Loopbreaker

— What if your memories were someone else's design?.

A sliver of light slipped through the fractured ceiling of the archive room, falling softly on Lindsay. The glow outlined her form with a stillness and serenity that felt strangely out of place.

Shawn stared at her, a inexplicable sense of familiarity rising within him. It stirred the dust of distant memories.

Lindsay's voice broke the silence, calm but firm.

 "I came here to remind you: Meta Origin is not just the name of an organization.

It's a vow—one you made, with your own lips."

Meta Origin.

The words unlocked that memory of that strange note—the one that had mysteriously appeared at the school's opening ceremony days ago. He had puzzled over the unfamiliar handwriting then, sensing a connection he couldn't place.

But now, Lindsay's words brought those scattered fragments into focus, the outline of a larger truth beginning to emerge.

His throat tightened. He finally spoke, voice low and uncertain:

"That note… was it from you?"

Lindsay gently shook her head. She didn't confirm. She didn't deny. Her expression held something far more complex—something unspeakable.

He opened his mouth to ask more—

—but in that instant, the room was consumed by a searing red light.

A siren shrieked through the silence.

"Warning—Memory Vault approaching collapse threshold. Initiating countdown..."

The red glow pulsed like a heartbeat gone wild, washing over the walls, the floor, their faces. The entire chamber throbbed with a sense of imminent rupture.

Shawn instinctively stepped back, shielding his eyes.

The ground quivered beneath them, then began to tremble more violently, as if some enormous thing deep below had begun to stir.

Lindsay didn't move. Her eyes scanned the walls with razor focus.

 "We need to get out. Now."

Her voice was quiet. Urgent.

Shawn turned to her, voice breaking through the chaos:

"What's happening?"

"The Memory Vault is self-destructing."

Her tone was steady, emotionless.

"Why?"

There was something inevitable in her gaze—something almost sorrowful.

"You weren't supposed to awaken. Not yet."

She paused, looking straight into his eyes.

"But now that you have... you must remember everything.

Otherwise, the Gate of Meta Origin will remain sealed—forever."

 "The Gate…"

He whispered the words as if trying them on for the first time, though they echoed with a strange weight—an ancient resonance.

Lindsay's gaze softened, though the depth within it was almost unbearable to meet.

"It's the entrance through which all consciousness returns to truth.

And it's your only path... back to the Originverse."

The tremors deepened. Cracks spread across the ceiling like a web of lightning.

 "Go!"

Lindsay grabbed his arm and yanked him into the side passage—

---

They burst through the underground tunnel's exit just as the campus announcement system chimed in with a message about "routine pipe maintenance."

But both of them knew better.

Shawn's eyes caught the glint of metal beneath the workers' overalls—the same alloy used in the memory vault's construction. And in the sunlight, he saw their pupils flicker… with data-blue circuitry.

They slipped into a nearby classroom.

Professor Les was just finishing up.

"That's it for today. Begin working on your thought papers for next session."

Shawn and Lindsay took their seats silently. A few classmates looked up, then returned to scrolling their phones or whispering about homework. As if nothing had changed.

But Shawn felt Don's gaze prickling like static on his skin.

Don was hunched over his notebook, sketching. When the page caught the light, Shawn saw it:

A precisely drawn Bagua diagram—labeled with measurement units used only in the Originverse.

---

Evening settled over the campus.

In a corner of the crowded cafeteria, Shawn and Hayden sat shoulder to shoulder on plastic chairs, their dinner plates long empty.

Hayden tapped a broken rhythm on the table with his chopsticks, scowling at his phone.

"Seriously? Professor Les gave us this as a discussion prompt:

'In what ways does Esoteric Studies offer new perspectives to modern society and the individual?'

What is this, philosophy of sorcery?"

Shawn didn't answer immediately. His right hand absently rubbed the metallic Meta Band on his left wrist.

Under the flickering ceiling lights, its engraved symbols shimmered—reminding him of the glowing Innocence Box back in the vault.

Hayden leaned in, the smell of curry heavy on his breath.

"Wanna throw together a study group? Invite Lindsay too."

He smirked. "The way she answers questions? Freakin' mystical."

An hour later, condensation fogged the windows of the South Hall dormitory's rec room.

Wendy's voice sliced through the low hum of the air conditioner.

"If Esoteric Studies taught me anything, it's that not everything is measurable by plagiarism reports."

The crystal beads on her wrist caught the projector's blue glow, scattering light like tiny stars.

"So what next?"

Johan snapped shut his copy of Being and Time.

"You planning to use a star chart to pick your thesis topic?"

A few students chuckled. But the laughter died the moment Don spoke from the corner, voice sharp and cold:

 "Don't waste your time. The professor's angle is academic, not mystical.

You think Esoteric Studies can actually help anyone? Try meditation all you like—AI, algorithms, and blockchain are the real forces reshaping society."

His fingers toyed with a pendant on his chest—a small, cold metal All-Seeing Eye—as if sending a coded message no one else understood.

Judy spun her pen idly.

Suddenly, it slipped from her fingers and landed squarely on Don's notes, ink blotting across a strange symbol mid-formation.

"Oops."

She smiled, revealing a playful fang. Her nails subtly scraped across the fresh ink, leaving behind a pattern—eerily like a broken Yao line.

All the while, Lindsay remained silent, sketching glowing shapes in the air with a highlighter, lines trailing like wisps of will-o'-the-wisps.

Then someone suggested forming a club.

And Shawn noticed—Don flinched.

A subtle contraction in his pupils, sharp and sudden.

Just like the metal coils had contracted during the vault's meltdown.

Seconds later, hands were raised in unison to vote—eerily synchronized.

Everyone... except Don.

 "The Meta Truth Society."

Lindsay's whisper reached only Shawn's ears.

And in that moment, his Meta Band pulsed gently—almost in recognition.

Darkness fell.

The lights blinked out.

From the air vents came a low, droning hum—like the murmur of ancient incantations.

When the emergency lights flickered on again, Don was gone.

All that remained was a half-finished iced Americano on his chair.

Condensation slid down its side, the droplets slowly forming a symbol—

All-Seeing Eye.

---

After everyone had left, Shawn stood alone by the chalkboard.

In the dim yellow light, he saw faint lines etched over and over into the board's lower edge—some ancient truth, almost erased, but not forgotten:

Heaven is Qian. Earth is Kun.

Thunder is Zhen. Wind is Xun.

Water is Kan. Fire is Li.

Mountain is Gen. Lake is Dui.

But under the words Heaven and Earth, someone had added two foreign names: Meta and Origin.

And beneath it all, the word Lake had been tampered with—

The L scratched into a G, and the k reshaped into a t.

 Meta Origin Gate

A subtle tremor ran through Shawn's left wrist—his Meta Band had begun to hum, low and insistent, like a whisper from another plane.

He lifted his gaze to the empty room.

The traces of Lindsay's glowing symbols still lingered faintly in the air—

like the edge of a doorway not yet fully closed, beckoning him inward...

toward a realm within his consciousness that had yet to be named.