Memory Guardian

Harmonic Leaptone's face went pale. She remembered her experience in the Sea of Oblivion—the terror of Who am I, really? had begun with the possibility that her memories were false.

"This is the source of the contamination." Lin Ye pointed toward the discolored region at the deepest part of the Memory Sea. "Memories are turning into lies there."

Lin Ye led the expedition deeper into the Memory Sea.

The farther they went, the more complex the colors of the surrounding seawater became. In the shallows, memories had a single color—the memories of one civilization, the history of one existence. But in the depths, every drop contained fragments of countless civilizations' memories, intertwined, overlapping, and contradictory.

Thirty-Three Harmonics began to falter. She was not under attack; she was suffering information overload—each harmonic was receiving hundreds of conflicting memory signals at once. "Tuner... I can't tell anymore... Some memories say the Sun rises in the east, some say it rises in the west, and some say there is no Sun at all... They're all real, yet they exist at the same time..."

Radiant Stilllight raised the Spear of Definition, trying to impose order upon those memories. But whenever he defined one memory as "real," another equally real memory emerged to deny it. "My definitions are fighting each other... These memories refuse to be defined by a single rule..."

Myriad Faces' forms began to split apart. It transformed into hundreds of different shapes at once—each one a true form from a certain memory. Yet those forms contradicted one another. Some demanded that it solidify, some demanded that it flow, and some demanded that it vanish completely. "I... don't know what I'm supposed to become anymore..." Pain entered Myriad Faces' voice for the first time. "They all say they're real..."

The thirty-seven billion stars