第 031 Episode| Data Retention

???

When Lika turned his head, there was nothing beyond the wall.

Only that crack in the ice-crystal dome, letting through a sliver of light that didn't belong to this layer. He stared at it for two seconds; the chill at the back of his neck didn't fade. Before the contact target went down a moment ago, those eyes had clearly gone past him, looking toward this crack — whatever it had seen, he hadn't.

He stood there a while longer. Inside that crack it was quiet, white light flowing slowly, no shape to it at all.

But he knew he hadn't been wrong. Something, over there, had looked away.

He filed the thing away in his head, tagged it a message he couldn't read, and set it aside for now. He'd set aside too many unreadable messages; one more made no difference.

He drew his eyes back.

Back to the thing eight meters off.

---

The contact target lay on the ice-crystal floor and didn't get up again. The scales of its lower body still carried a faint twitch, slower and slower. Its eye was open, but that eye no longer looked at anything.

Lika didn't go closer right away.

It was a habit of his — a piece of code you think has ended is most dangerous when it only "looks" ended. He'd survived on this trick himself more than once: the opponent thinks his thing is dead through and through, lets his guard down, and the piece he'd buried in the background quietly crawls up again and bites back.

So he didn't trust "looks like it's down." First he read it with his Triggerer sense of direction.

[The contact target · status]
[Life signal: faint · still dropping]
[Render priority: zeroed · unrecoverable]
[Threat assessment: low]

Render priority zeroed, unrecoverable. That line he trusted — when that claw came down a moment ago, he'd written its priority to NULL with his own hand, and that was irreversible. The Instance would never draw it first again.

Threat assessment low. It really was down.

Only then did Lika walk forward. His heartbeat fell slowly from 171 a minute, down to around 130. He crouched beside it, keeping two meters from that claw. Up close, that layer of deep green scales edged in blue was actually very fine, one overlapping the next, as if someone had laid them down very patiently, one at a time.

He crouched in front of those open eyes. The light in them was retreating bit by bit, like the last few seconds of afterglow before a screen powers off. He didn't know whether a piece of code, when it died, looked like this too.

---

He didn't know what to do next.

He'd written and deleted more code than he could count. Deleting a piece of code, for him, was a keystroke, a confirm, wiped clean, not even a sound left behind. But no piece of code had ever "gone down" in front of him, eyes still open, chest still rising and falling a little, slower and slower.

He didn't even know what it would take to truly "end" this thing. Issue one more command to zero out its life signal? Or just crouch here and wait for it to drop to zero on its own?

He found he didn't quite want to do it.

The thought surprised even him. The thing had nearly gutted him a moment ago.

Before he could finish thinking, the Instance moved on its own.

[Detected: retainable object]
[Auto-process started: Data Retention]
[snapshot in progress... 4% ... 17% ... 38%]

Lika hadn't issued this command.

The Instance ran it itself.

He stared at the progress bar crawling upward, his chest tightening again. A moment ago in this Instance, every move had been one he'd reckoned out for his life and then issued himself. This one wasn't — it was the Instance going around him, deciding to do it on its own.

Like someone standing behind him, pressing a key he couldn't see.

He thought of the line of sight that had looked away at the Rift a moment ago. Was it the same hand — the one that had watched him a moment ago, and now pressed this key for him, could it be the same one? He had no proof. But this Instance, from start to finish, was like someone a step ahead of him, knowing where he'd end up.

---

Halfway through the snapshot, the interface laid out for Lika the thing it was capturing.

Most of it was structure he could read — Instance-native, signature L.K.S._Core, Kaiyuan 925/3/11. Written by the past him. This he already knew.

But capturing into the depths, a few stretches jumped out that he hadn't written.

[Fragment · source unmarked]
[Image: under the ice, a row of bent backs]
[Symbol: a mark turned half around, the wrong way]
[Sound: a woman's voice, intoning a syllable Lika can't read]

Lika stared at those few stretches, and his temple gave a throb.

Exactly the same pain as the last time he'd seen the words "the Black-Flame Orchid" on a tentacle.

He tried to bring that half-turned mark into focus. But the harder he tried to focus, the deeper that pain drilled into his temple, and the image blurred along with it, as if something wouldn't let him look. He had to let go.

When the past him wrote this thing, he'd copied material in from somewhere else. What he'd copied, the present him couldn't read — and seemed, somehow, not allowed to read.

---

[snapshot complete: 100%]
[Data Retention: success]
[This object may be retained as —— Shadow]
[Bind?]

Shadow.

When the word jumped out, Lika froze a moment. From start to finish the Instance had never explained what this was — no description, no note.

But looking at those words, "Bind?", something in his head lit up on its own.

He knew this logic.

Like picking up a module that still ran — someone else's program had died, but the function remained, and you could copy it, hook it onto your side, let it run for you. He'd done this kind of thing more times than he could count.

Only this time, what was to be copied was a thing that, a moment ago, had wanted to cut him down with one claw. A thing with eyes, that raised its head, that before going down had thrown him a "passed."

---

Lika crouched there, his breathing not yet fully settled.

He knew, rationally, that he should be careful. He hadn't even worked out what this thing truly was, those few unreadable fragments were still throbbing in his temple, and the Instance had just gone around him and run a process on its own — every single thing under this ice was outside his control.

The safest move was to touch nothing, back out first, get to the surface, work the whole of today's events out from start to finish before anything else.

He knew that was the safest.

But that line, "Bind?", glowed right in front of his eyes, glowed so he couldn't look away.

His biggest fault was exactly this — knowing he should pull his hand back, while his hand moved first. With code it was this way, with people it was this way. The fault had hurt him, and it had saved him. He still couldn't tell, even now, which one this time would be.

He paused half a second.

Then reached out and touched the option.

---

The option lit up under his fingertip.

The thing on the ground, the twitch in its lower body stopped. Its whole outline began to scatter — not vanishing, but being gathered up, restacked, like a file being taken over by someone else.

On the ice-crystal floor, that scattered heap of data slowly rose up.

It faced Lika.

The interface threw up one last line:

[Name your first Shadow]

【Ch. 031 End · Inside the Instance · Rift Memory Layer 1, beneath the ice-crystal dome】