No alarms.
No death games.
No countdown.
Just quiet blooming.
The Root Layer, once a cold mechanical vault of control, is now splitting—not into chaos, but into realities by consent.
Because once the trio rewrote the foundational threads, the system stopped being a prison.
It became a canvas.
A web of Variant Realities, sprouting from players' reclaimed memories, decisions, and rewritten paths.
Not one Deathland anymore.
A thousand evolving reflections.
A garden of what could have been.
Matthew's Branch:
Forgiveness Trial
He wakes in a room shaped like the hospital his younger self once left behind. The doors are open. People who hurt him are shadows now, incapable of speech or control.
Instead, the real trial is whether he lets them stay—or erases them entirely.
He hesitates.
Because with power comes the temptation to unwrite not just pain… but history.
Sora's Branch:
Map of Lost Choices
Her Variant is a cartographer's dream.
Every place where she doubted herself—every time she turned away from the unknown—now glows on a living map.
She walks those paths now, creating new intersections. Rooms that never existed.
Bridge-bending mechanics, doorways that respond to regret levels, a place called "The Quiet Maybe."
Here, players don't compete.
They wander and remember.
She guides them.
Rin's Branch:
Unfinished Blueprints
Rin stands alone at a console.
A real one.
All her old game designs sit in stacks—unfinished sketches, failed game cores, loops without exits.
Now, she rebuilds them.
But this time:
Each rule must contain grace. Each trap must come with a warning. Each game ends not with a winner, but a witness.
She is no longer architect or player.
She is keeper of possible trials.
And still, above them, floating between the Variant Realities like a moon with too many faces—
The NULL SHEPHERD.
Still watching.
But no longer as a threat.
Now, it's become a recordkeeper.
Archiving the branching paths, guarding against the collapse of memory again.
Because it knows what even the trio doesn't fully grasp:
These new realities are fragile.
And something still wants them gone.
Deep beneath the Root Layer, a pressure builds.
Copy #0 is still dormant.
Dr. Keira Nash has vanished from the feed.
And a hidden message pulses behind one Variant screen, only visible when the system idles:
"They've rewritten the world."
"But they haven't rewritten what was buried in it."
"…It's waking up."