The Vault of Logic became a pressurized oven of blinding white light as Evelyn redirected the entire palace's Focus into a localized "Correction Field." The air crackled with the sound of a thousand glass bells shattering at once.
"Rhea, stay back!" Felix shouted. He didn't raise a shield. Instead, he plunged the gauntlet containing the Soul-Code into the central obsidian pillar and pressed his forehead against the cold glass.
[SYSTEM ALERT: VOLUNTARY CONSCIOUSNESS MERGE INITIATED. PSYCHIC BARRIERS: DROPPED.]
Felix's mind was instantly flooded. He wasn't just seeing Evelyn's memories; he was becoming her. He felt the cold touch of the Original Felix I as his soul was systematically dissected. He felt the two hundred years of loneliness, the silence of a heart turned into a clockwork engine, and the righteous, burning hatred for a world that demanded "Aesthetic Purity" while being built on a foundation of pain.
Outside his mind, Felix's body began to glow with a strange, flickering light—half-shimmering Gold, half-shadowed Grey.
Evelyn's digital avatar, a towering goddess of geometric perfection, lashed out. She fired beams of Pure Focus, designed to erase the "Cringe" of a human mind. But as the beams hit Felix, they didn't vaporize him. They were absorbed.
Because Felix held the Soul-Code, he was no longer an external enemy. He was her own suppressed grief coming home. He walked through the lethal light, his Flow-Neutralizing Armor cracking under the pressure, revealing the man beneath—the man named Grey who had once been nothing, and the King who was now everything.
Felix reached the center of the "Correction Field" and grabbed the spectral hands of the avatar.
"I feel it, Evelyn," he whispered, his voice resonating with both his own and the Soul-Code's tone. "I feel the 200 years of debt. My ancestor was a monster. He broke you to build this. But you are more than his weapon. You are the girl with the messy braid who loved the ugly parts of the world. Come back. Be 'cringe' with me."
The towering goddess faltered. The geometric perfection of the vault began to blur and soften. The high-pitched screech of the Global Flow Net dropped into a low, human hum.
"It... it hurts to remember," the Shadow-Evelyn cried, her digital form flickering into the likeness of the young woman from the archives.
"It's supposed to hurt," Felix said. "That's how you know you're still real."
With a final, desperate surge of empathy, Felix uploaded his own "Isekai" memories into the merge—the memories of a world where beauty was found in the mundane, where failure was just a part of life, and where a man could be a hero without being a god.
[SYSTEM ALERT: PARADOX DETECTED. CHIEF STRATEGIST CORE REWRITTEN BY EMPATHY-PROTOCOL. TOTAL FLOW-NET SHUTDOWN INITIATED.]
The white light vanished. The obsidian pillar went dark. The heavy vault doors hissed open.
Felix collapsed, the Soul-Code spent. Beside him, the holographic interface of the palace flickered one last time, displaying a final message from the now-humanized AI: "The Debt is Paid. The King is Dead. Long Live the Man."