Episode 021| The Dead Word

???

Lika walked toward the crystal where he'd set the ball.

7 steps. Each step lit a panel underfoot.

The crystal split from its centerline faster than he'd expected—the crack had already gone from a single line to a spiderweb. By the time he stopped in front of the crystal, the whole face was cracking in a full-sheet collapse—not piece by piece, but the whole face parting from the center to both sides, like a door opening.

The instant the door stood fully open, the tendril cluster came out of the crystal.

It didn't crawl out—the whole bundle extended slowly toward him from the deepest part of the crystal. The scale-shaped limb-ends at every tendril's tip stirred faintly, as if feeling for something in the air.

The pool of black liquid at the base came out too. It flowed from the inner crystal toward the floor, but the instant it landed on the crystal ground it didn't freeze and didn't soak in—it stopped there. A pool of black, sitting quietly 50 centimeters in front of his boot tips.

—

Lika didn't move.

He noticed one tendril in the cluster was finer than the rest—about as thick as a little finger—and this one had something dangling from its end.

Walnut-sized.

The shell was a semitransparent scale-keratin. At first glance he judged it not like a plant seed but more like a mineral—some kind of polished crystalline body.

There were carved marks on the surface. The patterns were regular enough that someone might have engraved them.

The lines within the carving flashed once every few seconds. Low brightness, almost requiring a squint to see.

The brain-chip interface jumped:

[Detected: unclassified organism · remnant]
[Running analysis]

After 1.6 seconds—the Instance's standard cycle—the interface jumped again:

[Remnant: Black-Flame Orchid · seed]
[Status: DEAD]
[Read refused]

—

The instant the four characters "Black-Flame Orchid" entered Lika's retina.

He crouched.

He didn't mean to crouch—he couldn't stay standing.

The headache started 3 centimeters behind his temple—needle-sharp, spreading toward the back of his skull. Nothing like this had ever struck him before. It was more like the pain of a memory segment that hadn't been accessed in a very long time getting hit.

The brain-chip interface threw up a warning at the same moment:

[Neural signal anomaly]
[Source: hippocampus / temporal cortex]
[Pattern: no correspondence to current experience]
[Recommendation: pause input]

Lika braced against a crystal that hadn't cracked yet. The pain held for about 8 seconds before it slowly receded.

Only when it had pulled back to a faint dull ache at his temple did he straighten up.

He didn't look at the tendril cluster, didn't look at the dangling seed. He looked at the four characters "Black-Flame Orchid" on the brain-chip interface.

He'd never scanned these four characters in any database. Never read them, never written them.

And yet they had a physical effect—eight seconds in his retina and he'd nearly blacked out.

Meaning this word wasn't just a word. It was a key to some segment of his past memory—his present head didn't recognize it, but his deeper neurons did.

Some fragment of the thousand-year amnesia fault had just been poked by these four characters.

—

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

He fired up the L.K.S._Core shortcut mode—the signature ran its own independent channel, no need for the brain-chip link of his original flesh—and dropped the string "Black-Flame Orchid" into Spectra's full index.

Expected response: "string does not exist."

Actual response:

[Spectra query: Black-Flame Orchid]
[Result: historical archive · unreadable]
[Last modified: Kaiyuan 925/3/11]
[Signature: L.K.S._Core]

Lika looked at that signature line and went still for 3 seconds.

Kaiyuan 925/3/11—he'd seen that date for the very first time only just now, on the note accompanying _RiftMemory.lks.

L.K.S._Core—that signature was his own.

Which meant: on that day 85 years ago, the past him had locked the word "Black-Flame Orchid" away with his own hands. Locked it until Spectra couldn't read it. And just now, the thought of it gave him a headache—he suspected that was the price of the lock.

—

"So—" Lika said softly.

The sentence went unfinished.

—

Because just then, the dangling seed moved.

The carved marks on its surface began to slowly shift. It didn't crack, didn't sprout—more like a code interface being rewritten endlessly, redrawn once a second. The once-regular lines began to slip out of place, recombine, realign.

The brain-chip interface jumped:

[Remnant · Black-Flame Orchid · seed]
[Status: DEAD → ???]
[Layer 1 unlock depth: 2/4]
[Instance progress: 12.7%]

The seed had "woken." But what it was waking into, Lika couldn't tell. It didn't glow, didn't swell. It was simply being rewritten.

—

Lika watched the seed and calmly strung the messages together in his head.

The seed's status going from DEAD to ???—this permission change hadn't come from the Instance. The Instance's query result earlier had only said it "refuses to be read," not that it could be rewritten.

He guessed the permission came from that L.K.S._Core signature line.

Which was—himself.

The past him.

As if reading and writing this seed right in front of him.

—

Lika let out another breath. Slower than the last.

"All right," he said softly.

"Let's see what you want to write."

—

【Ch. 021 End · Inside the Instance · Rift Memory Layer 1】