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/-\
The skies didn't crack this time. They simply went quiet.
Across the world's largest cities Kyoto, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, Berlin the air felt heavier. Power grids hiccupped. Light flickers began in clusters: neon signs dimmed to blood-orange hues, monorails halted in sync, and shard-imbued networks bled static into civilian comms.
In Toronto's upper-sector, all three broadcasting towers went dark within thirty seconds.
The sixth node had not announced itself. It whispered. A cold, sub-zero pulse rippling across fiber lines, bypassing chakra resonance entirely. Unlike the other nodes living, chaotic, filled with history this one didn't feel alive. It felt engineered.
Antarctica had never broadcast before. Now it pulsed on all frequencies. A soft, clinical hum that every human seemed to feel behind their sternum.
Governments scrambled.
In Berlin, operatives from three opposing factions triggered simultaneous blackout orders. In Nairobi, sleeper cells long believed dormant awoke with entirely new behavior patterns: not violent, but silent. Calculating. Watching.
The sigils they scrawled weren't like the others. They weren't Uchiha-made. They were reversed inverted calligraphy, twisted backward as if mocking their source.
Near the Berlin node, civilians wandered into traffic, muttering in dead dialects.
"Izanami waits."
"The memory has no blood."
"We return through mirrors, but only once."
Each phrase an echo from nowhere. Each speaker unaware of their own mouth.
The Recall Chain had gone active. And something in the ice was listening back.
Aiden's world didn't return with light.
He blinked against darkness, only to remember: the bandages over his eyes weren't just covering wounds. They were covering absence. The Sharingan was gone no longer functional in the traditional sense. But something else had bloomed in its place.
"Vitals stable," Selene murmured, monitoring from her post beside the glass chamber.
Kiera remained in the shadows, arms folded, jaw clenched.
Aiden's chest rose and fell in steady rhythms. But then his mouth moved.
"You're Selene," he whispered. The tone was off casual, but not his. "But not that Selene. You haven't burned yet."
Selene froze.
Seconds later, his voice changed again. "Naraka grid breach detected. Evac protocol six seconds."
Now he gasped, sat up with a jolt. The vitals spiked.
Kiera rushed forward. "Aiden "
He blinked behind the bandages. "Who was just speaking?"
"You were," Selene said carefully.
He clutched his head. "No, they were. I saw a woman watching a flooded city. Then a man carving runes into ice with bare hands. I felt his fingers crack. I felt it."
Selene nodded grimly. "Your neural resonance is syncing with the Recall Chain. It's no longer pulling from the past it's tethered to the active minds of other shard hosts."
Kiera hissed. "You're saying he's splitting?"
Selene glanced down at her readings. "Worse. He's becoming plural."
Aiden whispered a phrase in Uchiha dialect neither of them had ever heard. Then again, in a more ancient cadence.
"Under the Black Sun, memory does not end. It restarts."
Selene paled. "That phrase… it's not in any current archive. That's from the kinetic scrolls in the Vault."
Kiera exhaled. "He's tapping into restricted fields."
Aiden looked up, bloodless lips barely forming the words. "I don't know where I end anymore."
Drey sat crouched over a holotable, data scattering like starlight across its surface. Echo stood nearby, arms crossed, absorbing the chaos.
The sixth node had changed everything.
"I traced the signal's frequency," Drey muttered. "It bypasses chakra entirely. It's not a spiritual resonance it's a data language. Cold, recursive. Unforgiving."
"And human?" Echo asked.
Drey hesitated. "Not… precisely."
He pulled up a rendering of the node's hum, layered with its transmission code. "This doesn't resemble any of the shard signatures from the Vault or global nodes. And it's not reacting to chakra. Which means it might not even be a shard at all or was altered."
Echo's fingers hovered over the table. "Then what is it?"
Drey zoomed in. "See these sublayers? That's geo-tagged coordinate data, embedded inside the signal envelope."
He tapped the map. A point in Antarctica lit up.
"Kagami," Echo murmured. "That was one of the off-grid shinobi outposts, right?"
"Not just off-grid," Drey said. "Classified. It wasn't part of any shinobi nation. It was independent, rogue. A place to store… things."
Echo narrowed his eyes. "Then that's where we go."
Inside the Mirror Vault, the Berlin host stood before a corridor lined with living crystal and memory-streams. His form flickered once as the calm boy he'd been, then again with jagged speech and narrowed gaze.
Mandara watched silently.
"Peace is optimal," the host whispered. "But inefficient."
He blinked again. "We can't afford restraint."
Mandara stepped forward. "You're becoming two people."
"No," the host replied, voice split, one tone soft, the other frigid. "I'm becoming all of him."
The memory pillars trembled. Scrolls reacted to the conflicting chakra signatures pulsing within the host's body.
"The directive was built with a choice," Mandara muttered. "You weren't meant to carry both halves."
"But something disrupted the implantation," the host said. "And now he Aiden is carrying the spillover."
He turned to a sealed corridor. No glyphs opened it. No chakra signature registered.
But it opened. Seamless, like breath drawn in reverse.
Mandara's jaw clenched. "That's not chakra…"
"It's recall," the host replied. "The Vault remembers who I was. And who I'm becoming."
Kiera didn't trust Selene. She never would. But the tremors in Aiden's neural profile were spiking too fast to ignore.
"He's fragmenting," Selene said, fingers dancing over the stabilizer schematics. "His consciousness is trying to reconcile multiple current inputs. If we don't ground him, the identities will begin to overwrite his baseline."
"And you want to fix this with that?" Kiera pointed to the shard-node interface stabilizer.
"It's the only method calibrated to echo-patterned cognition," Selene said.
Kiera studied the design. "A temporary patch."
"A choice-forcing mechanism," Selene corrected. "The Architect left it behind for a reason. He knew one day someone would have to choose which version of himself continues."
Kiera's expression darkened. "You think Aiden is the Architect."
"No," Selene said. "I think he's what the Architect became… when choice failed."
Kiera leaned in. "You keep saying the directive was meant to protect memory. But all I see is damage."
Selene's eyes glittered. "Because protection was never its goal. It was to fracture memory test it under pressure. And let only the strongest fragments remain."
Kiera whispered, "You want him to break, don't you?"
Selene didn't answer. She only powered up the rig.
Aiden drifted.
The darkness around him wasn't absence. It was structure familiar. His unconscious mind stood within a chamber of spinning rings. The Vault. But deeper. Beneath even the crystal foundations.
The Vault's final memory chamber.
There, he saw him again.
The Architect stood before a half-burnt mirror. The face it showed back… was his own. Older. Scarred. Fire in one eye. Regret in the other.
"You," Aiden said.
The Architect turned.
"I'm not your future," he replied. "I'm your fallback."
"What do you mean?"
"You were not my heir," the Architect said. "You were my failsafe."
Aiden's breath hitched.
"I carved the directive into time itself. I fractured identity to keep memory from becoming corruption. But the chain was broken. And now you inherit it all of it."
The chamber quaked. Scrolls unraveled. Unseen data poured through the dreamscape like ink into clear water.
"Then help me fix it."
The Architect shook his head. "No. Choose."
The walls began to collapse. Code bled from the air.
Aiden shouted, "Choose what?"
The Architect's image flickered, fading.
"Choose which world to remember. The rest will burn."
And then
Silence.
/-\
If you wish to read more or simply support me than check out my Patreon at
" https://www.patreon.com/Its_Zack/ "
You can Get Access to 3 More Chapters OR 7 More Chapters if you want.