Beneath the simulation, the memories which never been spoken begin to loosen.
—
Athena Institute · Deep Simulation Chamber
Day Thirteen.
The students on Floor 22 faced their first full-scale, system-level individual assessment.
Unlike class discussions or theory-based tests, this phase was designed to measure:
real-time response, non-standard construction, and implicit logic recognition.
Simulation Theme:
Submerged Escape System Design & Resource Coordination.
Each participant was given incomplete data, and tasked with spatial reconstruction, route planning, and emergency response under evolving constraints.
—
Elric stood in front of the virtual interface, with a steady gaze.
The countdown hit zero.
The simulation burst open: a rotating four-dimensional space model, a cluster of floating coordinate nodes, and a cracked pressure capsule.
Other students frowned, recalculating vectors and testing configurations.
But Elric—no notes, no equations.
He simply closed his eyes.
Three seconds later, he moved.
——
His fingertips moved swiftly through the air.
The structure on screen assembled far faster than the system's predictive curve.
His route mapping looked less like calculation—
More like remembering.
Layer after layer clicked into place.
As if the path had been seen before.
As if it came from memory, not analysis.
—
Inside the system monitoring room, a red flag blinked on the observer screen:
"22-F03 Cognitive Path Detected – Nonlinear Contextual Recall."
"Route accuracy: 97%. Reasoning chain: untraceable."
One instructor frowned.
"Did he access the model in advance?"
Another professor quietly shook their head.
"No. He's reconstructing something he's lived through."
The room fell silent for three seconds.
—
Elric's gaze landed on one corner of the simulation:
The ruptured underwater chamber.
He hadn't told anyone.
But the image in his mind was already there—
Blurry, permanent, indelible.
—
He had once been inside a box—metallic, enclosed.
Maybe a storage crate.
Maybe a shipping container.
He wasn't sure anymore.
What he remembered—
Was seawater seeping through the cracks.
The dampness.
The salt.
The stench of rust and fear.
Did he cry?
Probably not.
He just stared upward,
Watching the crack in the ceiling shrink,
Smaller and smaller,
Until the light was almost gone.
Back then, he thought he would die.
But he didn't.
He lived.
And he never went back to the world he came from.
—
"Task complete."
Elric opened his eyes.
The system showed eight minutes still remaining on the countdown.
He was the first in the group to finish.
—
Outside the simulation chamber,
Other students went out one by one—
Most of them looked tense.
Some chugged water from their bottles in silence.
Gao Mo glanced at Elric and raised a brow.
"You were… fast."
Elric replied calmly.
"I've seen something like it before."
Meng Zhiheng leaned in, half-joking.
"Did you grow up underwater or something?"
Elric didn't answer.
Just looked down at the glowing trace still fading from the simulation floor.
It was a path he had already walked once.
Today—
He had simply walked it again,
This time in a way the system allowed.
—
Meanwhile, in the back garden of the house,
Elena sat quietly on a wooden bench.
She was sewing the cuff of an old shirt—
One Elric had worn as a child.
The sunlight was soft, warm across her lap,
And the fabric seemed to hold it gently—
Like light filtered through a dream.
—
She paused.
Not because something came to mind—
But because that feeling returned.
Like a light,
From somewhere far beyond,
Pushing through layers of silence and distance,
Reaching for her.
She gently pressed her hand to her chest.
And whispered—
"Were you… thinking of me today?"
No reply.
Only the sound of wind brushing through the osmanthus tree.
But she smiled.
And kept sewing.
——
[Chapter Epigraph]
He thought he had forgotten that night.
But the faster he moved through the system,
the clearer the black water that once drowned him became clearer.
⸻
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Chapter 19 · Beyond the Archive Room
Blank files. Missing data. The deeper they search—
the more it seems this boy… may never have existed.