When Rei opened his eyes again, he was no longer walking.
He was falling.
Endless white below. Endless white above. And then—
THUD.
He landed on what should have been a floor, yet felt like thought. Not a surface, but a frozen idea shaped into solidity. The environnt ford slowly, as if rembering itself:
Shelves of glowing data cubes
Frozen monts from Jay’s life
A ticking pendulum that swung without sound
Everything here pulsed with System Authority.
---
> [Access Granted: User R.K.]
[Lazy Genius Core Archive: Confidential Layer 0]
[Viewer Status: Unauthorized Dream Host]
---
The system should have rejected him.
But it didn’t.
Instead, it welcod him. As if it rembered him too.
Rei stepped forward, boots echoing in a vacuum of silence. Each data cube he passed blinked with labels that made his skin crawl:
Jay.001 – Assigned Sleep Personality
Jay.002 – Suppression of Original Intent
Jay.003 – Inherited Dream Class (Unstable Transfer)
Jay.004 – Rejected Anchor: Rei Kazuma
He stopped.
> "What...?"
His fingers hovered over the last cube—Jay.004.
He touched it.
The cube pulsed, projected a blue-hued recording.
---
Jay, years younger, sat across from a faceless administrator. The conversation had static interruptions, but Rei could make out the words.
> ADMIN: "To stabilize the 999x System, we’ll need to overwrite the Dream Anchor. The boy... Rei, he’s too unstable. Too idealistic."
> YOUNG JAY: "So... you’ll dump it on ?"
> ADMIN: "You’ve shown perfect laziness paraters. You won’t ddle. That’s what we need. A vessel that sleeps through the chaos."
Jay didn’t respond imdiately.
Then:
> "Fine. But don’t bla if I get bored and start poking holes in your plan."
---
The recording ended.
Rei stepped back, breath ragged.
So that was it.
He was supposed to be the host. The system was his—a Dream Class ant to stabilize cognitive magic, to shape realities through subconscious control.
But Jay had been chosen instead—because he wouldn’t care.
Because Jay was... "lazy."
A flaw that made him the perfect lock.
---
> [New Archive Unlocked: Prototype Anchor Logs]
Rei opened it.
And this ti, the mory was his.
---
A small room. A girl holding his hand. The sa one from before—the blurred figure.
She whispered:
> "You promised we’d change everything, Rei. You said dreams could rewrite the world."
He choked.
> "I... rember now."
The Dream System. The Academy. The Project. The girl—her na—
> [ERROR: Na Corruption – Recovery in Progress]
A flicker in the background: Jay. Watching through a glass wall, distant, unreadable.
---
> [Warning: Archive Core Stability Dropping – Unauthorized Recovery in Progress]
[Please prepare for extraction]
Rei ignored it.
He walked deeper.
At the very center of the archive sat a terminal marked:
> SYSTEM RESET: CLASS REALIGNNT
It pulsed.
Waiting.
A choice.
---
Rei reached toward it.
His voice calm.
"I’m taking it back."
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