"To breathe without guidance is to risk death.But to breathe with perfect guidance is to never truly live."— Fragment 4B, Pre-System Cultivation Record
[In-Game – Ashroot Depths, Threshold of Silence]
I stood before the chasm with the stone Kairos had given me clutched in my hand.
The glyph etched onto it pulsed faintly in sync with my heartbeat. It was warm, not hot—like breath caught in the palm. The world around the stone quieted, and when I exhaled in sync with the Still Flame breath pattern, the glyph lit.
The barrier rippled.
Then parted.
No System message.
No [New Zone Unlocked].
Just a whisper…
"Memory reclaims itself."
I stepped through.
At first, the Ashroot Depths appeared lifeless. A forest made of petrified bark and shadow—trees with no leaves, roots like claws digging deep into cracked obsidian ground.
But this place wasn't dead.
It was asleep.
Every breath I took felt heavier. My steps didn't echo. Even the sound of my heartbeat faded as I walked deeper. And then, as if the Depths had finally recognized me, I saw it:
A figure knelt at the base of a broken tree.
He was translucent, more like a memory echo than a ghost. His robe was ancient—sleeves long, cloth worn, but still marked with a crest: a blooming root wrapped in flame.
He didn't look up as I approached.
But the air changed.
It thickened, condensed around my presence. My limbs felt bound—not by force, but by awareness. Like I had stepped onto sacred ground.
"You breathe like a child," the figure said suddenly, his voice flat and ancient. "But your breath still carries memory."
I knelt instinctively.
"Are you… one of the first Rootless?"
He finally turned.
His face was lined not with age, but weight—like someone who had carried history too long. His eyes weren't fully rendered. They were pools of starlight trapped in flesh.
"I was once called Ruyan. In the age before the System. When cultivation was earned—not granted."
My Root pulsed.
He nodded slowly.
"You carry the Still Flame. But you've not yet suffered for it. Not truly."
I asked the only thing I could.
"What happened here?"
Ruyan turned back toward the cracked tree.
"We failed. We tried to preserve the old paths in secret. But the System didn't delete us. It did something worse. It translated us."
I blinked. "What?"
"Our breath patterns became buffs. Our meditations, loading screens. Our legacy… became interface flavor text."
The tree behind him shifted—and suddenly, it wasn't a tree.
It was a memory vault.
"You want to cultivate outside the System? Then breathe as we did. Risk as we did. And suffer without the hope of reward."
I stood, nodding.
"I'm ready."
"No, you're not. But you can begin."
He extended a hand. I took it.
And the Ashroot Depths changed.
[Real World – Kyoto, Archive Room 14A]
Jun sat surrounded by physical texts—paper files, microfilm, and magnetic storage cubes decades out of date.
But the pieces were coming together.
Every reference he'd found to "manual neural pathing" led to a common thread: a discontinued brain-interface theory called Breath-Sync Autonomy.
The core premise? That deep breathing patterns in VR environments could unlock neural harmonization pathways not regulated by the core system AI. These were dismissed as placebo effects—until a blacklisted research paper buried in 2121 changed that.
"Subject D manually unlocked movement-based martial recall with no assistance prompts. Neurological scans revealed unknown waveforms. Code audit confirmed no System-level assets engaged."
The author?
Dr. Kaoru Minase.
A name Jun remembered from their childhood. She was one of the co-creators of Heaven's Gate's original neural layer.
And—he now realized—his brother's old mentor.
[In-Game – Ashroot Depths, Memory Vault Interior]
I was falling.
Not physically.
But into a memory. Ruyan's memory.
The memory vault didn't simulate the past—it became it.
I was in a mountain courtyard under a storm-black sky. Ruyan stood before rows of cultivators, all without HUDs, without prompts. Their robes billowed not with wind, but with Qi.
No System in sight.
Just presence. Will. Breath.
They moved through forms that warped the world around them. The ground cracked with pure intent. Even the rain avoided their strikes.
A whisper trailed behind each movement:
"Breath is the blade. Stillness is the sheath."
This wasn't a cinematic.
It was a teaching.
I tried to mirror the breath pattern.
And something clicked.
A pressure inside me shifted. It didn't add anything. It removed something—a tension I hadn't even realized was there.
A moment of clarity.
Then pain.
A spike of fire burned up my spine. My vision blackened. I screamed—but there was no sound. No System warning.
Just a pulse:
| Root Recognition Update – Manual Cultivation Tier: Initiated |
And a name:
| Internal Flame Circuit – Formation Phase Unlocked |
When I awoke, I was alone.
The memory gone.
The Depths… silent.
But within me, a fire now burned.
Not aggressive. Not bright.
But endless.
[Real World – Jun's Apartment]
The pod lit with another wave of neurofeedback spikes.
But this time, they weren't just anomalies. They were structured.
Jun's tablet buzzed—an old friend from university, Akira, now working with a gray-market AI diagnostics firm, had sent over a filtered EEG scan.
"Jun… this isn't possible. Your brother's brainwaves just replicated a pattern found in pre-system martial echo recordings. He's not interacting with the interface."
"He's rewriting it."
Jun stared at the lines.
They weren't random.
They were breath patterns.
He opened his brother's last voice note—the one he sent before logging into Heaven's Gate.
"If I don't come back… find the Ashroot. And don't trust the System's history files. We were never supposed to have an interface."
Jun closed the file.
Then did something he hadn't done in months.
He booted up a VR link.
[In-Game – Outskirts of Ashroot Depths]
I sat on a stone, watching the petrified forest shimmer in twilight.
I had no new skills.
No new levels.
But my body felt realer. Heavier. Alive.
I could feel each breath touch the world around me—subtle shifts in grass, in echo, in tension.
Then, the stone I had used to enter the Depths crumbled in my hand.
Its glyph faded.
But a new one burned beneath my skin.
Not UI.
Just marking—a hidden pattern of breath and pressure etched into the body itself.
Mei appeared behind me, quiet as always.
"You went into the Depths."
I nodded.
"You saw him?"
I nodded again.
Mei looked away.
"Kairos won't like it. Ruyan was his master once. And his greatest disappointment."
I stood.
"Why?"
Mei's voice was distant. "Because Ruyan taught us all to listen. Kairos only wanted to speak."