第 037 Episode| The Thousand-Year Question

Kaiyuan Year 1010, January 1 · 10:14 p.m. · Saint Tranya · An Unnamed Safe House

After touching down, Lika didn't return to QuarktoLabs. He came back to this safe house — the lease was under another person who didn't exist, right down to the utilities paid by that person. There wasn't much inside: a chair, a bed, and one whole wall of servers he'd wired together himself, fans turning low.

Shadow_001 came in after him and stopped in the corner by the door. That knot of cold, 1 degree lower than the room, pressed against the wall, motionless. Lika didn't look at it, and knew where it was all the same.

He sat down in that old chair and called up the note in the innermost layer of his brain-chip.

[Note · 01]
[L.K.S._Core is more than just a code name]

The whole stretch below it still wouldn't read. He tried to focus for a moment; his temple twinged deep, and he let go.

---

Lika's life had been a long one. So long that, most of the time, he couldn't be bothered to think about exactly how long.

He knew he'd lived a very long time — long enough that the K on his arm was older than any person he could remember, any city, any version of Spectra. But "long" had never been the problem. Long made things blurry: you remembered something had happened, you just couldn't recall it clearly; one face slowly layered over another. That was natural. He knew that kind of blur.

What he had to face now had nothing to do with blur.

It was a break.

Blur was a faded gray; squint and you could still make out the outline. A break was something else — it was a hole. Reach into it and your hand passed straight through, touching no bottom, no edge.

He didn't remember when the K had been inked onto his arm. How the string L.K.S._Core had first come to be, he couldn't say either. As for those words "the Black-Flame Orchid" — just setting them in his head for a second sent a needle-prick through his temple, yet consciously he could dredge up nothing, as if someone had hollowed out that cell, leaving only the pain at its edge.

And then that fragment. Under the ice, a row of backs bent low; a mark turned half a circle, facing the wrong way; a syllable in a woman's voice he could never read out. Every time it surfaced, the pain landed in the same place — the exact same place as when he read that note.

---

For this whole millennium, he'd taken himself to be "the one tracing the clues."

In front of that ice crevice in the Instance, a thought had crossed him: maybe he wasn't the one tracing the clues — maybe he was "the clue he'd hidden from himself." His knees hadn't held then, and he'd sat down.

Now he sat in his own chair, and the question was still the same. Only this time, he decided not to skirt around it.

What he was going to trace was himself.

---

Lika jacked into the server on the wall.

For over a decade, he'd left a backup in every system he'd passed through — whatever he couldn't read, store it first; that was his instinct. If there was a break point somewhere in his own life, then this machine was the only place that might light up that line.

He entered a command: take every record under the name L.K.S._Core that could be traced, sort it by time, and push backward, push until it pushed no further.

[Trace: all records under the name L.K.S._Core]
[Sort: time · reverse]
[Earliest readable: March 11, Kaiyuan Year 925]
[Further back: historical archive · unreadable · signed L.K.S._Core]

---

March 11, 925.

The same as "K." The same as "the Black-Flame Orchid." The same day, the same signature.

He counted back. It was Kaiyuan Year 1010 now. From 925 to now, 85 years.

The records he'd left himself, the ones he could read, only traced back to this line. 85 years. Further back, he was certain he'd still been alive — the K on his arm was the proof, that tattoo older than 925 by who knew how many years — but that stretch, he couldn't read. Not because it wasn't there, but because it was locked. And whoever had locked it had used the signature L.K.S._Core.

---

Lika leaned back into the chair.

Across all of Spectra, only one person could use the signature L.K.S._Core.

Himself.

More precisely — the him of the past.

He stopped spending effort on whether "it might be someone else." On that day 85 years ago, the him of the past had sat somewhere, used the exact same access as the him of now, and locked away "K," locked away "the Black-Flame Orchid," and locked even his own memory from before 925 into that unreadable gray.

It wasn't time that had stolen his memory. Someone had done it by hand. And that someone held his key.

---

He stuck on the next question.

Why?

Why would the him of the past want the him of the future to forget who he was? When a man goes to this much trouble to hide something, either he's afraid of being found by others, or he's afraid he'll let it slip himself someday. But what was hidden this time wasn't a file, a coordinate, a string of passwords. What was hidden was "him," the whole of him — stuffing himself into a version that didn't even know what it had hidden, and then locking it shut.

He stopped here. Further down, there was no more evidence. All he had in hand was a question, and a person who'd thrown the lock for him 85 years ago and still held his key.

---

But this time, he wasn't stopping empty-handed.

He pulled out the date "March 11, Kaiyuan Year 925" on its own, opened a new cell in the brain-chip, and tagged it. For the first time, he'd set himself a clear direction to trace: not K, not the Black-Flame Orchid, but that day — what exactly the him of the past had done on March 11, 925, and why he'd picked that day to throw down so many locks all at once.

He dropped that date into the brain-chip as a query.

---

The brain-chip interface lit up.

What lit wasn't that unreadable note. It was the slot below it, the one that had always sat empty — "02."

For the first time, it had something in it. No content, just a single line of status:

[Note · 02]
[Condition: Unmet]

Lika stared at that line.

The notes weren't handed over for free. 01 had surfaced on its own the day he touched down; but 02 wanted him to "meet" something first before it would open.

The him of the past hadn't only laid out a road for him and set a note down at every interval. He'd added a lock to each one as well.

Lika asked one thing, softly. Only Shadow_001 in the room could hear it, and it wouldn't answer.

"What do you want me to do first?"

【Ch. 037 End · Saint Tranya, An Unnamed Safe House】