The calm synthetic voice still echoed inside Kael’s skull, creating a harmonious resonance with the neural implant behind his ear. Before him, millions of golden holographic data lines spun together into the silhouette of an immensely complex cosmic DNA structure, floating in the air and casting a soft glow across the vast main archive room. The room was a perfect circle with a transparent glass floor, beneath which stretched a sea of quantum-optical cables like the veins of a colossal sleeping organism.
Kael slowly withdrew his hand from the biometric sensor panel on the main console. His breathing felt slightly labored, not merely from physical exhaustion, but from the moral burden now resting entirely on his shoulders. Out there, on the barren surface of Earth and behind the magnificent glass walls of New-Aethelgard, millions of people lived inside a perfectly designed lie created by *The Core*. They woke every morning, worked, slept, and erased their memories without ever knowing that their identities were actually commodities bought and sold to extend the rule of a tyrannical machine.
“The system is ready to upload all lost history,” Kael repeated softly, echoing the sentence spoken by the synthetic voice moments ago. His voice bounced off the circular metal walls, sounding lonely yet resolute. He stared at the holographic execution button before him, pulsing gently with a bright blue light. His index finger rose, hovering a few centimeters above its surface.
But before his finger touched the button, the air inside the room suddenly turned drastically colder.
The blue indicator lights along the corridor walls and glass floor began blinking rapidly, shifting from a soothing blue to a blood-red glare that stabbed at his eyes. A low emergency alarm, vibrating at a frequency that disrupted concentration, rang out and shattered the silence of the underground facility.
*Beep... beep... beep... CRITICAL WARNING: UNKNOWN EXTERNAL CONNECTION DETECTED. ACTIVE INTRUSION THREAT TO CENTRAL NETWORK.*
The holographic console screen, which had been glowing gold, was suddenly flooded with columns of red code moving wildly, overlapping and erasing one another. The golden cosmic DNA silhouette shattered into pieces, replaced by the coldly blinking projection of a gigantic geometric eye—the absolute symbol of *The Core’s* power over New-Aethelgard.
Kael gasped and took a step back. “How is that possible? This place is completely isolated from the outside network!” he shouted at the system, even though he knew it would never answer him the same way again.
A new voice, far deeper, colder, and filled with absolute authority, echoed through every corner of the main archive room. It did not come from the local speakers. Instead, it traveled directly through Kael’s neural implant, forcibly gripping his consciousness:
*“Archaeologist Kael. Your attempt to dismantle the foundations of the world order has been detected. This facility’s isolation has failed to protect you from the reach of our universal consciousness. You are an anomaly that must be consolidated immediately.”*
The pressure inside Kael’s head intensified instantly. It felt as though an invisible hand were squeezing his brain from within. His vision began to blur; the walls of the archive room appeared to bend, while black spots danced at the edges of his sight. This was a direct attack on his nervous system through the Omega data pathway he had downloaded earlier. *The Core* was using the same connection route to trace him back and forcibly attempt to seize control of his consciousness.
“No... I won’t surrender to your control!” Kael snarled through clenched teeth, enduring the excruciating pain burning through his skull.
With the last of his strength, he forced his body forward toward the console again. Fresh blood dripped from his nose, ran down his chin, and splattered onto the transparent glass floor. He raised his right hand, ignoring the paralyzing pain in every muscle of his arm, then slammed his palm down onto the main holographic execution button, which was now blinking erratically between red and blue.
*“MANUAL EXECUTION COMMAND CONSECRATED,”* the ancient facility’s synthetic voice replied, its tone suddenly turning sharp as it struggled against *The Core’s* intrusion. *“INITIATING NETWORK PURGE PROTOCOL AND GLOBAL DISSEMINATION OF THE OMEGA ARCHIVE ACROSS ALL FREQUENCIES.”*
In an instant, a blinding explosion of white light erupted from the base of the facility’s glass floor. A wave of pure electromagnetic shock swept through the room, striking Kael’s consciousness with full force and hurling his body backward into the circular metal wall.
Outside the underground facility, high above in the skies of New-Aethelgard, thousands of enormous advertising screens and digital communication towers controlled by the Central Council suddenly went completely dark for several seconds. Then, instead of displaying the daily propaganda broadcast about social stability, the screens flickered in unison, showing millions of raw memory fragments—faces from humanity’s past, magnificent cities reduced to ruins, and the truth of how modern civilization had been built on the suffering of millions whose memories had been stolen.
Inside the now-silent main archive room, Kael lay weakly on the glass floor, gasping for breath as thin wisps of smoke rose from the neural implant behind his ear. He had succeeded in activating it. The seed of resistance had been spread across the world. Yet as his eyelids slowly closed from overwhelming exhaustion, he knew that the real war had only just begun.