Episode 025| K
Crouching at a seam in the ice, Lika finds a carving he recognizes — a mark he has carried on his arm for as long as he can remember, one he has hidden from everyone, even himself. A locked archive entry forces him to reconsider who he has been all along.
???
Lika stood where he was.
After stopping on the seventh step he hadn't gone any further.
The breathing rhythm still ran its loop of 1.6 seconds + a 0.3-second pause. Every pause corresponded to the step he'd just taken — he was standing here now, and the pause stayed locked to this position.
He didn't retreat. He didn't keep going either.
He decided to look around first — since going forward would only bring him closer to the other one, he'd first get a clear sense of what this space of his actually was.
The ice crystals along both walls of the passage — those he already knew. Each one sealed a bundle of tendrils, scaled tips, black liquid.
But between crystal and crystal, there were seams in the ice.
He'd kept overlooking the seams.
The seams weren't wide, about four centimeters. Lika crouched and brought his face up to one.
The seam wasn't empty.
The inner face of the seam held a shallow relief.
The carving was fine. The light refracted by the crystal had washed over it, and his eyes hadn't caught it as he'd walked past.
Now, up close —
it was a letter.
The shape was distorted, its turns cut hard. But the outline was familiar.
K.
Lika's breath stopped.
Not the K from a textbook — the main stroke folded into two sharp angles, the lower-right stroke broken into two pieces in the middle, each end tapering to a spike.
The same as the one on his arm.
He had never shown anyone the tattoo on his upper left arm. Even the scan image of that patch of his left arm in the QuarktoLabs headquarters physical-exam system was one he'd altered himself — he didn't just cover himself, he covered the data too.
He rarely even looked at the tattoo himself. He didn't remember when it was inked. For as long as he had memory, the K had been on his arm. A thousand years.
In all those thousand years he had never seen a second K anywhere.
Until just now.
His right hand — not by want, by reflex — went to his left upper arm and pressed down on the tattoo.
Lika undid his coat and pulled his whole left arm out of the sleeve.
That tattoo on the back of his upper left arm.
The letter K.
The main stroke folded into a sharp angle, the lower-right stroke broken in the middle.
Identical to the relief in the seam before him.
The same cut.
For about two seconds Lika's mind went out entirely.
Not the crash he'd written, the kind from a stack overflow. Another kind — as if someone had hit pause inside his brain and then forgotten to hit it again.
He looked at the tattoo.
Looked at the K in the seam.
He half-reflexively went to pull the coat back over it — then stopped midway, lowered his arm slowly. Whether he covered it or not no longer meant anything. What it covered was him, not this world.
He sat down. Not slowly — his knees just didn't hold, and he went down.
He looked for about ten seconds before his mouth would move.
"What is this K…"
He was asking himself. But this time he knew — for the first time he had a direction.
He followed his hacker's instinct, fired up L.K.S._Core shortcut mode, and threw the string "K" into Spectra's full index.
The response:
[String query: K]
[Result: historical archive · unreadable]
[Last modified: Kaiyuan 925/3/11]
[Signature: L.K.S._Core]Lika stared at that line, 925/3/11.
The same response as "the Black-Flame Orchid." The same day. The same signature.
But the K didn't fit.
The K wasn't something that only existed from 925. This tattoo of his was older than 925.
His past self had, on 925/3/11, locked the word "K" so Spectra couldn't read it out —
but the K had been on his body a thousand years before that.
The most reasonable reading — his past self hadn't created K on 925/3/11.
His past self had, on 925/3/11, hidden it.
Covered even from himself, unreadable even to this future version of him —
his past self didn't want his future self to know what K was.
As Lika breathed that breath out, for one instant his chest sank.
For this thousand years he had always thought of himself as "the man looking for the clue."
Now, for the first time, it occurred to him — he might be "the clue he'd hidden from himself."
The brain-chip interface flashed:
[Layer 1 wall relief "K" status: DEAD]
[Read refused]Lika stared at the K relief in the seam.
The edges of the carving began to redraw.
The same rhythm as that seed — redrawing once per second. The once-regular turns began to slip out of place, recombine, realign.
As if his past self were reading and writing this K.
The brain-chip interface flashed:
[Wall relief "K" status: DEAD → ???]
[Instance progress: 42.8%]Lika looked at the K relief.
The breathing rhythm kept running in the background — one beat every 1.6 seconds, a 0.3-second pause, then another beat.
He asked softly:
"So you wrote this K too?"
No one answered.
The relief kept redrawing.
Lika looked another three seconds, then turned side-on and pressed the back of his upper left arm to the seam.
Letting the Instance align the two K's.
【Ch. 025 End · Inside the Instance · Rift Memory Layer 1】
Follow this story
Drop your email and we'll send new chapters the moment they go live.
Observer comments
0 records