The black stone platform was cold.
Not in temperature, but in the absence of active history. Lin Ye sensed it the moment he set foot upon it. There were no recent memories clinging to the material, no frequent trajectories, no accumulated corrections. It was a place designed not to be used—except when the world had no other answer left.
The fragmented clock appeared with complete clarity in his consciousness. The cracks became visible again, not widening, but aligning. The three passive foundations reacted in unison, as if they had been waiting for this exact point.
Arkhavel stood a few steps away.
"Once you begin," it said, "you won't be able to stop the process halfway. The Derivation Point does not accept indecision."
Lin Ye nodded.
"It never has."
What he felt was not courage. It was accumulated responsibility. Every decision avoided, every collapse dampened, every person he had left behind without being able to save them. All of it had formed a silent weight that now manifested with brutal clarity.
"What do I have to do?" he asked.
Arkhavel raised a hand and placed it on one of the worn runes along the platform's edge.
"Nothing complex," it replied. "Don't channel power. Don't activate techniques. Don't try to control the outcome."
The rune glowed faintly.
"Just remain."
The world reacted.
Not with violence, nor with immediate rejection, but with a global pause. It wasn't a dead instant like those Lin Ye had touched before. It was something else: a local suspension of consensus. Space around the platform stopped adjusting. Time neither advanced nor reversed. It simply… stopped confirming.
The fragmented clock vibrated violently.
"Major Derivation process initiated."
The internal voice sounded fractured, as if it too were being evaluated.
"Warning: the bearer will be excluded from all active predictions."
Lin Ye drew a deep breath.
He felt the first effect almost immediately.
His body did not weaken. He felt no physical pain. What he felt was a loss of reference. He no longer knew exactly where he stood in relation to the rest of the world—not in terms of distance, but of belonging. It was as if his existence had been removed from a list everyone else continued to follow without knowing it existed.
The Still Fire burned softly, preventing that exclusion from collapsing his internal coherence.The Silent Thunder remained alert, severing external impulses that tried to classify him.Spatial Memory, for the first time, stopped suggesting paths.
There were no routes.
Because there was no consensus to return to.
"Focus," Arkhavel said. "Don't try to define yourself. Let the world be the one that fails to do so."
Lin Ye closed his eyes.
In the darkness, he saw no images. He saw absences. Versions of himself the world tried to project and immediately discarded. Possible outcomes that could not fix themselves because none satisfied all parameters.
Then the true cost arrived.
Not immediately.
Retrospectively.
Lin Ye felt something being withdrawn from his past.
Not a concrete memory. Not a clear event. It was a connection. A minor relationship. A name he could no longer evoke with precision. Someone he had known, someone who had mattered… and who now existed only as a vague sensation, without face or context.
"Is this the price?" he asked, his voice tight.
Arkhavel did not answer at once.
"Yes," it said finally. "The world cannot erase you forward—so it compensates backward."
The fragmented clock beat hard, as if trying to record the loss, but finding nowhere to anchor it.
"For every minute you remain outside consensus," Arkhavel continued, "something in your history will become irrelevant. Not always the most important thing. But never something without value."
Lin Ye clenched his teeth.
"Then this isn't a solution," he said. "It's a debt."
"Exactly," Arkhavel replied. "One you may be able to pay later… if you survive long enough to decide how."
The process advanced.
The platform emitted a faint glow—not visible from afar, but deep. The space around it became blurred, not through distortion, but through lack of definition. To any correction system, Lin Ye was no longer 'here.' Nor was he 'elsewhere.'
He was simply… unconfirmed.
"Derivation complete."
The internal voice sounded exhausted.
"Status: limited autonomous existence."
The world began moving again.
Wind swept through the ruins. Dust fell. Time continued.
But something fundamental had changed.
Lin Ye opened his eyes.
The surroundings were the same, yet they felt… more distant. As if he were observing them from a slightly displaced angle.
"Done," Arkhavel said. "Now the Core cannot predict you."
"Can it reach me?" Lin Ye asked.
Arkhavel shook its head slowly.
"Not directly. But it will do what it always does when it can't correct something."
"And that is?"
"Adjust everything else," it replied. "People. Regions. Decisions."
Lin Ye stepped down from the platform with steady footing. He did not stagger. He did not fall. But his shadow, cast upon the stone, took a fraction of a second longer than normal to follow him.
"How much time do I have?" he asked.
Arkhavel looked at him gravely.
"Until the world decides that compensating for your existence costs more than learning from it."
Lin Ye nodded.
That was enough.
Thousands of kilometers away, the Correction Core registered the absence.
Not as an error.
As a statistical void.
And in response, it increased the intensity of corrections across all peripheral regions.
Small anomalies began to disappear.
Large ones… began to resist.
The game had entered a new phase.
And Lin Ye—now officially outside the world's consensus—was no longer merely an interference.
He was a question that could not be ignored.