Chapter 6: Forest and Logs (
"Pull up the status log for Class E3 today."
The meeting room was dim, lit only by the flickering projection at the center. Lines of data streamed across the screen with a faint electric buzz. The air was dry, quiet, tense.
"These are the sync test results from the fifth class," the system technician said, tapping the graph. "Three students exhibited frequency spikes. One unregistered Armament triggered a resonance."
"The black spear?" Instructor Zhong Lan looked up.
"Yes." The technician nodded. "Nie Shi's weapon still has no registered manifestation pathway. The system has flagged it as 'non-system origin,' but its resonance value is extremely high."
A few instructors exchanged looks.
"Where did it come from?" asked an elderly teacher in a lab coat, his voice raspy from years of late-night arguments.
"Unknown. Its binding process doesn't match any standard framework. Preliminary analysis suggests it's a… Remnant Armament."
The room fell silent.
"Remnants?" someone echoed. "I thought those were purged decades ago."
"The active ones, yes," the technician replied carefully. "But this one is… different. It's not fully active, not fully inert. It behaves like a passive remnant—something awakened by proximity."
"Is it stable?" someone asked, though they sounded like they already knew the answer.
"For now," the technician said, though even they didn't sound convinced. "But there was a record today—it attempted to access an external memory channel and was forcibly cut off by the system."
Zhong Lan's eyes sharpened. "What was it trying to access?"
No one answered.
She leaned forward slightly. "Do we have logs of the intercepted signal?"
"Corrupted. Fragmented echoes, mostly. But some patterns match known deep-memory anchor points."
The room stirred again.
"Also," the technician continued, glancing at another tab, "we suspect it's affecting more than just Nie Shi."
A quiet tension ran down the table.
"During Xie Ping's test, his Armament prematurely hit the emotional threshold value. Lin Kui's sync field showed fragments not belonging to her. Lu Jingxing's projection glitched—there was a flicker of a structure the system couldn't identify."
"In other words…" The deputy director narrowed his eyes. "It's not just an anomaly. It's a potential memory contagion source."
Someone gasped softly. Someone else muttered, "Impossible…"
"Then he must be isolated," the lab coat teacher said, rising slightly. "We can't risk the others. Class E3 was supposed to be controlled chaos, not a gateway for collapse."
"Objection," Zhong Lan said, her voice sharp.
Heads turned.
She stood, arms crossed. "You say it's contagious. I disagree. If it truly meant to spread, we would've lost the entire class by now."
"Then how do you propose we handle it?" the deputy director asked, frowning.
Zhong Lan's voice dropped. Calm, but firm. "We continue observation. Assign him to solo training if needed."
She turned toward the screen, the flickering image of the black spear pulsing faintly.
"More importantly—he might be the only one who can make that weapon speak."
That night, Nie Shi dreamed again.
He stood once more in the forest.
Not the real one—not any forest the waking world had maps for—but a place tangled in memory. The trees were too still. The air didn't move. And in the center, just like before, stood the gate.
It wasn't a gate made of metal or wood.
It was a shape—a spear buried upright in the ground, piercing something invisible beneath it.
The ground around it was cracked, faintly glowing.
Nie Shi stepped closer. Leaves crunched under his boots, but made no sound.
The spear trembled.
Then came the voices.
They didn't come from a direction. They came from everywhere . Fractured. Layered. Too many voices speaking through the same mouth. "Who… are you…" "You are not it… not him…" "Return… return… return…" "Return the memory-bearer… only then… only then…" His head throbbed. Each word felt like a chisel against his thoughts.
The gate vibrated harder, lines of glowing script surfacing along the shaft—metallic glyphs in a language he couldn't read, but somehow understood . "Where… am I…" The words turned to static. The voices scrambled like broken glass in his skull.
He staggered back.
The earth beneath his feet cracked. Roots tore through the soil. Shadows bloomed upward, shrouding the trees.
Flashes of memory— not his —rushed past:
A battlefield soaked in ash.
A child screaming.
A woman falling to her knees in the rain.
A shadowy figure standing over them, unmoved.
Eyes—cold. Watching him.
He gasped.
His knees gave out.
The spear in the ground began to shift.
Its surface peeled back, unfolding like a puzzle. The gate form collapsed inward, and something new emerged.
A weapon.
Black as night. The tip curved like a talon. Its spine pulsed faintly, as if breathing. Strange veins of light traced its body—like memory given shape.
The glyphs shimmered once more. "Remember it," the voices said. "Or be devoured." "You are wielding someone else's life." "Next time… it must answer to you." And then—
A click .
Not loud. Not violent. Just… decisive.
A lock, beginning to loosen.
The forest shattered around him.
And Nie Shi opened his eyes. He was soaked in sweat.
His body trembled, but not from cold. He could still hear the voices—echoes that hadn't faded with the dream.
Beside his bed, the black spear sat quietly in its stand.
But something had changed.
A faint glow ran down the shaft. A crack of light.
And just as he stared at it, there came a sound: click Like a chamber shifting.
Like a vault preparing to open.
Nie Shi sat up slowly.
The warning still echoed in his head. "You are wielding someone else's life." He looked at the spear.
And this time, it looked back.