The countdown did not disappear.
It fractured.
At first, Minh Truong thought it was a visual error.
The familiar lifespan value—once stable, once absolute—now flickered like a damaged signal. Numbers overlapped. Digits lagged behind reality, correcting themselves seconds too late.
He blinked.
The world did not change.
But the data did.
A passerby brushed past him on the street. For a brief moment, no number appeared above the man's head. Then—delayed—his lifespan snapped into place, as if reluctantly acknowledging existence.
Minh Truong stopped walking.
That had never happened before.
The system had always been instant. Cold. Precise.
Now, it hesitated.
A faint pressure settled in his chest. Not fear—recognition. The kind that came when something fundamental shifted, even if no alarm was sounded.
He checked himself.
His own remaining time was still there. But beneath it, something new had surfaced.
A thin, translucent layer of data—unlabeled, unreadable—hovered like a shadow beneath the numbers.
He could not interact with it.
He could not dismiss it.
It simply existed.
Around him, the city moved on, unaware. Traffic lights changed. People argued, laughed, lived. Yet Minh Truong could feel it clearly now—the world was no longer perfectly synchronized with the data observing it.
Somewhere beyond his perception, a correction process was running.
Slowly.
Silently.
Minh Truong lowered his gaze and continued walking, forcing himself to blend back into the crowd. Whatever had ended in the previous incident had not concluded cleanly.
It had left residue.
And residue, once noticed, was never ignored by systems designed to watch.
Above him, the sky remained clear.
But for the first time since the data revealed itself to him, Minh Truong understood one thing with absolute certainty:
He was no longer just observing the numbers.
The numbers were struggling to keep up with him.