Chapter 10: Descent Into Spiral Sector Twelve
Kai didn't trust her.
He didn't have to.
Trust wasn't a luxury you afforded strangers in ruins that breathed like sleeping machines.
But Ashen Valk moved with confidence—like someone who had danced with death often enough to know the tempo.
"Down this shaft," she said, activating a magnetic line that hissed against the wall's metal plating. "Fast and quiet."
Kai hesitated.
Lina glanced at him, nervous. "She saved our lives back there."
"Maybe. Or maybe she wants something from the Fragment."
Ashen glanced back. "If I wanted to take it, Ardent, I'd have let the Wardens wear you down first."
She descended without waiting.
Kai clenched his jaw.
He hated it—but she was right. Whoever she was, she knew this place. And they didn't.
"Let's go," he said to Lina, then followed her into the depths of Spiral Sector Twelve.
---
The shaft ended in a vault corridor—walls glowing faintly with pulse-light veins, as if the entire station had veins of its own.
Kai walked in silence behind Ashen Valk, Vein Blade sheathed but humming faintly under his fingertips.
"You're not Ascendancy," she said without turning. "But the Fragment recognized you."
"I didn't ask it to."
Ashen smiled faintly. "They never do."
Kai studied her. She wore the armor of an Initiate, but hers had been customized—etched with glyphs that weren't standard protocol. Her energy signature was strange too: not purely spiritual, but not machine-born either.
"You're a synth cultivator," he said.
"Half," she replied. "My mother was human. My father was... engineered."
"You say that like it's normal."
"It is—down here."
Kai fell silent. Something tugged at his senses. Not danger—curiosity. The Fragment stirred inside him, echoing faint pulses toward something deeper.
"You feel that too?" Ashen asked.
"Yeah. Like a signal."
She stopped in front of a sealed door. "That's because you're near a Spiral Node. A secondary Fragment—split from the core after the Collapse. Only a few still activate."
Kai blinked. "You mean there's another Fragment here?"
Ashen placed her palm on the door panel. "Yes. And if we don't reach it first, someone else will."
The door hissed open.
---
Beyond it lay The Spiral Heart — a domed chamber flooded in violet-blue light. Floating in the center of the room was a massive shard of crystal, suspended in a stasis field. Dozens of conduits linked it to the walls, each one pulsing with fragmented protocols.
It wasn't just a Fragment.
It was a Prototype.
"Welcome to the memory of humanity's ambition," Ashen said quietly. "One of the last cores that tried to unify tech and soul cultivation."
Kai stepped closer. The moment he neared it, his Fragment pulsed wildly. Lines of code flickered in the air before his eyes. Glyphs. Names. Timelines. A long-forgotten script scrolling faster than he could follow.
> [Fragment Synchronization Available]
[WARNING: Partial Merge May Overload Host Veins]
Proceed?
His heart thundered.
"Do it," he whispered.
Lina grabbed his sleeve. "Wait—what happens if it overloads you?"
Kai didn't answer right away.
"I'm tired of not knowing," he said. "If this thing has answers, I want them."
He reached out.
The moment his hand touched the suspended Fragment, light swallowed the chamber. Violet flooded his vision, and suddenly—
He wasn't in the Spiral Core anymore.
---
He stood at the edge of a battlefield under an alien sky.
Armored cultivators charged across floating platforms. Machine armies clashed with spirit-born guardians. In the sky, ancient warships split into stars, crashing down like tears of fire.
At the center of it all: a woman, face hidden behind a mirrored mask, holding a blade made of collapsing galaxies.
She turned—and looked directly at him.
"You've opened the gate too early," she said. Her voice was familiar. Too familiar.
Then she vanished.
The world shattered.
---
Kai collapsed back into the Spiral Core, gasping.
The floating Fragment dimmed. Synchronization halted.
> [Partial Merge Complete — 4% Integration Total]
[Ability Gained: Astral Sense — Fragment Awareness within 10-km radius]
[Memory Glimpse: Event Echo #67-A]
Ashen rushed to his side. "What did you see?"
Kai looked at her, dazed. "A war. A real one. Not simulation, not data. It happened."
Ashen frowned. "That's impossible. The war was sealed away in memory vaults."
"It wasn't sealed enough," he said. "I saw the masked woman again."
Ashen paused. "You've seen her before?"
"In the first Fragment. She knew me."
Ashen knelt beside him. "Kai, if you're seeing the past... you're seeing too much. Your mind might not survive full resonance."
Kai pushed himself up.
"Then I'll survive it. Because whoever that woman is, she's at the heart of this. And she's still out there. Waiting."
He glanced at Lina. "We're not running anymore. We're finding the rest of the Fragments."
Ashen smiled.
"In that case," she said, "you'll want to see the Spiral Map."
---
She tapped a panel at the chamber's center. A hologram burst forth—nine points of light orbiting a broken Earth, each one pulsing faintly.
"Only three are active," she said. "The rest are dormant or untraceable."
Kai stared at the points.
The next step was clear.
His path wasn't just survival anymore.
It was destiny.
And it would begin again... with the next Fragment.