The border between Sector 116 and 117 wasn't a wall; it was a horizon of falling water.
Led by the rhythmic pulse of the merged Cinders, Renji, Lyra, and Darius stood at the edge of the "Great Drain"—a massive structural gap where the neon foundations of Neo-Shinjuku ended and the dark, pressurized void of the Submerged Sector began. Millions of gallons of digital runoff and recycled soul-matter cascaded into the depths, creating a roar that vibrated in Renji's very marrow.
"The Abyss," Lyra shouted over the thunder. She stared down into the blackness, her violet spear glowing dim against the encroaching dark. "Sector 117 isn't a city. It's the System's 'Heat Sink.' It's where all the waste energy, the failed experiments, and the corrupted data are dumped to cool."
"Sounds like my kind of place," Darius grunted, though he tightened the straps on his iron shield. "But how do we get down there without becoming pancakes? That's a five-mile drop."
Renji stepped to the very edge of the precipice. His tattered suit snapped in the violent updraft. To his companions, he looked like a silhouette of jagged shadow, but in Renji's vision, the waterfall was a cascading waterfall of binary strings.
[LOCATION DETECTED: SECTOR 117 — THE ABYSSAL SINK] [PRESSURE LEVEL: CRITICAL] [ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARD: DATA-DROWNING]
"We don't drop," Renji said, his voice echoing with the metallic resonance of Soul-Fracture Stage 2. "We dive."
He raised his hand, and the merged Cinder pulsed with a sickly green-grey light. He wasn't just rewriting physics anymore; he was imposing his own presence onto the environment.
[SKILL ACTIVATED: ARCHITECT'S CIPHER — BUBBLE ENCAPSULATION] [COST: 2 DAYS OF LIVED EXPERIENCE — PROCESSING...]
The memory of his first paycheck—the specific weight of the envelope and the smell of the ATM—vanished into the void. In its place, a sphere of shimmering, translucent code expanded around the trio.
"Step in," Renji commanded.
As they entered the sphere, the roar of the waterfall vanished, replaced by a low, rhythmic hum. Renji leaned forward, and the bubble tipped over the edge.
The descent was a nightmare of shifting scales. For the first mile, they passed through the "Filter Grids"—massive, glowing honeycombs of light that stripped the "personality" away from the waste data falling from the city above. Renji watched as the ghost-like remnants of memories—fragments of faces, names, and laughter—were caught in the grids and dissolved into raw, grey sludge.
"It's a graveyard of thoughts," Lyra whispered, her hand trembling as she touched the edge of the bubble.
"It's more than that," Renji said, his eyes scanning the darkness below. "Look at the walls."
As they descended further, the "walls" of the sector began to change. They were no longer made of biomass or metal; they were made of frozen, petrified "Glitches." Thousands of distorted, half-formed shapes were fused into the architecture—arms, eyes, and torsos of beings that the System had tried and failed to create.
[WARNING: DEPTH THRESHOLD CROSSED.] [SCANNING FOR LOCAL LIFE-FORMS...] [ERROR: UNRECOGNIZABLE DATA DETECTED.]
Suddenly, the bubble jerked violently.
Something massive moved in the darkness outside their sphere. It wasn't a Peacekeeper or a Geist. It was a silhouette of tangled, oily cables and glowing white eyes, easily the size of a city block. It drifted past them, emitting a sound like a thousand radios being tuned to a dead frequency.
"What in the Higher Heavens was that?" Darius hissed, his hand on his blade.
"A Void-Leviathan," Lyra said, her voice barely a whisper. "The things that grow in the waste. They aren't part of the System's plan. They're what happens when you leave enough 'Deleted' data in the dark for too long."
The bubble slowed its descent as they reached the "floor" of the Abyss. It wasn't solid ground, but a thick, viscous sea of liquid code—the Aetheric Deep.
In the distance, submerged halfway into the dark sea, was a structure that looked like a jagged, upside-down cathedral. It pulsed with a rhythmic, bioluminescent gold—the third Cinder.
"There it is," Renji said, his pulse quickening. "The Cinder of Preservation."
But as the bubble touched the surface of the liquid sea, the golden pulse stopped. The cathedral went dark.
From the shadows of the petrified walls, hundreds of white eyes began to snap open. These weren't the eyes of Leviathans; they were human-sized, but they were attached to figures that moved with a jerky, stop-motion twitch.
[THREAT IDENTIFIED: THE FORGOTTEN.] [STATUS: HUNGARY FOR CORE-DATA.]
Renji looked at the UI. The "Forgotten" weren't just attacking; they were draining the bubble's integrity just by being near it.
"Renji, the shield is thinning!" Lyra cried, her spear sparking as she struck at a hand that tried to phase through the sphere.
Renji looked at the dark cathedral, then at the horde closing in. He felt the weight of his missing memories, the 71.2% integrity that felt like a ticking clock. He realized that the cathedral hadn't gone dark because it was empty. It had gone dark because it was hiding.
"They aren't trying to kill us," Renji realized, his eyes widening. "They're trying to use us as a key."
A massive, distorted voice boomed from the depths of the liquid sea, vibrating the very atoms of their bubble.
"Architect... show us... what you have forgotten..."
The liquid sea began to rise, forming a massive, grasping hand that eclipsed their entire sphere, pulling them down into the crushing depths of the Aetheric Deep.