AFC - Chapter 5.0: The Threshold of the Lost Echo

Arc of the Forgotten Fragments (Floor 2)

The passageway was not dark in the usual sense of the word. It was not the absence of light that defined it, but the very negation of perception.

As she took the first step, Elia, contained within Ho Siyu's skin, felt the environment transform. The air, once merely thick with the dust and magic of the library, became dense, viscous, as if each particle of oxygen carried the weight of a century. The silence, which in the ancestral library had been a reverent calm, here became a palpable entity, an insurmountable wall that absorbed even the faintest echo of her own breath.

It was a silence so absolute that it hurt, pressing on her eardrums, threatening to crush her very consciousness.

"Incredible," Elia murmured, Ho Siyu's voice barely a whisper that seemed to be devoured by the density of the air. "How can a place be so... quiet?"

A cold, beyond temperature, enveloped her. It was not the cold of winter or of the depths of the earth, but the cold of a frozen time, of a petrified eternity. Every atom of that passageway seemed to have been frozen in a remote instant, preserving secrets so ancient that universal memory had erased them.

The scent of mold, of aged paper, and the faint fragrance of burnt sandalwood, which had once encapsulated the weight of knowledge, now mingled with a metallic essence, almost like dried blood, and the sickly sweetness of decaying truth. It was a smell of fermented lies, of broken oaths, of promises that time had devoured.

"This is no ordinary hallway," Elia thought, her mind screaming against the silence. "It is a mausoleum of truths."

The Emotional Presence extended, not like a wave crashing against the silence, but like the finest threads of light, feeling out the immense blackness.

What she found were not solid walls, but overlapping veils of history. She perceived echoes, not of articulated voices, but of pure, concentrated emotions. Vibrations of regret so deep they bordered on madness, of ambition so voracious it had devoured generations, of truths so atrocious that the Castellan mansion itself, the Tower, had tried to contain them within its walls like a lethal poison.

This place was not a simple corridor between points; it was a conduit to the veiled heart of the Tower, a segment of Floor 2 that the Castellans had sealed with their own desperation, a place where the Fabric of Realities had frayed and been sewn back together with dark threads.

"This is where fears are buried, Elia," a voice seemed to whisper in her mind, not audible, but felt, a resonance of her own essence speaking directly to her consciousness. "The fears of those who were afraid of losing what they had gained, even if that price was their soul."

Elia nodded with an almost imperceptible movement of her head.

"Fears that rotted and became poison," she replied in a low voice, addressing herself, but also that inner voice. "And that still infect everything."

Elia remembered the notches on the untitled book, the key to unraveling the acoustic secrets of the library. She knew that the library was a vast resonance chamber, a receptacle of stories. This passageway, with its suffocating silence, was the place from where those resonances were orchestrated, the hammer that struck the right points to release or suppress truths.

"Hidden in plain sight," Ho Yiran's words resonated with a new and chilling precision. Here there were no shelves full of tomes or rice paper screens; only the smooth, cold surface of the walls, which stretched on infinitely, without a single apparent door or window. It was truth in its purest state: a blank canvas for falsehood.

She lifted the book, feeling its now-familiar weight in her hands. The notches, which in the filtered light of the library had been mere marks, now shone with a faint blue light, an emanation of the essence that had been the final curtain in her own awakening. It was not a light that illuminated the passageway, which remained in its impenetrable darkness, but one that seemed to speak to her, a braille for the soul that she, Elia, was able to read with her fingertips. Each mark was a syllable in a forgotten language, an instruction to interact with the very fabric of space.

"Alright," she whispered to the nothingness. "What do you want from me? What secret do you keep, nameless book?"

She touched the first notch with her thumb. The passageway did not react with a roar, nor with an explosion of light. Instead, Elia felt an imperceptible, almost ethereal change.

The density of the silence at that particular point became deeper, more absolute, as if the air held the breath of a sleeping being. It was like witnessing the pulse of a heart that beat across eras, a pulse barely audible, but undeniably present.

"A heartbeat," Elia breathed. "The heartbeat of the Tower."

She tried the next notch, turning the book slightly, as if it were a key in a cosmic lock. A soft click resonated, not in her ears, but in the vibration of the ground beneath her feet, a rhythmic pulse that seemed to invite her to a secret dance with the Tower itself. A slight dizziness assailed her, as if space itself were leaning in to listen, to obey.

The Laws of Singularity of Causality that governed Kravnos, which dictated how elements from other universes must adapt to exist, seemed to bend their knees before the Narrative Malleability that Elia had begun to manifest.

"What do you want me to do?" Elia asked, her voice a pleading whisper in the immense void. "Show me the way, or the truth."

And then, Elia's "Narrative Malleability" activated, not as an explosive force, but as a subtle distortion in the very perception of reality.

The walls of the passageway began to ripple, not as if the material were moving, but as if the story that composed them was being rewritten in real-time, a canvas upon an already woven tapestry. It was not an optical illusion; it was a fundamental alteration of the narrative.

Fleeting images appeared on the surface of the wall, not static, but in constant flux: ancient faces, marked by desperation and cunning; arcane symbols that seemed to dance and change shape with each blink; fragments of texts in a language that Elia felt she knew, but could not remember, a language that spoke of pacts and sacrifices.

"By the Broken Lands!" Elia exhaled, fascinated and terrified. "What is this? Are they memories? Broken stories?"

They were echoes of the "Fabric of Realities," latent stories of the Castellan Family, not just their memories, but the decisions that had forged their destiny and, by extension, that of this universe.

In one of those visions, Elia thought she saw a woman, with hair the same dark shade as Ho Yiran, her eyes filled with an infinite sadness, kneeling before an abyss. She seemed to be offering something, not an object, but a part of herself, a promise torn from her soul, while around her, shadowy figures, which Elia's Emotional Presence interpreted as the ancestral Ho Masters, watched with disapproving coldness.

From the vision of the kneeling woman, an echo emerged, a whispered lament.

"The price is too high... Too high! Please... don't take this from me..." And a deeper, resonant voice replied, "The lineage is the price, not the loss. Your sacrifice weaves the future, descendant."

Another image showed a library, yes, but not the one she knew, but a vaster, more labyrinthine one, where the books were not made of paper, but of solidified light, and each tome pulsed with a life of its own.

A man, with the same inverted Castellan emblem she had seen in Ho Yiran's documents, was trying to catch one of those books, but it slipped through his fingers like sand. The man's voice, frustrated and desperate, filtered through the distortion.

"I can't catch them! I can't contain them! They vanish like smoke... The stories are being lost!"

Elia focused her Emotional Presence, guided by the book. Each notch, each turn, each pulse of her own power reconfigured the passageway. She was not looking for a physical door; she was looking for a narrative opening, a crack in the sealed history that could reveal the path to her.

The air filled with a growing hum, like that of thousands of voices whispering at once, although the silence persisted on an auditory level. It was the resonance of collective memories, of the fragments that Ho Yiran sought, and that the Castellan family had tried so hard to contain.

Elia felt her own existence, her thread in the Fabric of Realities, tense and vibrate in response to that silent symphony. Each whisper seemed a lament for a past that refused to die, and at the same time, a warning of a future that refused to be born.

"They tried to control everything," was the feeling that washed over her. "To control the narrative. To control existence itself."

A voice in her head, the voice of her own logic, warned her.

"Be careful, Elia. Not all threads should be unearthed. Some are better left forgotten."

"Why?" she replied in a low voice, feeling the visceral need to understand. "What is so terrible that it justifies this silence and this darkness?"

Finally, by positioning the book at a specific angle, over a notch that vibrated with a particular intensity, the passageway reacted with a deep shudder. A door did not open; the matter did not part. Instead, a section of the wall, previously smooth and impenetrable, dissolved into a whirlwind of luminous mist, a dense, golden fog that swirled upon itself, revealing a space beyond.

It was not an exit, but a dimensional window, a viewing portal to a space that should not exist under the normal laws of Kravnos.

Through the mist, Elia saw a circular chamber of dark stone, its walls adorned with intricate glyphs that vibrated with a subtle energy. In its center, on an obsidian pedestal, floated an object. It was not a scroll, nor a material fragment in the common sense. It was a dark crystal, so deep that it seemed to absorb the little light that surrounded it, a gem of solid night, but within it danced motes of golden light, like stars trapped in amber, pulsing with a tiny, constant life. And most shockingly: a figure knelt before it, immersed in deep concentration, with her eyes closed.

It was Ho Yiran.

Her hair fell like a black cascade over her shoulders, and her hands were extended toward the crystal, trembling but firm, as if she were about to grasp reality itself.

Her face, though young and delicate, showed an almost painful tension, etched with lines of steely determination and barely contained desperation.

Elia's Emotional Presence detected a whirlwind of longing and an abyss of despair emanating from Yiran, a visceral need that transcended simple curiosity or duty. The crystal was not an object; it was a repository. An encapsulated fragment of history, a piece of the Fabric of Realities that Ho Yiran was trying to activate, not just to read it, but to modify it.

"It can't be!" Elia gasped, the sound muffled by the passageway, but the impression seared into her soul. "She is... rewriting."

As Elia watched from her invisible threshold, Ho Yiran murmured something in a guttural, ancient tongue, a litany that sounded like both a plea and a command. They were not words that Elia could understand with her conscious mind, but her Emotional Presence translated them as an echo of a past that wanted to be rewritten.

"What story are you trying to change, Yiran?" Elia whispered, feeling a forced connection with Ho Siyu's desperation.

The golden motes in the crystal flickered with more intensity, and then, the crystal began to pulse with an internal light. It was not sounds that emanated, but shockwaves that propagated through the chamber, pure narrative distortions. They were echoes of lives rising and falling, of truths twisting and breaking. Elia felt a pang of understanding, a truth as cold as the passageway she was in.

Those fragments were not just inert memories; they were malleable pieces of the Fabric of Realities itself, encapsulated and endowed with a latent power to rewrite history. And Ho Yiran was learning to manipulate them, to mold reality to her will.

Elia felt a shiver that did not come from the cold, but from the relentless logic of what she was witnessing. Her own existence, her thread in Kravnos, depended on the stability of stories. If Yiran could rewrite threads at will, what would happen to Elia's threads? Could Ho Yiran, in her desperate search, erase her, unravel her from the narrative, just as the boy in the prologue had forgotten his sister? The threat was existential, beyond any physical harm.

"She doesn't just seek knowledge, she seeks absolute control," the voice of her Emotional Presence resonated in her mind. "And absolute control destroys what it tries to dominate."

The scene vanished as quickly as it appeared, the luminous mist closing in on itself, and the passageway returned to being an impenetrable wall of darkness and silence. Elia was again in the absolute blackness, with the book in her hands, its notches no longer glowing. She had witnessed something that the Ho Masters had striven to keep hidden, a truth that the Castellan family had veiled with layers of oblivion.

But the revelation had struck her with the force of a silent thunderclap: Ho Yiran was not only seeking the fragments for knowledge or out of a family duty; she was trying to use them to alter the very narrative of existence, to bend fate to her will. And if those fragments could rewrite stories, what would that mean for the delicate balance of Kravnos, a universe where reality itself was a fragile narrative? And for Elia's own destiny, whose existence depended on the stories remaining intact, or at least, manageable?

"This is bigger than I imagined," Elia murmured, the sound of her own voice barely a protest in the immense void. "Much bigger."

Elia pressed the book against her chest, feeling the cold of its pages against her skin. The truth was hidden in plain sight, yes, but its implication was much deeper and more terrible than she had imagined. The danger was not just Ho Yiran's relentless search, but what she planned to do with what she found.

Elia was not just a guest in Siyu's body; she was becoming a counterweight in a much larger narrative, one that threatened to unravel the entire universe. And in the midst of that thick silence, Elia knew that the next step had to be crucial, not only for her survival, but for the survival of the very stories that sustained reality.

The Tower had revealed itself as a battlefield for the narrative, and she, Elia, had just claimed her place in it. Uncertainty gnawed at her, but a new determination ignited in her being.

"I can't let her rewrite the universe to her liking," Elia affirmed, with a voice that, although only audible to herself, resonated with a renewed force in the silence of the passageway. "I must stop her. I must understand."