The city could not hold it any longer. It began to fracture, filling the atmosphere with chaos like a structure rejecting its own foundation. Glass splintered into shards of light, the streets tore open into glowing fault lines, and the sky above pulsated with conflicting signals, the darkness clashing against flashes of memory that refused to stay buried.
Lorenzo stood at the center of it; unmoved and unyielding but no longer passive because for the first time since he entered the system, he could really feel himself, not as a collection of commands or responses, but as something that refused to be rewritten.
And the system felt it too.
“This instability is unnecessary,” the Architect responded, though his voice had lost some of its earlier calm.
“You’re disrupting the integration, st
