Aashish_Kookna

“If you could relive your life—not to chase fame or fortune, but to right your deepest regrets—would you dare face your own past?”

Yun Fei was an ordinary man in his thirties, living a life soaked in the bitter wine of missed opportunities and mistakes. A failed business, a broken family, friendships turned sour, and the loss of the only girl who truly loved him—his world was a long list of what-ifs and if-onlys. He wasn’t evil, but he had been weak. Not cruel, but often silent when he should have spoken. His was a life not ruined by one catastrophic event—but by a thousand small regrets that, over time, swallowed him whole.

And then he died.

Not in glory, not in battle, not even in some poetic tragedy.

Just… alone. Forgotten.

But death wasn’t the end

Born Again with My Future Regrets

The three summoned Echoes stood in silence, their bodies flickering with unstable energy, their forms caught between forgotten battles and impossible futures.

Each of them carried weight—not just in presence, but in their memory echoes. And yet, they bowed to Yun Xi.

Yue Lan stared in disbelief. "You didn't just summon them… You commanded them."

Yun Xi looked at the Echoes, nodding once. "They're not here for me. They're here because I've already seen what's coming. And because this timeline… is collapsing faster than we thought."

The first Echo stepped forward. Unlike the soldier from before, this one wore crystalline armor that shimmered like shattered glass. Her voice echoed with three timelines at once:

> "You have activated the Memory Seed Protocol. By rights, you should not possess the Core Fragment."

Yun Xi reached into his system bank and pulled it out—the fragment from the Harvester, still pulsing faintly.

The Echo nodded solemnly. "Then the collapse has accelerated."

The second Echo, tall and wrapped in shadows that didn't move with the light, extended a long digit toward Yue Lan.

> "You. The girl marked by silence. You've been inside the Fold."

Yue Lan nodded, her expression hardening. "I barely made it out."

Yun Xi stepped between them. "She's with me. And I'm not letting her be rewritten."

The third Echo didn't speak. Instead, it walked slowly toward a cracked piece of wall nearby and placed its palm against it. A glyph appeared, swirling with hidden sequences.

Accessing Memory Seed Chamber… 1%

Yun Xi felt the air warp around them.

"Wait," he said. "There's a chamber? Where?"

The crystalline Echo answered, "Not where. When."

Suddenly, the ground beneath them trembled. All light in the area condensed into a single thread—drawn into the glyph.

Then, with a quiet pulse, a portal opened. Not like a Fold or a crack, but a perfectly circular doorway into somewhere else.

Through the opening, Yun Xi saw a strange space: floating shards of memory, twisting time anchors, and a monolithic tree made entirely of glass and light—its roots spread across the sky, drinking in lost moments.

> The Chamber of the First Memory Seed.

"Only three people have ever entered this place," the crystal Echo said. "None came out unchanged."

Yun Xi didn't hesitate. "We're going in."

Yue Lan grabbed his arm. "What if this breaks you?"

He looked her in the eye. "Then I'll break right. Because this timeline… depends on someone remembering what wasn't supposed to happen."

Inside, time had no weight. Sound moved in spirals. The roots of the tree whispered secrets in languages no one had spoken in thousands of years.

At the base of the tree lay an altar—cracked, glowing faintly.

And there, resting on it, was a seed.

Yun Xi approached. His system screamed warnings.

[Your future will rewrite itself.]

Chapter 26: Memory Seed Protocol