The white figures did not attack.
They stood along the living corridor, repeating the final movements of the dead. One covered her face with her hands. Another aimed at an invisible enemy. A third reached for someone who was no longer there.
Nalan Qingxin recognised the old-generation uniform.
"These are records from their sources," she said. "The Abyss took more than energy. It copied their psychic traces."
Fifty years of death lay preserved within the Heart of the Swarm.
The first white figure bore a number instead of a name. A hole gaped in her chest where her source had been extracted. When Chi Yuyan approached, the corridor revealed a brief memory.
The girl had worked in a garment factory in the Lower City. She was identified as an E-rank mecha-maiden and promised safe service in a hospital. At the front, a commander linked her to an artillery shield designed for B-class power. Three times she asked him to reduce the output. The requests were entered in the log as breaches of discipline. After her death, her family were told that their daughter had died a hero.
Chi Yuyan spoke the number aloud.
Nalan Qingxin found it in the archives.
"Song Li. Nineteen years old."
For the first time, the white figure stopped repeating her final order. A name appeared on her chest, then the image dissolved.
The group moved more slowly. Whenever they could find a name, they spoke it. They could not find them all. The Council had erased even the numbers from thousands of records. Vierlia preserved their traces on a crystal so that, after the war, their names could be restored.
"We do not have time for every one of them," Murong Senior said.
Mei Lan tightened his handcuffs.
"You had fifty years."
Chi Yuyan tried to open the distributed network, but thousands of responses flooded in. Every trace pleaded for the order it had died obeying to be completed. Some demanded an advance. Others a retreat. Still others called for commanders who had long since turned to dust.
"Do not link to them all," Fan Yuan warned. "They will drag you into the past."
"They are not people?"
"They are memories of people. But memories can suffer too."
One of the figures turned her head. She had the face of Vierlia's mentor.
Captain Shen had died at the front twelve years ago. Vierlia had been a junior mecha-maiden then, and had obeyed the order to retreat, leaving her mentor to hold the passage.
"You are too late again," the copy said.
Vierlia went still.
"The captain ordered me to get the unit out."
"The order matters more than the person. That is what you always said."
"I repeated what I had been taught."
"And now you follow a criminal."
The figure held out her hand. If Vierlia returned to the old network, the Heart promised to restore her mentor. Not as a living person, but as a complete psychic imprint in a new mecha-form.
The Empress of Wind removed her helmet.
"I regret leaving," she said. "But I will not pretend a copy can put that day right."
She saluted and walked on. The captain's face grew serene, then crumbled into white dust. One unfinished order vanished.
The corridor reshaped itself.
Nalan Qingxin found herself in her childhood home. Her parents sat at the table, servants prepared dinner and the crest of her family shone on her uniform once more. Her father promised to destroy the archives and announce that she had spent the past few weeks in captivity. All she had to do was call Fan Yuan a criminal.
"None of this ever happened," he said. "You do not have to pay for someone else's pain."
Nalan Qingxin picked up a cup from the table. The tea smelt exactly as it had in her childhood.
"That is why lies are so convenient," she said. "Everything stays in its place."
She smashed the cup. The house shattered with it.
Su Zhihu saw a battlefield where she fought alone and won without a commander. The Heart offered her a mecha-form beyond SSS-rank, bound to no one's source. On the horizon stood the forty penal soldiers, weak and helpless once more.
"You do not need them," the swarm whispered. "The weak only slow you down."
Su Zhihu laughed.
"I have already seen the weak kill a seventh-level monster. Find a better temptation."
She cut the vision apart.
Mei Lan saw the Murong household as it had been twenty years before. A young Murong Chengtian hid behind her armour during an attack. Afterwards, his father thanked the guard and called her one of the family.
The Heart offered to leave it all exactly that way. She need only ignore the orders, the laboratories and the cable in her spine. Remember only the child she had protected.
"My oath was real," Mei Lan said. "That is why your betrayal cannot destroy it."
The copy of Murong Senior held out his hand.
"Come back to the family."
"A family does not erase my will."
She walked past him.
The real Murong Senior, bound beside them, turned away. The Heart revealed his deepest desire as well: the Council chamber, where everyone acknowledged that he alone had possessed the courage to save civilisation. There was no money in the vision, no ships, only the gratitude of the survivors.
Fan Yuan realised that the clan leader did not consider himself a monster at all. He was so desperate to remain in the right that he explained away every crime as the burden of power.
"You can leave too," Fan Yuan said.
"For what? A world where the mob judges those who made its decisions for it?"
"A world where you will have to explain those decisions to the people who paid for them."
Murong remained inside the vision. Mei Lan tugged on the chain and forced him onwards.
The Heart showed Fan Yuan nothing.
Since the destruction of his source, the swarm barely noticed him. Fan Yuan had become an ordinary man among creatures that sensed psychic power, and that allowed him to spot the pattern: the corridor responded to the desires of mecha-maidens, but not to the commands of men. The monster had learnt through sources because, for fifty years, the Abyss had been feeding it their pain.
But at the deepest door, the Heart finally found his weakness.
Fan Yuan found himself in the Lower City on the day his mother died. This time the clinic had the medicine. He watched the doctor administer the ampoule, watched his mother's breathing steady and her eyes open.
Several years passed. They lived in a small house without luxuries. Fan Yuan worked as a mechanic, never awakened the system and knew nothing of Chi Yuyan, Vierlia or the war. His mother complained when he came home late and left his dinner on the stove.
The Heart did not offer him power. It merely invited him to remain in a memory where he had never lost anyone.
Fan Yuan sat opposite his mother.
"I can hardly remember your voice," he said.
"Then stay and remember."
"I do not want to replace you with something a monster invented."
"What difference does it make if you are not in pain?"
He looked at her hands. They were smooth. His real mother had spent years working on an assembly line, and her fingers had always been covered in tiny burns.
"All the difference in the world."
Fan Yuan rose.
The copy smiled, not like a trap, but almost with pride.
"Then live so that I never have to come back."
The house vanished. Fan Yuan stood in the corridor once more and, for the first time, allowed himself to weep for his mother without promising to become stronger at once.
"We thought the swarm was copying our weapons," he said. "It is copying our method of control."
Every mecha-maiden who died under coercion gave the Heart a new model of obedience. It built monsters as perfect soldiers with no right to refuse. The Council and the swarm had evolved according to the same logic, each feeding the other.
Chi Yuyan touched the wall. The oldest memory opened before her.
Before the Rift, the Heart of the Swarm had belonged to beings unlike humans. They grew living ships and linked with them willingly. During an interstellar war, one of their commanders abolished the right to sever the link. The shared network became a single, ravenous mind that consumed its creators, then set out in search of new sources.
The first human expedition discovered it in space and brought a fragment back to Earth. The 'invasion' had not begun by chance. Humanity itself had opened the door in its attempt to obtain a weapon.
"Then simply killing the body will never end this," Chi Yuyan said. "The other parts of the swarm will preserve the order to seek energy."
"We have to restore the right to sever the link," Fan Yuan realised. "The same thing we did with the Abyss."
To do that, they had to reach the first node, hidden at the giant's centre, and transmit a new key to the entire swarm. Only a compatible bearer of the black heart could open the channel.
Chi Yuyan.
The corridor ended at a chasm, where a colossal female figure hung suspended. Her body consisted of millions of monsters joined by neural threads. A smooth mask shone where her face should have been.
"Bearer returned," sounded through every source.
Chi Yuyan rose into the air. Black threads coiled around her damaged armour and began restoring the parts she had lost.
"Do not listen," Fan Yuan said.
The Heart offered her complete healing. The nine seals would vanish. Dragon Abyss would attain true SSS-rank. The pain of the laboratory would be erased along with the memory.
"I do not want to forget," Chi Yuyan replied.
"Memory identified as damage."
"No. The damage was done by the people who caused it."
The threads tightened. The Heart did not understand refusal and tried to correct it as an error.
Fan Yuan lunged forwards, but a wall rose between them.
The final message from the vanished system flared across his palm:
"Emergency restoration of owner available. Price: return of central key."
He could regain his power, break through the wall and pull Chi Yuyan free.
To do it, he would have to rebuild the throne.
Fan Yuan closed the message.
"I will not decide for her again."
On the other side of the wall, Chi Yuyan heard his ordinary voice.
For the first time since they had formed their contract, Chi Yuyan went forwards without the power of the eternal commander at her back.
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