered her trembling limbs to stand, a new, urgent notification flashed.
[Warning: Localized Honkai Energy Surge Detected. 800 Meters Northeast. Signature: Agitated, Volatile. Non-Natural Propagation Pattern Detected.]
A map of Nagazora superimposed on her vision, a single, pulsing red marker flashing in a back-alley district not far from the school. It wasn't the slow, ambient saturation. This was a spike. An event.
The Herrscher wasn't the only thing awakening in Nagazora. Something else was stirring, and the System was pointing her right at it. The choice was immediate: return to the sterile safety of the empty mansion, or step toward the danger, armed with 55 points and a handful of dangerous, half-understood tricks.
Yuan, her amethyst eyes hardening with a resolve that was becoming her own, turned and walked swiftly toward the school doors. She was heading home.