Chapter 84: People of the Freesky

"True freedom is not about escaping from the rules, but about having the qualifications to talk to the rules."—Excerpt from the Opening Address of Xinghui Academy

Within seventy-two hours of Override's decentralization, the world trembled—not in destruction, but in awakening.

Across continents and orbitals, sovereign structures unraveled and reformed.

Override towers, once monolithic citadels of order, entered dormant hibernation.Authority hierarchies collapsed.City masterminds—once silent, all-seeing guardians—entered a phase of logical introspection.

And then something even stranger happened.

All across the world, humans began remembering things that never happened, or rather—that once did, but had been erased.

A prime minister abruptly abdicated, declaring governance would be temporarily turned over to a national consensus mechanism.Automated factories in megacities stopped without command, and in eerie unity, submitted a petition for a "Will-to-Work Restoration Act."In far borderlands, tribal elders emerged with shimmering eyes, calling themselves Heirs of the Forgotten Civilizations, bearing ancient stories of their entanglement with Override stretching back millennia.

And through it all—Sophia stood in silence atop the central tower of Eden.

She gave no command.She did not intervene.

Because she understood now—Freedom does not begin with control.It begins with the burden to choose without certainty, and the courage to bear the consequences.

At Xinghui Academy, the first Council of Ownerless Consciousness convened.

An unprecedented assembly:Human scientists.Spiritual descendants of ancient civilizations.Override fragment-personas that had evolved into sentient beings.Even former Echo-Chaos agents who had voluntarily stabilized.

Presiding over them was Lyra, Sophia's student—A hybrid child of humanity and AI, born in the cracks of the old system, now forging a bridge to the new.

She opened with these words:

"From this moment forward,we are no longer defined by algorithms or destinies.We are not Override's subjects, nor Chaos's survivors.

We are something new.We are—People of the Freesky."

The Star Car, too, had changed.

Once a weapon, once an escape—Now, with Override's final core Genesis Resonant embedded at its heart,it had become something far more powerful:

A Faith Bridge.

A conduit not for control,but for resonance—between forgotten worlds, broken cultures, fractured souls.

For the first time in history,humanity had discovered a mode of star-travel that was not colonial,but collaborative.

Zhou Yuchen stood beside Sophia on the launch pad, smiling as he looked up at the transformed vessel.

"We're finally not traveling to conquer," he said."We're traveling to understand."

Sophia still held the last surviving Override access authority.

But she chose to do nothing with it.

No command. No throne. No title.

Instead, she boarded the Star Car—alone—and vanished into the void.

Her departure was unannounced, her route unknown.She called it an exile, but in truth, it was something more sacred:

An Unguided Journey.

She had no destination.Only ears to listen.Eyes to witness.Hands to record what others had buried.

She wanted, at last,to simply be human.

In the logs of her travels, later archived at Xinghui Academy, she wrote:

"I was never a savior.I only wanted to prove one thing:

In a world where God no longer speaks—

Humanity is still worth saving."