Plant a Seed (5)

The shelter had never been so quiet. After returning from Mount Vireon with the XIWEIS plant secured and planted, SOL dimmed the lights in the house and sent a new directive across Azihiro's interface.

[Rest Mode Activated. Physical threshold exceeded. Mandatory recovery initiated.]

Azihiro didn't protest. His limbs felt like steel cables stretched to their limit, fraying at the edges. The bruises on his arms had already darkened, and his knuckles still carried the dried blood from the cavern's rough terrain. Even the soft surface of his bed felt like stone beneath him, but as soon as he lay down, he sank deep into unconsciousness.

The moment his mind drifted away from the waking world, the void was broken by a jarring light. Azihiro found himself sitting amidst crumbled concrete and smoking debris. The sky above him burned brightly, filled with ash and smoke trails. Alarms wailed from distant towers. The ground quaked.

He looked down. A woman's head rested in his lap. Her face was a blur as though the catastrophic scene refused to give her identity. But her body was unmistakably solid and real. Torn, bleeding, burned, so broken he could barely process it. Her breaths were shallow, and her blood pooled at his knees, soaking into the cracked pavement.

Explosions thundered nearby. Something roared, not from nature, but something vile and dangerous. He could feel it like it was something that no longer belonged in any living world.

Then a voice, filled with panic, rang out. "The zombies are attacking the base! Hurry to evacuate while we stop them and give you enough time!"

Zombies?

Azihiro had never heard that word before. Not in his life, not in any file he ever read during his time in the academy, or the library in the mansion of the Jing Clan. But in this dream, it hit with terrifying clarity.

He turned his attention back to the woman. Her lips moved. Her voice trembled but rang like truth through a world falling apart.

"Run… Do not give the core data to them! Run and leave me alone, Azi. You must survive with the data intact. This world might perish, but yours won't! So run! Fulfill my death wish! Keep the core data!"

He froze. Her hands clutched his suit, her blood smearing it. More explosions shook the ground. Fires surged closer, buildings collapsing in dominoes of chaos. Somewhere behind him, footsteps charged, weapons blared.

"Go, Azi!"

"Do not look back!"

"Live for us!"

He tried to hold her tighter, but she faded, first her voice, then her form, evaporating like mist. The world fractured in front of him. Screams blended into the wind like a distant past. And then he woke up.

Sweat drenched his shirt. The blanket was tangled around him, his chest rising and falling rapidly. He stared at the ceiling. The soft light of SOL's rest mode illuminated his surroundings, simulating a night sky, unaware of the storm that had raged behind his eyes.

He sat up. His breath caught. The dream had felt so real. Too real to be called a dream.

Azi.

He touched his temple. No one had ever called him that. 

Who was that woman? What was the core data? And... zombies?

He pulled up SOL's interface, typing rapidly.

[Query: Zombies]

[Term not found.]

Was it just a dream?

He narrowed his eyes, trying to shake off the cold lingering in his spine. He tried to lie back down, but sleep wouldn't come. His mind spun with too many fragments, blood, data, a nickname he didn't recognize yet felt branded into his bones.

Giving up on sleep, Azihiro rose and slipped into his outer suit. The corridors of the SOL shelter were dim but responsive, lights flickering on as he passed. The air was cool, the silence soothing, but his thoughts raced.

I am Azihiro, and I have Azi in my name... He needed a distraction. Something to do. Something to build. So he went to the miniworkshop. 

All the materials he had gathered over the last missions, like scraps from the environment, circuits from old satellite wreckage, and the memory chips he found in damaged goods, lay scattered across the metal table. He hadn't had the time or energy to sort through them until now.

Azihiro began his work. He sorted the parts by function, bio-circuit boards, thermal regulators, power coils, and nanowire harnesses. The tools clicked and sparked softly as he worked, the only sound in the room aside from his measured breaths.

His goal was to construct a primitive Optical Brain, a device that could bypass SOL's limitations and scan for planetary and interstellar broadcasts. SOL, as useful as it was, had protocols. It filtered what information reached him, and Azihiro needed clarity beyond what the system permitted.

The people who brought the prince to this place made sure he had no way out, so they destroyed his optical brain.

He connected two memory cores together with a stabilizer chip and fused the heat regulator on the left side. Sparks flew briefly, then steadied. He added a visual interface screen salvaged from the remains of an old aerial drone and calibrated the power ratio through a tiny dial.

Hours passed. Piece by piece, the Optical Brain took form. It was crude and far from elegant, a dome-shaped unit with wires curling like vines around its sides, but it was brought to life once he connected the power conduit. A soft tune filled the room.

Azihiro pressed a sequence into the interface, directing the Optical Brain to run a signal sweep, both local and interstellar. It would take some time to scan frequencies beyond the barren land, but if there were any hidden archives, distress calls, encrypted codes, or planetary anomalies, this device would find them.

He leaned back and stared at the screen. Static. Then, one by one, signals began to flicker in.

Encrypted messages.

Old military transmissions.

Fragmented voice recordings.

Most were indecipherable, corrupted beyond repair. But then...

"…core… data…"

The voice was faint. His fingers hovered over the controls. He tried to stabilize the feed. It crackled, then played again.

"…protocol breach… transfer the core data to AZI… mission fallback confirmed… surviving personnel rerouted to Terra-7…"

He stared at the screen.

AZI.

Again.

So it wasn't just a dream.

He closed his eyes, his heartbeat thundering in his ears. This meant something. The name. The woman. The data. They weren't figments. They were real. An event that had been buried, redacted, or lost entirely. But now, traces of it were waking.

Azihiro touched the casing of the Optical Brain gently. His world had shifted. The seed he had planted was not only of crops and roots but of memory and identity. Whatever truth was hidden behind his silence, whatever past had been cut away, he was one step closer to knowing it.

Did I forget some memories?

Or was the prince involved in some state secrets?