第 020 Episode| The Ice-Crystal Tendrils

???

Lika took another 5 steps.

With each one, the ice crystal underfoot brightened, to maybe 30 percent—just enough to show him where the next step would land, then slowly dimming again. He timed the rhythm: each crystal went from bright to fully dark in 1.6 seconds.

Exactly in sync with the low-frequency pulse the brain-chip fed in.

—

"Not a coincidence," he told himself.

The whole Instance—the ice crystal underfoot, the pulse of the heartbeat, the light flowing through the walls, the interface refresh—all hung off the same system clock. One clock running the whole layer. Nothing he'd ever built would dare a design like that: if this really was one shared schedule, you moved a single variable and the whole layer felt it—at the cost that one fault anywhere paralyzed the whole layer.

The Instance seemed willing to write it that way—seemed like whoever wrote it wasn't afraid of paralysis.

He kept going.

On the seventh step he stopped.

The ice crystal to his right was clearer than all the rest.

As if someone had deliberately wiped this one clean for him to see.

There was something inside the crystal.

Not one. A cluster.

A bundle reached outward from the deepest part. The thick ones were as thick as a wrist, the fine ones like the tip of a pen. Every few centimeters along their surface ran a ring of slight ridges, and up close each ring was packed dense with tiny scale-shaped limb-ends, each pointing a different way.

Lika looked for 3 seconds.

"Tendrils," he said softly.

The two words surfacing in his head surprised even him—he'd never seen anything shaped like this in any biology manual.

He crouched and brought his face to within 5 centimeters of the crystal.

The tendril cluster sat in the deepest part of the crystal, an estimated 1.2 meters in. The base of the tendrils met something larger, but he couldn't make it out—the crystal turned milky white at that stretch.

What he did see clearly was the pool of something against the inner crystal at the base.

Black liquid. Somewhere between viscous and crystalline, still flowing in the instant it froze.

Blood.

Not human blood, but his brain filed it reflexively under that category.

The brain-chip interface jumped:

[Detected: unclassified organism · Layer 1 resident]
[Scan status: failed]
[Reason: refuses to be identified]

"This again," Lika said softly.

The blank ground past the S-17-R boundary "refused to be measured."
The thing in this ice "refused to be identified."

Same logic—inside this Instance, the thing being observed has the right to refuse.

—

He straightened and looked down both sides of the passage.

Every ice crystal sealed a bundle.

Down both sides of the whole passage, at least 40 clusters reached toward him.

Lika worked the situation in front of him with a hacker's reflexes.

Scan failed = the system won't give you the data you want. There were two ways past a system that wouldn't answer: brute-force it, or ask a different way.

Brute force was off the table here—he was inside the Instance, and the physics were written by someone else.

Ask a different way—he had an idea.

He drew the one test ball he had left from his coat pocket.

Reinforced-alloy shell, three independent signal emitters inside. He'd thrown it together in the CV-1A's cabin, and it had been rejected once already past the boundary.

He set the ball gently on the ground beneath the ice crystal to his right.

The brain-chip interface jumped at once:

[Observer object placement registered]
[Choice registered: offering]
[Layer 1 unlock depth: 1/4]
[Instance progress: 3.7%]

Lika stared at the line for 2 seconds—what caught him was that 1/4 at the end.

From 0/4 to 1/4. He'd done one thing right.

Now he went back to that word: offering.

For these last few minutes he'd kept demanding a response from the Instance. But what the Instance wanted wasn't for him to take data—it was for him to set down what was in his hand first.

—

He crouched and looked at the ball.

The ball didn't move.

After about 8 seconds, the ball began to roll slowly toward the crystal. No wind, no slope, no external force. The ball rolled over on its own.

—

The instant the ball touched the crystal.

The tendril cluster in the deepest part of the crystal swayed as one toward him.

A small motion. Like a bow.

The brain-chip interface jumped:

[Layer 1 resident has responded]
[Protocol unlocked: basic contact]
[Notice: once started, the protocol cannot be interrupted]

Lika watched the tendril cluster stop and settle back into its original posture inside the crystal.

The pool of black liquid against the inner crystal began to flow slowly back toward the tendril bundle—the thing he'd thought already frozen was moving again.

Then the outermost layer of the crystal—the face his cheek had just been near—began to split from the center.

Not like shattering. Something wanted to come out from inside.

—

Lika stepped back 7 paces.

"Cannot be interrupted," he read the system's line aloud once more.

His "setting down" earlier hadn't only been an invitation—the Instance had read it as a start signal.

The crack ran up and down the crystal's centerline.

The other crystals along both sides of the passage began to crack too, one after another.

Light seeped out of every crack.

Not like the slow light inside the crystals—this was hotter, its frequency less stable, like someone knocking from inside.

The brain-chip interface jumped:

[Layer 1 residents waking en masse]
[Instance progress: 8.1%]
[Choice registered: select your next action]

—

Lika let out a breath.

"One at a time, then."

—

【Ch. 020 End · Inside the Instance · Rift Memory Layer 1】