The liquid sea didn't feel like water. As the massive hand of code dragged the bubble beneath the surface, the sensation was more like being submerged in freezing mercury. The pressure was immense, pushing against the "Bubble Encapsulation" until the translucent walls began to spiderweb with red, digital cracks.
"Renji! The integrity is dropping!" Lyra shouted, her voice muffled by the thick, viscous medium pressing in from all sides. "If this thing pops, we're not just going to drown—we're going to be overwritten by the waste!"
Renji stood at the center of the collapsing sphere, his feet planted wide. His eyes were no longer red; they were a blinding, flickering white as he pushed the Architect's Cipher to its absolute limit to maintain the barrier.
[WARNING: EXTERNAL DATA PRESSURE EXCEEDS SHIELD CAPACITY] [CURRENT SHIELD STRENGTH: 14%... 9%...]
"I can't... hold the physics!" Renji gasped, blood trickling from both nostrils. "The Abyss doesn't have a constant variable! It's shifting... it's all junk data!"
The grasping hand of the Deep pulled them deeper, dragging them toward the mouth of the "Upside-Down Cathedral." As they neared the entrance, the voices of The Forgotten grew from a whisper to a deafening roar. They weren't speaking with mouths; they were broadcasting their tragedies directly into the trio's minds.
I was a baker in Sector 42... I had a son named Elias... I don't remember his face... please, give me a face... I was a soldier... I died for a world that was deleted... give me a reason... give me a memory...
"They're starving," Darius growled, his iron shield glowing red as he bashed at a distorted, faceless head that tried to phase through the thinning barrier. "They don't want to kill us, Renji! They want to eat our pasts!"
With a final, violent lurch, the bubble was sucked through the cathedral's arched gates and into a pocket of airless, pressurized space. The shield shattered.
Renji, Lyra, and Darius were thrown across a floor made of petrified soul-matter. Renji scrambled to his feet, but the environment was already attacking. Thin, ghostly tendrils—the Siphon-Threads—dropped from the ceiling, seeking out his neural ports.
[CRITICAL ALERT: MEMORY SIPHON INITIATED] [SYSTEM DETECTED: THE ARCHIVE OF THE DELETED]
"Get back!" Renji screamed, swinging his arm in a wide arc. A blade of black static cut through the air, severing the tendrils reaching for Lyra and Darius, but dozens more latched onto his own back.
He fell to his knees as his mind became a battlefield.
In his vision, a massive, spectral scale appeared. On one side was his remaining 71.2% Memory Integrity. On the other side was a void that needed to be filled. The Forgotten weren't just ghosts; they were the collective 'Trash' of a thousand harvested worlds, and they had found a man who could give them form.
Give us... the childhood... the voices hissed.
Renji felt the memory of his first day of school being yanked out. Then his first kiss. Then the memory of his mother's voice.
"NO!" Renji's voice distorted, sounding like a choir of crashing servers.
He didn't pull away. Instead, he reached out and grabbed the tendrils with both hands. If they wanted to eat, he would feed them—but not with his life. He channeled the Cinder of Industry and the Cinder of Ash simultaneously, creating a bridge between the Cinders and the starving Archive.
"You want a memory?" Renji snarled, his eyes bleeding black ink. "Take the memory of the Harvest! Take the memory of your own deletion! Re-member... WHY YOU ARE HERE!"
[SKILL ACTIVATED: VOID-REVERSE — TRAUMA BROADCAST]
He didn't give them his happy moments. He weaponized the very trauma the System had forced upon him and the billions of others. He pumped the raw, unrefined agony of the Harvest back into the Siphon-Threads.
The Archive screamed.
The cathedral began to shake as the "Forgotten" were flooded with the truth of their existence. They weren't being fed; they were being awakened. The bioluminescent gold light that had been dim began to pulse with a violent, rhythmic intensity.
[PROGRESSION: THE ARCHIVE IS RECOGNIZING THE ARCHITECT] [CINDER OF PRESERVATION STATUS: UNLOCKING...]
But the cost was high. Renji's UI was flickering wildly, the numbers dropping in real-time.
[MEMORY INTEGRITY: 70.8%... 70.4%... 70.1%...]
"Renji! Stop!" Lyra cried, running toward him through the swirling storm of data. "You're hitting the threshold! If you go below 70, you'll lose your anchor! You won't be able to come back!"
Renji couldn't hear her. He was staring at the center of the cathedral, where the Cinder of Preservation was finally emerging from a pool of liquid gold.
From the shadows behind the Cinder, a new figure stepped out. It wasn't a ghost, and it wasn't a machine. It was a man in a pristine white suit, holding a silver pocket watch. He looked exactly like Renji, but his eyes were completely gold.
"Hello, Sato," the duplicate said, his voice calm amidst the chaos. "I am the piece you've already lost. And I'm not letting you have this Cinder."
The duplicate snapped the pocket watch shut, and time in the cathedral stopped.