Chapter 10: The Nexus

Li Wei's consciousness did not shut off in the conventional way when he closed his eyes on Shido Itsuka's chest. 

There was no gradual transition to restorative darkness that a human being would expect after a day of sudden battles, emotional tensions, and the exhaustion of inhabiting a body that does not belong to them. 

Instead, the transition from wakefulness to sleep was a downward pull that made the walls of Shido's room, the sandalwood scent of his own skin, and the boy's comforting warmth stretch until they broke, like an old cloth yielding to the weight of an immense object.

I didn't feel like I was awake, but I wasn't asleep in the purely biological sense either.

Li Wei found himself standing on a surface that was not firm ground, but a dense, pearly mist that vibrated at such a low frequency that he felt it vibrate in the marrow of his bones. 

She looked at her hands; they were still the hands of the "Empress", white, perfect, charged with an energy that here, in this no-place, did not need to be contained or filtered. 

Her red hanfu floated around her as if she were submerged in an invisible ocean, and her black hair stretched out in the void, defying any known law of gravity.

Before her stood the most imposing structure that Li Wei — or the entity that was now Lian — had ever witnessed.

It was not a palace, nor a mountain, nor one of the warships that were typical of the game he was playing. 

It was...a tree.

But to call it just a tree was an insult to the magnitude of its existence. 

Its roots did not sink into the ground, but pierced the very fabric of reality, extending like veins of silver light towards an infinity of vanishing points that were lost in the horizon of emptiness. 

Each root seemed to be a conduit of knowledge and ideas, an artery that carried the vital essence of entire universes. 

The branches, so vast that they obscured any concept of "sky" or "space", bifurcated into mathematically perfect fractals, holding at their ends what appeared to be spheres of translucent crystal, each containing a world, a possibility, a life.

Li Wei instinctively sharpened his senses. 

At first, the sound was an annoying hum, static interference, but it soon transformed into something coherent. It was whispers. Billions of voices layered in a chaotic yet strangely harmonious chorus. 

These were not war cries or cries of pain; they were the residual thoughts of humanity from infinite realities dreaming in unison, ignoring the limits of space and time, as if the linear flow towards the future and the events of the past lacked meaning. 

He understood, with a clarity that terrified him deeply, that he was listening to the collective unconscious of all humanity. 

Each leaf of that tree was the dream of a human being, each branch a protected timeline, and the trunk... the trunk was the support of the very existence of the human species.

—This is the Nexus of Realities of Human History—he thought, although the idea did not seem to be his own, but an absolute truth given by Lian's body.

That's when she realized she wasn't alone. 

The space around the trunk was not empty.

Along the base of the great tree, arranged in a semicircular formation, were other figures. Li Wei felt a lump in his throat. 

At first, he thought they were projections of his own fragmented mind, but the density of their presence—the force they emanated—was too real, too heavy. 

There were twelve in total, including her.

The figures were enveloped in a distortion that made them appear to be in a constant state of flux between reality and illusion. 

Their shapes fluctuated, preventing us from seeing their full features.

However, some were clearer, although their identities remained hidden behind a veil of mystery.

A few meters to his left, he glimpsed a woman wrapped in what appeared to be a gold and white nun's habit, from an order that clearly did not belong to any religion on Earth. 

He held a magnificent staff, topped with a circular structure of intricate details that I couldn't quite make out. 

His presence emanated such a heavy piety that it felt like a condemnation; he was the embodiment of sacrifice.

Further on, an armored figure stood motionless. A knight encased in jet-black armor, its aesthetic screaming war and protection. 

He carried no shield, but a spear whose tip seemed to absorb the light around it. There was no face behind the visor, only a fixed intent that intimidated even the "Empress".

But it was two other figures that caught Li Wei's attention above all others, even though he didn't know why.

One was a girl with wings. They weren't the wings of a bird, but something more complex, a mixture of feathers and structures that resembled silver metal. Her figure was slender, surrounded by an aura of silver light that made her seem like a celestial apparition, but laden with a melancholy that Li Wei could feel in the air.

Beside the girl with wings stood another figure, a stark contrast. She was a girl wielding an enormous axe, a weapon so large it seemed impossible for someone of her stature to handle it. 

The axe didn't look forged, but rather torn from the crust of a primordial world, its runes glowing faintly. The girl remained deathly silent, yet the pressure she exerted on the space around her was brutal.

Li Wei felt a chill. 

These twelve figures... each one had a look as unique as his own, as out of place on Earth as the "Empress of the Crimson Lotus." They were pieces of a puzzle he didn't know existed.

Suddenly, the murmur of countless human voices ceased. The silence that followed was absolute, an emptiness that pressed painfully against Lian's ears. 

Then the Tree resonated. 

The spheres on its branches shone with a blinding intensity and a voice—if it could be called that—resonated not in the air, but directly in the core of his being, in his very soul.

It wasn't a single voice. It was an amalgamation of countless human voices: the cry of a newborn, the whisper of an old man on his deathbed, the shout of a warrior, the laughter of a child. All united in a single will, a single frequency.

—Apostles... my contractors... the guardians of humanity.

The voice was the Great Nexus, the incarnate will of human preservation, the ultimate defense system of the species.

—You have been called from the fabric of possibility for a task that transcends your own limited existence. The natural order has been fractured by the ambition of those who sought divinity in the mire of creation. You have been charged with hunting down the Sephiroth... destroying the contaminant born of human ambition.

Li Wei felt a rush of information that almost made him lose consciousness. 

I didn't understand the technical terms, but the images were clear: spheres of energy, ten of them, embedded like tumors in reality. 

The beings that Shido called "Spirits". 

But in this place, they weren't seen as girls; they were seen as anomalies, information parasites devouring the essence of the world.

—Tear off their branches; cut down their trunk. Let the ten Spheres of Sephiroth know their place as heretical artifices that damage the order. They will perish powerless before the will of our kind, and thus, you will be rewarded with the rebirth of your worlds.

The message was absolute. 

For this being, the "Spirits" were an infection, an "artificial divinity" created by human arrogance that now threatened to stifle the natural evolution of man. 

And they, the twelve figures, were the antibodies.

The Nexus's voice became more specific, lowering its tone to a vibration that made the misty floor crack.

—Two of you have already manifested in the polluted world; you will act as the vanguard that will fight against the trunk of this abomination. The rest will have to wait for their moment of convergence to contain its foul branches. For now...that's all.

Li Wei was in a state of total confusion. 

"Two of us as avant-garde? Are you referring to me or someone else? Is that winged girl I saw referring to the knight?" 

He tried to speak, to ask who had put him in this situation, what that "Great Nexus" really was that spoke with the voice of billions of dreamers. 

He wanted to shout that he was just a 21-year-old student who wanted to go home, not an "Apostle" with a mission to bring rebirth to a world that isn't even his own.

But her lips did not respond. 

The Empress's body moved by instinct, a program ingrained in her cells that went beyond the role he was trying to play in front of Shido.

Lian, along with the other eleven figures—the nun with the staff, the knight with the lance, the girl with the axe, and all the others—knelt in unison. It was a perfect movement, choreographed by the will of the Tree.

"Thy will be done, Alaya," the twelve voices said in unison.

'Alaya? What is this, Fate?'

The collective response of the 12 Apostles was so powerful that it shook the very fabric of space, and Li Wei couldn't help but want to roll his eyes at that name. Although he had to admit, this "Alaya" seemed more imposing than a blue sphere....

Li Wei then felt his consciousness being sucked back, away from the Nexus, the blurry figures, and the whispers of infinite realities. 

The white light enveloped everything, burning his vision and thoughts in an explosion of static.

—¡Hah!

Li Wei woke up suddenly, sitting up in bed with such force that the sheets flew off. 

Her breathing was erratic, and cold sweat trickled down her back, soaking the silk of her robe. Her golden eyes shone in the darkness of the room, desperately searching for the Tree, the infinite roots, or the voice of the Nexus.

But he only found the familiar walls of Shido's room, bathed in the bluish moonlight filtering through the curtains.

He felt a warm weight on his waist. He looked down and saw Shido, who had woken up because of his sudden movement. The boy was looking at him with sleepy eyes and an expression of genuine concern.

"Lian? What's wrong? Did you have a nightmare?" Shido asked, reaching out to touch her shoulder.

Li Wei froze, his heart pounding against his ribs. His hands trembled. 

The dream hadn't felt like a fantasy; it had felt like a display of objectives. The voice of the Nexus kept echoing in his ears: "Tear off its branches; cut down its trunk."

"It wasn't a dream..." Li Wei thought, as the Empress's mask reattached itself to her face out of sheer mental survival necessity. 

"It was an order. My body... my body knelt down on its own. As if it recognized the divine authority of that entity."

She looked at Shido. The boy who was trying to save those "Sephiroth" through affection. Based on what she had just heard, Shido was protecting the "contamination." 

He was the protector of the anomalies she was meant to eradicate. The irony of sleeping in the bed of her "target," or rather, the protector of her targets, struck him like a bolt of lightning.

"It's nothing, child," Lian said, her voice returning to its velvety, authoritative tone, though with a trace of fragility she couldn't quite conceal. "Only... a spiritual vision beyond your mortal understanding. Go back to sleep. Your empress needs silence to meditate on what she saw in the void."

Shido didn't seem convinced, but seeing the intensity in Lian's gaze and how her golden eyes seemed to be searching for something invisible in the air, he nodded slowly and lay back down, though this time he didn't let go of her hand, as if he was afraid she might vanish.

Li Wei stared at the ceiling, feeling Shido's warmth and the coldness of the mission he had just received from that unknown cosmic entity.

"Hunt the Sephiroth? Destroy girls like Pan's lover?" 

Li Wei clenched his fist tightly. The Empress within him accepted the command as a natural law, but the man who was Li Wei felt an instinctive revulsion. He didn't want to be anyone's executioner, nor the apostle of an infinite tree who hated "man's ambition."

However, something had changed. Now he knew he wasn't alone in this world. "Two of you have already manifested." 

There was another like her somewhere in the city or the world. Someone who perhaps didn't have an inner Li Wei to restrain her destructive instincts.

The role-playing game had just turned into a war of survival between humanity and these "spheres," and Li Wei, trapped in the body of the most powerful woman he could ever have imagined, found himself right in the center of the board.

"Thy will be done..." Lian whispered to herself, her tone bitter and lost in the stillness of the night, as she wondered who the second apostle would be and what would happen when her axes and fans met the kindness of a boy who only wanted to feed them.

Morning was near.