Chapter Four: Read, No Reply

An inverted city hung below. Streets, offices, and bedrooms overlapped like transparent folders. Deleted figures repeated the last thing they had ever done. Lu Chen stood on the glass corridor nearest the entrance, his missing fingers flickering as pixels. He looked up at Lin Mo without relief. “You finished the sentence after all,” he said. Behind Lin Mo, the paper strip tightened. Words in someone else’s handwriting appeared across the blank length: “My answer is as follows—I consent to enter the cache layer.” A period slowly appeared at the end.