Chapter 47 - Where the Unsaid Burns

I. The Echo After the Crater

Chapter 46 had ended with a bang: the massacre in the canals of Hoshigiri, a neutral mafia territory where Akihiko had been betrayed by one of his own.

The immediate consequences were untold... until now.

The blood of traitors was still hot on the cobblestones as Akihiko crept toward an old abandoned concrete structure: Shelter 17, an unnamed outpost the old assassins used in the root war, before the clans split.

There, Isabella was waiting for him.

But she didn't embrace him.

-You knew it was a trap," she told him.

Akihiko sat silently, holding his bleeding side.

He did not deny. He didn't explain. He just let the silence speak for him.

II. The words that went unsaid

That night, under the sickly light of an old lamp, Isabella asked him a single question:

-What did the Tree whisper to you before everything exploded?

Akihiko was slow to answer.

- "The roots know your voice... but not your soul."

That's what he told me.

Isabella looked away. They both knew that what had happened in the canals was not just human treachery.

It was judgment.

Someone from the Tree, or perhaps the Void, had intervened.

III. The cry of the child

During midnight, Akihiko went for a walk, despite the pain. He entered the tunnels that bordered Shelter 17. There he found a child, covered in mud and dried sap.

The boy did not speak. His eyes were completely white. On his arm, a shredded spiral.

Akihiko approached. The boy stepped back. He mumbled something, but it wasn't human. It was Tree Language, in an incomplete version. As if he had been taught the chant, but without the full melody.

-Who are you?

The boy answered with a single word:

-Hollow.

Akihiko did not understand then.

But that was the first echo of the name.

The first time the seed of the Void manifested without a body, but with a voice.

IV. The lost message

Back in the shelter, Isabella found a note hidden in the clothing of one of the traitors' corpses. It was written in burnt sap, only visible under slow fire.

The message read:

"It's not for power. It is for purity.

The Tree has begun to reject its own memories.

If you are reading this, you have already been edited."

Isabella understood then that what happened in the canals was not a simple execution.

It was a cleansing of facts.

And the few survivors were marked with something worse than death:

partial oblivion.

V. The choked cry

Before dawn, Akihiko dreamed.

In his dream, he was standing before a white root. It did not speak to him. It did not judge him. It only watched him.

And behind it, a faceless figure.

The figure said:

"When you remember this moment, you will no longer be here."

And Akihiko woke up crying without knowing why.

VI. What will not be remembered

When Chapter 48 begins, this moment will not be remembered by anyone.

The child will disappear.

The note will burn alone in the shelter fire.

Isabella will not mention the name "Hollow".

And Akihiko will believe that the dream was just that: an echo without a root.

For this chapter was marked by the Tree with a special decree:

"Wandering memory: not forgotten... but silenced."