第 023 Episode| The First Upgrade

???

The line "Response: ??? · Processing" hung there for about ten seconds.

Lika didn't move.

He was waiting for the Instance to decide.

The Instance couldn't simply reject him — he suspected the command's origin had been stamped over by an L.K.S._Core signature, untraceable.

The Instance couldn't simply accept him either — the command's origin read "??? · Observer ID mismatch," plainly an illegal injection.

What the Instance had to do was judge: treat this unauthorized command as a violation, or treat it as a legitimate extension.

Which one it chose came down to how the Instance read this signature.

If the Instance treated L.K.S._Core as "a tool whose source needs verifying" — it would refuse.

If the Instance treated L.K.S._Core as "an extension of the Instance's own author" — it would accept.

Lika watched the screen, still.

He'd used seven backdoors. He knew what the Instance based its judgment on — the permission model behind the signature. Whether the signature was a tool or an identity.

How his past self had written this permission model eighty-five years ago, Lika didn't know.

---

Eleventh second.

The brain-chip interface flashed:

[Instance judgment complete]
[L.K.S._Core signature = identity extension]
[Unauthorized injection source = identity-extension verification passed]
[Conclusion: legitimate]

Lika finished those four lines and went still again for two seconds.

His past self, eighty-five years ago, had defined himself as the holder of this Instance's signature. So the Instance didn't recognize the command's origin — it recognized the signature.

As long as the signature was here, any injection source that cleared identity-extension verification would be treated as the man himself.

Including the man he was now.

---

Thirteenth second.

The brain-chip interface flashed:

[Permission sync: L.K.S._Core identity-extension verification]
[Observer ID realignment]
[Module execution: _AccessPromotion.lks]

Lika murmured it once aloud — "_AccessPromotion.lks."

Another .lks extension. Written by his past self.

The module ran for 1.6 seconds — the Instance's standard cycle, the whole layer sharing one clock.

Then it spat out:

[Permission upgrade: Observer → Triggerer]
[Module: _AccessPromotion.lks]
[Signature: L.K.S._Core]
[New permissions unlocked: rule activation / parameter adjustment]
[Write permission: restricted (reserved for the original signature holder)]

---

The instant the upgrade landed, Lika's senses changed.

Nothing like ordinary perception — a spatial sense he had never once felt.

As if he'd suddenly come to stand at the center of a floor and was looking down across all of it — the layer relationships of every object in the Instance laid open inside his head.

He didn't just see the Instance. He could read the Instance's structure.

Every block of ice crystal had its own coordinates. Every tendril had its own render priority. The clock drift beneath his feet had its own compensation coefficient.

These had only ever been phenomena to Lika before.

Now they were variables he could call up.

"So this is what a Triggerer is," Lika said softly.

He couldn't write anything new. But he could wake the old rules.

Like a man who couldn't add a column to a database, but could run a procedure already stored in it.

---

He gave it a try.

The ice crystal under his feet went from lit to fully dark over 2.4 seconds — slower even than the Instance's stuttering earlier. Inside his head Lika issued the Instance a command:

Parameter adjustment: systemclock_period = 1.6s

The brain-chip interface flashed:

[Triggerer command confirmed]
[Parameter adjustment: systemclock_period: 2.4s → 1.6s]
[Execution complete]

The rhythm of the ice crystal lighting under his feet snapped back to 1.6 seconds.

The crystals along both walls of the passage, the ones that had dragged out to 2.1 seconds, fell in one by one, neatly, in step with the marching cadence from before.

---

Lika let out a breath.

He had never held a permission like this. For a thousand years he had read this world — read code, read data, read other people's backdoors.

This was the first time he could make the world move at his command.

The brain-chip interface flashed:

[Layer 1 unlock depth: 4/4]
[Instance progress: 28.6%]
[Layer 1 main protocol complete]

4/4.

Layer 1 was done.

"Then we keep going." Lika said softly.

---

He was about to head down the passage when the brain-chip interface threw up one last message:

[Layer 1 main protocol complete · follow-on module ready]
[Next step: "Breathing Beneath the Ice"]
[Coordinates: end of the passage]
[Warning: the contact target this time ≠ Layer 1 inhabitant]

Lika looked at that last line, "the contact target this time ≠ Layer 1 inhabitant."

That cluster of tendrils he'd just dealt with — those tendril-creatures frozen in the ice for so long — the Instance had just told him: the thing at the end of the passage was not those tendril-creatures — it was something else.

---

"Breathing Beneath the Ice." Lika murmured the words.

This time his temple didn't ache.

But the ice crystal under his feet lit a touch slower than normal — as if the Instance didn't much want him heading that way.

Lika looked toward the end of the passage.

The passage ran long, a faint light at its far end.

Newly upgraded to Triggerer, the first parameter he could adjust was the clock beneath his feet. He'd just set it back to 1.6 seconds. And it was already starting to slow again.

The Instance hadn't stuttered. He was beginning to suspect — it didn't want this conversation to keep moving forward.

---

【Ch. 023 End · Inside the Instance · Rift Memory Layer 1】