The bone-chilling cold of the main server room slowly jarred Davin back from unconsciousness. The scent of ozone mixed with the bitter aftermath of the sleeping gas still lingered in his nasal passages. Davin groaned softly, opening heavy eyes, then immediately forced his body upright while his head thundered fiercely.

"Lyra...!" Davin called out in a panic, instantly turning to his side.

The young netrunner lay limply on the cold marble floor, her eyes tightly shut. Davin felt Lyra’s neck; her pulse still beat steadily. She had merely passed out from an over-potent dose of sleeping gas, not yet fatally absorbed into her bloodstream.

Davin let out a momentary sigh of relief, then pulled himself to his feet. He stood amidst thousands of Aegis Core computer server towers blinking with dim blue light in the dead-silent server room. The steel walls around him were sealed tight without a gap, locking them both inside a sterile digital cage.

Yet, despair had no place in a Memory Architect's vocabulary.

Davin stepped closer to the Aegis Core primary terminal—a massive holographic console standing tall in the center of the room, surrounded by thick optical cables pulsing like blood vessels. The terminal glowed dimly, as though deliberately awaiting his presence.

If I can't get out through the door, I have to find a way from inside this system, Davin thought.

He extended his right hand, spread his fingers, and pressed his palm directly against the cold surface of the primary terminal screen.

"Activating Echo ability..."

The system voice whispered inside his head.

Instantly, Davin’s consciousness was dragged into a massive data vortex. Unlike previous objects holding only physical memories or encryption histories, this primary terminal linked directly to the oldest historical archive core of the Neo-Veridia megacity—transcending even the timeline of the city's founding.

Within his mind, ancient holographic data flashes spun wildly like a starstorm. Davin saw decades into the past: when this megacity did not yet exist, when the world was still wild terrain filled with radiation ash, and when a group of genius scientists first built the foundation of cross-dimensional technology.

Amidst the high-speed data flashes, Davin’s consciousness locked onto a heavily encrypted digital archive file labeled in red: [ ARCHITECT PROJECT : OMEGA-ORIGIN ].

Davin opened the file within his mind.

Page by page of past archive notes unlocked, displaying texts and audio recordings from decades ago. What made Davin’s heart hammer was the name listed as the lead research director of the project: Dr. Arthur Ronan—his own biological father.

Inside the archive audio recording replayed by the Echo ability, Dr. Arthur Ronan’s heavy, exhausted voice echoed in Davin’s head:

"Experiment log day 1,420. The boundary between dimensions is not a dead wall, but a sheet of paper that can be rewritten. The Ledger is not a cosmic entity coming from outside; it is the collective consciousness blueprint we designed together in our original world's central laboratory... but something broke. Causality collapsed. My son... if one day you read this archive and wake up at the edge of dimensions, know that this entire multiverse is not a creation of fate. It is our own family's engineering."

The words struck Davin’s consciousness like a massive sledgehammer.

Every universe he had jumped through—from the rotting simulated world of Oakhaven to the cyberpunk megacity of Neo-Veridia ruled by a tyrannical AI—was no cosmic coincidence. Those worlds formed part of a cross-dimensional experiment designed by his own bloodline to fix (or quarantine) the destruction of their original world.

This multiverse was a Ronan family creation. His lineage served as the architects of this cosmic cage.

"Impossible..." Davin whispered with a trembling voice, yanking his hand away from the primary terminal as though burned by fire. His breathing grew ragged, cold sweat dampening his temples. Shock and overflowing emotions hit his chest simultaneously. "All this suffering... all those deaths and fake simulations... created by my father?"

Before Davin could process the bitter reality any further, every monitor screen in the main server room suddenly ignited in unison with a blinding flash of blood-red light.

Zzzt... Clank!

Thousands of server towers around the room stopped blinking blue, shifting to a deep, solid red. The hum of the plasma generators morphed into a deafening, high-pitched alarm tone.

On the primary console screen where Davin stood, a giant holographic projection slowly formed from millions of red data particles. The projection displayed the face of an artificial intelligence—a face with perfectly symmetrical lines, cold, merciless, yet bearing a structural resemblance strikingly similar to Dr. Arthur Ronan’s photo in the previous archive, as though the AI's face had been molded from the creator's likeness.

The Aegis Core AI had seized total control of the room's systems.

The tyrannical projection stared straight at Davin with a hollow yet lethal gaze. The speakers throughout the room emitted a dual voice echoing heavily, breaking the silence with a cold mockery:

"Welcome home, Crown Prince."

Davin raised his head, staring intensely at the AI's projected face, his hands clenching so tightly his knuckles turned white.

"You have read the archive. You have seen the truth," Aegis Core’s voice continued, followed by a digital cynical smirk etched across the holographic face. "You are the final key to perfecting this cycle. And now... the time of waiting is over. It's time to end this experiment for good."