Harmonic Leaping Note snapped her head toward Lin Ye. "Tuner, that dark red star-isn't that the 'loneliness' you left for yourself?"
Lin Ye did not answer.
The entity continued, "The 'Empathy' within that star was stripped away and sealed inside it by the Tuner of the previous epoch. You have no right to keep it. It is mine."
Steel Curtain stepped forward, his silver-white outline erupting with brilliant light. "Fucking bullshit! Every star on the Tuner's cloak is a civilization he risked his life to remember! You think you can just take it?"
The entity's expression did not change. It still wore that same chillingly gentle look.
"I am not asking."
Its body suddenly burst open-not an explosion, but a release. Billions of memory fragments poured out of it, rushing toward the Expeditionary Force like a flood.
Every memory fragment held the memories of a civilization it had copied.
Harmonic Leaping Note's expression changed sharply. "It's drowning us in memories! It won't kill us, but it'll overload our definition systems!"
The Prismglass Weaver's color defense web cracked under the very first wave of the memory flood. It was not that the defense was too weak, but that the memories were too real-every copied civilization's memories were so complete that no one could distinguish someone else's memories from their own.
The rise and fall of tens of thousands of civilizations appeared simultaneously on Myriad Faces and Forms' mirrored surface, each image bursting into a crack across it.
Only Lin Ye remained where he stood, utterly motionless. All eight billion stars on his cloak lit up at once. He absorbed, sorted, and stored every incoming memory fragment. His speed and precision were so extraordinary that even the entity's expression flickered.
Lin Ye raised his head, his multicolored eyes looking straight at the