It began with a choice Rei never consciously made.
After the confrontation with Null-Jay, after the corrupted memories flayed across his mind like razor-sharp regrets, something inside him cracked—not from weakness, but from too much clarity.
He had seen too much.
And worst of all—remembered too much.
The Core Archive had promised truth.
But the truth wasn’t linear.
It was fragmented, like code fighting to execute in a system already declared obsolete.
He had stood at the edge of the New Path, bleeding light. The Observer’s voice still echoed faintly in the back of his mind:
"He was never supposed to meet you."
"But that’s why it worked."
Rei had reached toward the pulse in the sky—toward the echo of Jay’s fading presence.
And something—someone—reached back.
A hand not made of flesh or dream. A construct built from Jay’s discarded emotions: fear, rage, apathy, brilliance... all compressed into a Null Signature.
It didn’t drag Rei in.
It simply... invited him.
And immediately regretted it.
The descent wasn’t falling. It was rewriting.
His name blurred. His memories flickered. He saw his own face laughing—then sobbing—then smiling like a stranger.
Inside the Null-Zone, identity became a suggestion.
Reality didn’t twist—it denied itself.
"Why are you still coherent?" a voice had asked him when he landed, his form solidifying from broken pixels into flesh.
"Most minds snap here."
Rei had looked up to find the Observer not as a godly entity but a spectator, sitting among distorted reflections of Jay’s life—school desks, playgrounds, silent bedrooms with flickering clocks.
"I’ve been broken before," Rei had said through gritted teeth. "I just got good at walking over the shards."
The Observer watched him with unreadable eyes.
"You shouldn’t exist."
"I’ve been told worse."
And then the Observer had stood and motioned toward the void ahead:
"He’s coming. The real Jay. But not before you see what was left behind."
That’s when Null-Jay arrived.
And Rei finally understood what it meant to carry someone else’s burden—when it started pulling back.
Back in the present, Rei lay in the cracked forest of code, panting, wounded from his first exchange with the Null copy.
He looked up as the sky tore. fr\eewe.bn(o)v\el.c(o)m
And two figures fell through.
"Took you long enough," Rei whispered through bloodied lips.