The swirling dimensional gravity vortex beginning to glow on the reactor control room floor spun slowly, casting a faint white light that illuminated the ruins of the Neo-Veridia megacity’s central tower.

Davin did not immediately step into the vortex. He turned, walking unsteadily past the charred console debris toward the open balcony at the far end of the room—where the giant glass window through which he and Lyra had previously leapt now left only an empty metal frame.

Davin stood at the edge of the hundredth-floor balcony, staring straight out at the expanse of the megacity before him.

The transformation was striking. The city, which had always been smothered by toxic gloomy clouds and the suffocating flashes of holographic neon lights, now looked profoundly quiet. The giant advertising lights were completely dark, replaced by night's gloom that slowly began to fade. On the eastern horizon, a thin line of artificial dawn began to break, casting a soft orange glow cutting through the remnants of pollution fog, cleansing Neo-Veridia’s sky for the first time in decades under the artificial intelligence tyranny.

Down on the streets, civilians poured out from the squalid alleys. They looked up at the sky, realizing Aegis Core’s shackles had shattered. Some pointed toward the central tower, where a lone man's silhouette stood by the balcony—the unknown hero who had toppled the corporate empire overnight.

Yet, inside Davin’s chest, no pride or grand triumph resided. That victory felt utterly hollow.

He turned his head slowly, trying to recall Lyra’s final smile, the young netrunner’s voice when she called out to him, or even the detailed faces of his fellow researchers in his original world's laboratory.

Instead, that space stood empty.

The Ledger’s thirty percent transcendence tax had stripped away the vast majority of his permanent memory. Davin realized he had now become a stranger to himself. He was a traveler with no past, an empty shell driven solely by a blood oath and a cosmic destiny forced upon him.

"I freed this city..." Davin whispered softly to the night wind, his voice raspy and cold. "...yet I don't even remember my true name before I became the Architect."

Suddenly, digital data fragments from the shattered Aegis Core core drifted downward around his body, swirling like golden-blue fireflies of light.

That stream of energy moved in unison, soaking inward through the skin of Davin’s chest.

"Second Fragment Successfully Absorbed. Synchronization with The Ledger reaches 30 percent," the cold system voice echoed within his skull.

Instantly, the hourglass symbol on the back of Davin’s right hand blazed brightly, radiating a blinding golden-silver light. The symbol pulsed faster, as though responding to the call from the next dimensional coordinate unlocked behind him.

The white vortex on the control room floor suddenly widened, generating a gravitational wind pull beginning to tear at the surrounding space.

Davin clenched his right hand tightly until his knuckles turned white. He exhaled his final breath into Neo-Veridia's now-cleansing air, then turned his body to face the new dimensional gateway.

Right as he stepped closer to the light vortex, the mechanical voice of The Ledger whispered sharply directly into his consciousness, bearing a chilling warning that made his skin crawl:

"The absorption cycle approaches the halfway mark. Prepare yourself for a world where the law of causality has never existed."

Without the slightest hesitation, Davin Ronan plunged himself into the third dimensional vortex, letting his body be dragged away toward the next cosmic mystery.