We sat in the quarantine airlock. The only light came from a single emergency strip. It flickered. On. Off. On. Off. Each flash revealed the room in frozen snapshots.
Marcus leaned against the wall. His blood dripped from the gash on his arm. The droplets fell. Then they hung in the air. Then they fell again. The blood could not decide which timeline to obey.
Lara’s shadow moved a half second after she did. When she turned her head, her shadow face stared forward for a moment too long. Then it snapped to catch up.
The air tasted of copper and ozone. My Dysphasia whispered wrong sounds into my ears.
But the door stayed closed. The tools stayed in their pouches.
The sounds were coming from futures that had not happened yet. Or from ones that already had.
Eli checked his scanner. The screen glitched. Lines of code scrolled too fast to read. Then it showed a stable readout. Then it glitched again.
“My scanner is picking up multiple overlapping realities,” he said. “It cannot decide which one is present.”
The Rival pressed his fingers to his temples. His eyes were out of sync. One pupil dilated. Then the other. “The pathogen is not just in the air. It is in the concept of this place. We are breathing corrupted causality.”
I checked my status. The numbers wavered.
[PATHOGEN LEVEL: 17%... 18%... 17%...]
[EFFECT: SKILL DECAY ACCELERATION 170%... 165%... 180%...]
[IDENTITY BLEED THRESHOLD: 25%]
[NEXT STAGE: MEMORY FRAGMENTATION]
[/SYSTEM]
The numbers could not settle. The System itself was unsure what was happening to us.
Lara stood. She drew her phase-blade. The weapon hummed. The blue edge shimmered. Then it flickered. For a moment, the blade was solid steel. Then it phased again.
“I feel it,” she said. “The connection is unstable.”
She aimed the blade at a broken pipe on the wall. Thrust. The blade passed through the metal. Clean. No resistance.
Then she aimed at a piece of debris on the floor. A twisted piece of conduit. She thrust again.
The blade hit solid metal. Sparks flew. The impact vibration traveled up her arm. She stumbled back.
“What happened?” Marcus asked.
“It did not phase,” Lara said. She examined the blade. “The edge was solid. It only partially activated.”
The Rival approached. “Try again. On something else.”
Lara targeted a different piece of debris. The blade passed through.
She tried the original conduit again. Solid impact.
“It is specific,” she said. “Certain materials. Certain objects. The phase function fails.”
Eli scanned the blade. “The pathogen is corrupting the quantum tuning. The blade cannot maintain phase coherence against materials with high temporal stability. The more an object is anchored in reality, the harder it is for the blade to ignore it.”
“So against normal threats, it works,” Marcus said. “Against Admin level entities or Foundational objects...”
“It might fail,” Lara finished. She sheathed the blade. Her face was blank. “A permanent limitation. Until we find a cure.”
“There is no cure,” the Rival said. He pointed to a data terminal on the wall. “This place was not meant to contain a disease. It was meant to perfect one.”
He accessed the terminal. The screen flickered. Then it stabilized. Displayed a log.
[OUTER ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH LOG: PROJECT CAUSAL SCULPTOR]
[OBJECTIVE: DEVELOP REALITY-WEAPONIZABLE TEMPORAL PATHOGENS]
[STATUS: TESTING PHASE 7]
[NOTE: SUBJECTS SHOW PROMISING IDENTITY FRAGMENTATION UNDER 22% PATHOGEN LOAD]
[TERMINATION ORDER: ISSUED AFTER BREACH EVENT]
[REASON: TOO SUCCESSFUL. SUBJECTS BECAME CONTAGIOUS CONCEPTS.]
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
[/SYSTEM]
The words hung in the air.
“The System did not fail here,” I said. “It experimented here.”
Eli scrolled through more logs. “This was a weapons lab. They were engineering diseases that could rewrite reality. Make people forget who they were. Make objects forget what they were. The pathogen we have is a prototype. A weaponized causal instability.”
Marcus looked at his wounded arm. “And we walked right into it.”
“We had no choice,” I said. “The Trigger Mechanism was here.”
“Was it?” the Rival asked. He looked at the terminal. “Or was it placed here as bait? To see if we could survive the environment? To see if we were worthy of wielding the weapon?”
The thought was ice in my veins. This was not a dungeon. This was a test. And we were now infected with the test parameters.
My pathogen level ticked up. Eighteen percent. Then nineteen.
A wave of dizziness hit me. The room tilted. For a moment, I saw double. Two Marcus. Two Lara. Then they merged back into one.
The voice was mine. But I had not spoken. It came from inside my head. Clear. Cold. Certain.
I grabbed the edge of a console. “Did anyone hear that?”
“Hear what?” Eli asked.
“A voice. My voice. It said...”
I stopped. The words felt dangerous to repeat.
“Identity bleed,” the Rival said. He pointed to my eyes in a reflective surface. “Your pupils are different sizes. One is reacting to light. The other is delayed. The pathogen is creating temporal lag between your mind and your body. You are hearing thoughts from a future version of yourself. Or from a version in another timeline.”
“What did it say?” Lara asked.
I shook my head. “A warning. That is all.”
We needed to leave. Now. Every second in this airlock was increasing our exposure.
Eli found a map on the terminal. “There is a decontamination chamber deeper in the facility. It might have purification protocols. Or it might have more pathogens.”
“We have to risk it,” Marcus said. “We cannot stay here.”
We moved out of the airlock. Into the main facility corridor.
The hallway was wrong. The walls breathed. Not in and out. They shifted between states. One moment, clean white tile. The next, rusted metal. The next, fleshy organic tissue.
The floor changed texture under our feet. Slick. Then gritty. Then soft.
We passed a viewing window into a lab. Inside, a figure in a containment suit stood frozen. But its shadow moved. The shadow performed a complex series of gestures over and over. A looped memory of work.
Further down, another window. This one showed a room filled with floating crystals. Each crystal glowed with a different color. As we watched, one crystal turned black. Then it dissolved into dust.
“Reality seeds,” the Rival whispered. “They were growing stable causal nodes. For weapons. For tools. This place was a factory for foundational components.”
We reached the decontamination chamber. The door was sealed. A terminal beside it asked for a password.
Eli worked on it. “The security is old. Pre-System. I can bypass it.”
While he worked, I felt the pathogen creeping deeper. Nineteen percent. Twenty.
My thoughts began to echo. Each idea produced a second, quieter version of itself a moment later.
We need to leave. need to leave.
The weapon is a trap. weapon trap.
They are watching. watching.
I clenched my teeth. Focused on the present. The cold floor. The humming lights. The smell of antiseptic and decay.
The door hissed open.
The decontamination chamber was empty. Just a white room with drains in the floor. No equipment. No purification systems.
On the far wall, someone had written in black marker. The writing was messy. Desperate.
THEY MADE US FORGET HOW TO DIE
WE ARE STILL HERE
WE ARE ALWAYS HERE
Beneath it, a series of numbers and symbols. A mathematical notation. Eli recognized it.
“This is a causal equation. It describes a loop with no exit. A self perpetuating memory.”
“What does that mean?” Marcus asked.
“It means the test subjects did not die,” the Rival said. “They became trapped in their own memories. Forever reliving their last moments. That is the weapon. Not death. Eternal repetition.”
My pathogen level hit twenty one percent.
A memory that was not mine flashed behind my eyes.
I saw a lab table. My hands were bound. A figure in a white coat leaned over me. “Subject Seven. Causal resilience is remarkable. Proceed to phase two.”
The memory vanished.
I gasped. “I am remembering things that never happened.”
“They are happening,” the Rival said. “In another branch. The pathogen is connecting you to your alternate selves. You are bleeding across timelines.”
Lara’s phase-blade flickered on her hip. Uncontrolled. “We cannot stay here. Even if this chamber could decontaminate us, the process might kill us.”
“We need the Focusing Array,” I said. “It is the next component. It might have stabilizing properties.”
Eli pulled up the map from the Omega Null blueprint. The Focusing Array was in a region called “The Prism.” A sub dimensional layer used for calibrating reality lenses.
“It is not far,” he said. “But accessing it requires a reality key. A specific temporal frequency.”
“Where do we find that?” Marcus asked.
The Rival pointed to the writing on the wall. “Here. The equation. It is not just a lament. It is a key. The subjects wrote down the frequency that trapped them. The same frequency might open the door to the Prism.”
He studied the symbols. “We need to generate this exact causal vibration. It will attract attention. But it might open the path.”
“What kind of attention?” Lara asked.
“The kind that remembers this place,” he said.
I made the decision. “Do it.”
The Rival began to adjust his probability manipulator. He input the equation. The device hummed. The air in the room began to vibrate.
The walls shimmered. The writing on the wall glowed. The numbers peeled themselves off the surface. Hung in the air. Rotated.
A door appeared in the far wall. Not a physical door. A tear in reality. Through it, I saw shifting colors. A hallway of fractured light.
But something else happened.
The viewing windows along the corridor lit up. The frozen figures inside them turned. Looked at us. Their faces were blurred. Their eyes were dark voids.
They remembered we were here.
And they started moving toward the glass.
The voice again. Louder. More urgent.
My own voice. From a future that must have seen what comes next.
The pathogen level ticked up.
Twenty two percent.
LitRPG Cultivation Weak to Strong Isekai
When Death Magic collides with Immortality.
Mo Fan transmigrated to the Cultivation World with a broken body and "Trash Spirit Roots." He has no future in traditional cultivation.
However, he brought a unique cheat: The power to command death. Armed with his System, he will start from zero and shock the world.
What to Expect
Smart MC Ruthless World No Harem Optimistic
- From bottom of the food chain to apex predator
- Unique fusion of Necromancy & Dao
- Modern tactics crushing ancient traditions