A white trail runs through the crumbling Ruby Palace.
Lin Yuan leaped into it, and his body immediately plummeted downwards.
The ground beneath his feet was no longer the floor of the hundredth floor. The shattered palace behind him rapidly shrank, the entire floor becoming transparent from the edges, then disintegrating into a rain of data light that covered his field of vision.
An unnumbered record hung beside Lin Yuan.
The coordinates closest to the present time light up first.
That's where the sword "Space: Mountain Severance " struck Kayaba.
The second coordinate belongs to the final strike of " All Things Return to One " that breaks through the hundred-layer boss, and further ahead are the countless traces left when " Nameless " clashed with the boss's weapon.
These records were originally unrelated.
The computing resources left behind by Yui rearranged them in the order they occurred, turning them into a road that stretched downwards in reverse for two years.
Lin Yuan fell into the wreckage on the ninety-ninth floor.
Half of the maze lay across the center of the path. The walls and floor had lost their collision detection, but the massive stone beams supporting the maze remained solid, pressing down on him head-on.
Lin Yuan twisted his body in mid-air, raising his sword with both hands.
" The Mountain Severance "
The sword's edge slashed into the stone beam, the most direct force erupting outwards along the crack. The debris blocking the path broke off in the middle, and Lin Yuan passed through the scattered rubble, continuing downwards.
Ninety-eighth floor, ninety-seventh floor, ninety-sixth floor.
Each time a level is traversed, a coordinate segment in the unnumbered record disappears. This doesn't mean the path is closing; rather, it means the record that has already been guided is being deleted by the world.
Lin Yuan could not turn back.
The 90th floor is turning into countless tiny fragments.
The fragments were weightless, yet they retained the sharp edges from the very last moment before they were deleted. Thousands upon thousands of white lights surged toward Lin Yuan from all directions, sealing off all possible escape routes.
The Nameless sword was slashed out.
Before the shockwave from the first collision had even subsided, the second sword had already changed direction. Then came the third and fourth swords, the blade twisting and turning twelve times in succession within the narrow space.
No Interval.
The data fragments rushing towards his body were scattered one by one. As the final sword fell, Lin Yuan passed through a rain of light, but the wound on his shoulder that had just closed reopened.
The blood was swept upwards by the wind and vanished in the blink of an eye on the now-defunct 90th floor.
Lin Yuan did not stop.
The white trail passed through the seventy-fifth floor.
The coordinates left by the Skeleton Hunter when it died swept past. Below was the eleventh floor where the Moonlit Black Cats once lived, the second floor boss room where Lin Yuan had his own clashes, and the place where countless people first remembered the Nameless Swordsman after the first floor raid.
The past two years are slipping away faster than I am falling.
The entire building ahead suddenly tilted.
A piece of urban debris from the eleventh level detached from the main body of the floating city, leaving a white trail as it fell to the other side. Dozens of coordinates on the trail scattered, and if they were allowed to be deleted, Lin Yuan would lose his way to the earlier recorded directions.
He stepped onto a flipped roof and used the momentum to rush towards the nearest coordinates.
The foothold crumbled in the next instant.
Lin Yuan wielded the Nameless Sword, first striking the incoming wall with a straight thrust from the spear guard, then changing direction along the arc of the chain-bladed monster. The force of the collision did not dissipate, but was sent into the next piece of debris through a second burst of power from the greatsword.
" All Things Return to One ".
This time, all the power ultimately converged not on the final sword used to slay the enemy.
Using the final impact, Lin Yuan changed his falling direction, crossed the widening gap, and grabbed the extinguishing coordinates.
The scattered white trails reconnected.
The ruins of the city disappeared silently behind him.
The first floor is already in sight.
The streets of the Town of Beginnings are now just blurry outlines, and the Black Iron Palace and the central square are being peeled away from the ground. Deletion has no fixed direction; a perfectly intact street may disappear before the ruins beside it, and the original footholds may vanish into nothingness before Lin Yuan even steps on them.
There are no observable patterns here.
Lin Yuan no longer chooses the path in advance.
As the stone slab beneath his feet disappeared, he grabbed the edge of the wall after falling; the wall began to become transparent, and he used the momentum to leap towards the top of the broken tower; before he could land steadily on the top, the building in front of him forced him to change direction.
There is no fixed pattern of steps, nor is there a predetermined finish line.
" No Form " no longer belongs solely to the sword's edge.
Lin Yuan turned the outcome of each world collapse into the starting point for the next step. He traversed the disappearing Town of Beginnings and finally arrived at the very beginning of all records.
There were no buildings or roads there.
Only a blank space of less than one second remained in the unnumbered record.
It appeared before SAO officially launched, but suddenly appeared after 10,000 players had logged in. There were no accounts logging in, no teleportation commands, and no objects that could be recognized by the system.
There was only one unclassifiable spatial tremor.
That was the moment Lin Yuan arrived in Aincrad.
The white trajectory stopped before the blank record.
There was no exit in sight, only a black rift closing in along with the world.