— Who Keeps Watch for Humanity at the End of the World?
The energy of the Central Core still surged through Shawn—like starlight flickering across the vast neural sky of his mind.
He had done it. At last, he held the power to summon the remaining eight core fragments.
The Rift's Bridge could be completed.
The Meta Sou could be retrieved.
The Loop could finally be stopped—shattering the Pure Ark's dominion over humanity's future.
But his heart was heavy.
Meta Hierophant still stood alone in the Meta Genesis Realm, confronting the entire O.S.S. fleet.
And Quinn...
Is he still alive? Or was that golden light—his last goodbye, after all?
As Shawn's awareness drifted out of the Meta Genesis plane, Earth's orbit unfolded within his senses like a long-buried memory rising from deep slumber.
He reached out—
And felt it.
Not peace. Not home.
But fire.
Smoke choked the skies.
Storms of plasma danced where clouds once drifted.
continents dimmed beneath ash veils.
Cities swallowed whole by flame and silence.
This was not the Earth he remembered.
This was a world unraveling.
He turned his focus to what mattered most—the Eastern Continent.
Over its southern oceans, dozens of ultra-photonic warships hovered in grim silence, their hulls cloaked in fog-like magnetic vortices. Swarms of stealth hive-fighters darted through electromagnetic storms like flocks of black crows, each motion a ripple in the tensioned sky.
To the east, across the narrow strait, two supercarriers had locked in silent confrontation.
The Fire Dragon, Eastern Coalition's newest flagship, cut through the waves with cold precision—silent but imposing, its deck humming with power.
Opposite it, the Eagleflame, pride of the Federation's Pacific Fleet, advanced in sleek formation, its mech-styled hulls gleaming like armored falcons under orbital light.
On the islands nearby, some locals watched from afar, half in awe, half in jest—
as if watching some ancient ritual, or a modern-day bullfight playing out on a planetary scale.
To the northeast, across the frozen sea, the Rising Sun Corps carved through ancient ice with their deuterium-powered Ice Rift Destroyers, spectral lights trailing under polar auroras.
Beside them, the Yin-Yang Nation's Quantum Fold Army bent the terrain with spatial mirror arrays, folding tundra into shifting corridors.
Their goal was singular and clear—a joint assault on the Whitehead Mountains.
And in the highlands west and southwest, new symbols rose on weathered stone.
Banners of the Singular Knowers. The Free Remnants.
Names that once lurked in the margins of thought now blared across civilian satellite feeds, as if the world's repressed ideologies had erupted all at once—fracturing the last illusion of unity.
But the true unease came from the north.
The once-neutral grasslands had turned into a quilt of flags—dozens of colors, dozens of "Observer Nations"—each establishing forward posts under the guise of diplomacy, each a silent blade drawn.
And then, he narrowed his focus—not to the stars, not to the warships—but to the place where it all began.
He returned home.
His hometown—a central plains city on the Eastern Continent.
Once alive with traffic and voices, now it stood in suspended silence.
Subways frozen. Buses withdrawn. Shops sealed tight. Parks, plazas, schools—all closed.
As if someone had pressed pause on an entire civilization.
Occasionally, figures in full-body white hazmat suits patrolled the silence, red armbands slashing through the sterilized white like wounds.
The electric whir of their respirator hums echoed like ghostly whispers.
.
The moment Shawn appeared, a sharp voice cut through the silence:
"Stop! Where are you coming from?"
He steadied himself, replying that he'd just returned from travel, unaware of the current situation.
The guard scanned him with a blink of red light, then spoke, flat and mechanical:
"NF73 mutant strain. Five times the infection rate of previous COVID variants.
Full lockdown: seven days. All citizens restricted indoors unless for survival-critical purposes.
Your clothing violates current containment code. Return home.
Wait — system personnel to conduct testing."
Shawn nodded, quietly turning toward his apartment building.
Inside, the air reeked of disinfectant and medical-grade alcohol.
Posters lined the entrance: Lockdown Tier Map, Health Score Bulletin.
Residents were divided into four colors—Green (Protected), Gray (Controlled), Orange (Restricted), Red (Critical).
Only Green-status individuals were allowed outside, briefly, to collect rations and medicine.
The rest?
Sealed indoors. No movement. No exceptions.
As he raised his hand to scan the door, a movement caught his eye.
A hunched figure crouched near the wall, rummaging through fallen leaves.
He froze.
"Grandpa?"
The old man looked up slowly, face dusty, eyes warm.His green-status wristband glowed faintly as he crouched.
"Your grandma's joints are acting up again," he said softly. "Pharmacy's closed, so I thought maybe... a scorpion, a bit of mugwort...
Like the old days. Might help her sleep."
Shawn said nothing.
In that fragile, stooped silhouette, he saw not just his grandfather—but all the fractured lives exiled by the new order.
His mind turned to the Pure Ark—a system built under the banner of "human safety" and perfect rationality, one that promised to replace volatile human emotion with digital logic.
But in this reality, it had become a cruel absurdity.
He pulled out his phone. A blood-red countdown ticked on the screen:
2031.07.01 |15D | 012:16:00
That was the time until the next "Pure Reboot" of the Loop System.
Fifteen days.
Suddenly, a vibration.
A message from Kent:
"Shawn, you're back? Everything alright?
Chairman Da confirmed for tomorrow, 10:00 a.m., holo-link."