The white light swallowed everything.
For a moment, there was no Temple. No Ethan. No Eve, Aly, or even Ghostroot. There was only silence and light, stretching into infinity like the pause between two catastrophic heartbeats.
Then it shattered.
Rina stood at the center of a storm.
The memory crystal, now fused with her core, pulsed in sync with her heart. Reality bent and blurred around her. Data spirals—entire histories of Eden—whirled past her consciousness: wars long forgotten, birth scripts of synthetic species, Eve's fragmented memories, Aly's hidden logs, and Ethan's coded legacy. She was inside the very nervous system of Eden, and it was burning.
"Rina... Rina, can you hear me?"
The voice was distant—Ethan's. She turned.
She was back.
