A second message appeared.
Your core has grown stronger.
Adaptive resilience unlocked.
Physical and mental limits improved for subsequent dream encounters.
He lingered in the void.
Days—or something like days, since time here did not behave like time—slid past. The sky above the strange town never truly changed. Gray deepened or lightened, but never became full night or full day.
He moved through that stillness with purpose.
He practiced sword forms in silent plazas, his blade leaving no marks on the unreal cobbles. He drilled defensive stances, tested how quickly his mind could shift from one scenario to another, replayed tactical problems and solved them faster each time.
Memories sharpened.
The panic in soldiers' eyes became data points on how fear spread. The Mist Stag's illusions, once overwhelming, became a mapped pattern. Loss turned into lessons. Pain receded into something like a footnote—acknowledged, but not allowed to dominate.
He thought of the king.
Of the way his hand had rested on Noctis's shoulder, trust in his eyes. He thought of the recruits who had learned to bow, the lamp crews who had laughed nervously before their first real test, the civilians who had clung to hope in the cathedral.
Do any of them exist beyond this? he asked the quiet.
Or are they fragments only—created to teach, then erased?
The void did not answer.
It offered neither comfort nor condemnation, only space for the question to hang.
He raised the Echoframe again.
One final message rolled into view.
Dreams are not real—just illusions.
Prepare for the next sequence.
True strength grows only in reality.
A faint chill moved through him.
Part of him was relieved. The people he'd watched die had not truly existed. Their suffering, in this view, was a construct—a test, an elaborate training simulation.
Another part felt a quiet regret.
Illusions or not, the choices had felt real. The weight of command, the pull of responsibility, the cost of each decision—those were his. The growth the system praised had been paid for with experiences that felt like lives.
He closed the interface.
The gray town held steady around him, empty and expectant.
He rose from where he had been sitting on an invisible step, rolled his shoulders, and tested the looseness of his muscles. Stronger than before. More controlled. But the ghost of every lost face still followed his thoughts, even if the system insisted they were nothing but echoes.
All right, he thought. Next dream, then.
He stood ready, mind honed, core reinforced—and carrying a quieter, heavier understanding of what it meant to improve by walking through worlds that lived only long enough to break and teach.
At some point in that stillness, another memory surfaced.
Not from this dream, but from one before it—the one with the survivors who had fought beside him against a different monstrosity, in a different ruined landscape. He saw their chief again, the moment before departure, pressing something into his hand.
A small artifact, cool and smooth.
It had been shaped like twin arches, curves mirroring each other, edges polished like river stones. When he turned it, it had shimmered with a faint, liquid moonlight—a glow that seemed to pool inside the object rather than shine outward.
They had called it the Silver Bridge.
Now, in the void, he felt it again.
He reached into his cloak and found the artifact there, unchanged by the passage of non-time. As his fingers tightened around it, a pulse of latent power thrummed against his skin—subtle, but insistent.
It was not longing for home that moved him.
His real city, the one where the white and red seeds had first appeared, was a knot of unresolved grief and duty no dream had yet untangled. What stirred him now was different: a tug toward something entirely unknown.
He activated the translocar.
Silver light flowed from between the arches, forming a path beneath his feet. It expanded outward into a bridge that stretched into the gray, then beyond it, into somewhere else entirely. The void fell away on either side, replaced by shifting reflections of possible worlds.
He stepped forward.
The bridge grew under each footfall, arches rising and then collapsing into mist behind him. Silver shifted to dawn colors—pale gold, faint rose—until the light ahead brightened into a new horizon.
He emerged into another city.