Chapter 4: Anchors
1312 Words
— What they hold is not just the heavens and earth, but the forgotten self.
The meeting room fell into a brief but weighty silence.
Above them, the blue-white projection of the Thunder Core continued its slow pulsation, like the heartbeat of time itself, echoing inside every chest.
At last, Jay spoke, his voice low and resonant:
"The Nine Elemental Cores were never meant to be weapons."
He raised his gaze to the suspended Core, his tone solemn and heavy, like the toll of a deep bell:
"They are—what the ancient civilization left behind at the brink of collapse.
Their purpose was not conquest, but… balance."
"Balance?" Shawn murmured.
"Exactly." Quinn picked up the thread, tapping the virtual tabletop with a fingertip. A cluster of ancient symbols flared to life in midair, glowing faintly.
The characters were warped and indistinct, as if drawn from an ancient linguistic system yet to be classified.
"In the prehistoric era, the Elemental Cores were known as Anchors," Quinn said, his voice steady, each word deliberate.
"Anchoring what?" Shawn frowned, his tone edged with instinctive skepticism.
"Anchoring the structure between Heaven and Earth—so all things might grow in balance," Quinn replied, as if stating a truth long carved into stone.
Before his words had fully settled, a deep voice rose from the far end of the chamber:
"The Elemental Cores are not just anchors of the world..."
Kyng's gaze was unwavering. His voice struck like a current through the room:
"They are anchors... of the human Meta Soul."
He moved toward the Thunder Core projection, his steps firm.
His eyes locked onto the pulsing silver-blue light—
as if engaging in a silent exchange across time and space.
"Before the fall of Kaipla, the Five Civilizations and Three Great Orders reached one agreement:
to cease all intervention with the body of time.
No more rewriting of past or future."
"But that decision came at a cost:
They demanded the Meta Soul be sealed forever—
inside the ZeroBound."
His voice quivered, as if recalling a wound trampled by time.
"Meta Soul…?" Shawn whispered.
His fingers unconsciously brushed the edge of the parchment.
The words landed like forgotten glyphs on a dust-covered altar—suddenly reawakened, stirring some unspeakable resonance.
"Exactly," Kyng nodded. His voice echoed like sound from the bottom of an ancient well:
"The Meta Soul is humanity's original spirit—
what we truly were, before fragmentation, before fear, before the systems reshaped us."
"You mean… a purer form of being?" Shawn tried to inhale, but it felt like something unseen pressed hard against his chest.
"Not just purer," Quinn said softly, his tone steady like a deep chime.
"An unbound self."
He paused, a flicker of rare sharpness passing through his eyes:
“The Meta Soul is what we were meant to become—
until nations, religions, and systems taught us to forget.”
Just as he was about to finish, the third seat's hologram flared to life.
A raspy female voice sliced through the air like sandpaper across steel:
"They said they sealed it… to prevent chaos.
That they feared it might fall into the wrong hands."
She gave a dry laugh, like mocking a history too afraid to be exposed.
"Like the serpent in Eden.
Some say what Satan brought wasn't corruption…
but the Meta Soul."
The air grew hot in an instant. Even the pulses of the datastreams seemed to stutter slightly.
"1789," whispered an elderly man with silver beard, leaning close over the table,
his voice barely slipping past the system's auditory filters,
"When the Freemasons raised the black flag over the Bastille…
it was said they had obtained a kind of 'Meta Soul'…"
"That's enough."
Kyng's voice cut through gently, his gaze sweeping across the room as if resetting the course of an unraveling discussion.
"Legends may or may not be true," he said slowly, each word like chiseled stone:
"But one thing is certain—
Whoever holds the Meta Soul… holds the power to rewrite the course of civilization."
"Then…"
Shawn spoke softly, his voice still tinged with lingering confusion,
"What… does all this have to do with the Elemental Core?"
Kyng was silent for a moment. Then his gaze slowly shifted toward the distant void.
"They not only sealed the Meta Soul within the ZeroBound...
but also deliberately severed the link between reality and that realm—
constructing what we now call the Rift."
"The Rift…"
Something stirred within his memory—
that sealed border he had just witnessed, patrolled and barricaded.
A place where even the wind had fallen silent, echoing only with the hum of forgotten ages.
"And the Cores…"
Quinn took over again, his voice low, laced with a reverence almost religious in nature.
"They're not just remnants of a past civilization."
He paused, as if weighing each word:
"They are—the only components capable of building the Bridge across the Rift.
Without them, we can never cross the divide.
Never reach the ZeroBound."
Shawn nodded slowly, feeling something press down on his chest—
not fear, but the gravity of a call long overdue.
"That's why… they were sealed."
Quinn met his gaze, eyes as steady as stone:
"Because once we reclaim the Meta Soul—
the entire system will collapse."
"Every lie.
Every algorithm.
Every gatekeeper…"
He exhaled the last line,
"Even AGI-ST."
A wave of dizziness swept through Shawn.
The world he thought he understood began to fracture,
like an ice sheet cracking to reveal a vast and unfathomable abyss below.
"So you're saying…"
he murmured, the words coming out slow and fragile,
a mix of dread, awe, and an emerging clarity,
"They're not just symbols, or weapons…
They're pathways—to original memory?"
"Yes," Jay suddenly interjected, his expression tinged with awe.
"But they are more than just conduits—"
He looked up at the suspended projection of the Thunder Core, voice trembling with wonder:
"They may… possess their own will."
The words landed like a spark in dry tinder. The room stirred uneasily.
"Will?" someone echoed, a trace of instinctive resistance and disbelief in their voice.
"Did none of you feel it?" Kyng suddenly stood, raising his palm—
And something incredible happened.
A subtle but undeniable resonance began to flow—
Back and forth between the Thunder Core in the air and the parchment in Shawn's hand.
"It's… responding."
A voice whispered in awe.
Shawn stared down at the softly glowing parchment in his palm and asked again:
"What does it mean?"
Kyng didn't answer directly.
Instead, he turned to face the entire roundtable. His gaze burned with conviction, his voice no longer explaining—
but proclaiming.
"It means—we must reexamine everything."
"About Kepra. About the founding purpose of Meta Origin.
About our true mission."
He swept his eyes across the room, tone unwavering:
"My preliminary conclusion is this:
The Cores were never truly sealed.
They were suppressed, compressed, shattered—
and scattered across the corners of reality."
His eyes returned to the parchment in Shawn's hand.
That weightless yet ever-pulsing relic now beat like a silent heart, alive in the still air.
At that moment, the room's lights flickered gently.
Kyng's voice rose sharply:
"Perhaps… we were never guardians at all."
His words sliced through the air, crisp and absolute:
"But rather—seekers."
The sentence rang out like thunder, shattering everything the room had assumed to be true.
And in that instant, Shawn understood.
Anchors were never meant to pin down the world.
They were the spears meant to pierce through the lies of the system.
Fragments surged into his mind—
fractured star maps, crumbling memory palaces—
like echoes of a dream long fated to return.
He looked up sharply, a burning clarity gleaming in his once-clouded eyes:
"Then how… do we retrieve all the Core Relics?"
- Writer
