Having escaped the colossal prison of records known as the Well of Memories, the three companions reached the farthest edge of the Town of Sea Charts.
There, they arrived at the Stairway of Logic—a place that felt like the physical end of the world. True to its name, it was a forbidden zone that physically inhaled the breath of the living, transmuting it into the dust of information. It was a massive bridge of logic, suspended over a pitch-black abyss.
At the entrance, gargantuan lanterns reached the critical point of logic, flickering with an unnatural pulse. With every blink, particles of information fell like snow, and the grinding of stone was no longer a song of salvation; it echoed as a sacred birth cry announcing the reconstruction of the world.
Koyoi braced his feet against the stone surface, constantly gauging the distance of the sounds around him. The stairs stretched straight into the darkness, piercing the heavens. Every single step was etched with text, leaving no gap.
The characters were so fine the naked eye could barely catch them, carved into the stone with impossible density. Whenever Koyoi set foot upon them, the letters glowed with a faint light, greedily absorbing his body heat as if they had been waiting for the touch of a traveler. In place of handrails, walls of thin mist rose on either side of the stairs. Beyond them, nothing existed. To peer over the edge was to face a void so deep even light could not reach—an abyss waiting with its mouth hung silently open.
Clutching his drawstring pouch to his chest, Koyoi used the warmth of the "Drop" as his only guide, taking each step with agonizing care. The coldness of the stone seeped through his soles into the very marrow of his bones. With every breath, a strange pressure filled his chest, as if the oxygen in his lungs was being displaced by grains of data.
A wind blew upward from the abyss far below, but it carried no sound. It was a merciless, inorganic current that did nothing but brush against the skin.
Kuon’s prosthetic eye glowed blue as he stared at his Catalog. His stride was the surest of the three. The layers of information his eye perceived were fundamentally different from anything Koyoi or Asahi could sense. To him, the structural skeleton of logic that supported the stairs appeared as a web of pale blue lines. He knew better than anyone that if even one of those lines were severed, the bridge would collapse into the void in an instant.
Holding the pages of the Catalog down with one hand, Kuon reached out with the other to touch the wall of mist. The moment his fingertips passed through the vapor, his prosthetic eye flickered sharply. He bit his lip and jerked his hand back.
The skin of his fingertips had turned a thin, translucent white. That small patch of flesh had already succumbed to the "bleaching."
Kuon glanced at his fingers for a fleeting second before hiding them away in the shadows of his robes. As he straightened his back, there was a trace of clumsy kindness in his posture—a silent effort to avoid causing his companions any unnecessary dread. The pale light of the Catalog was his only compass, and guided by that glow, he moved forward, deciphering the architecture of the stairs step by step.
"…Look. This is the speed of Logic’s 'Correction.'"
When Kuon finally spoke, his words were tight. His voice carried both a simmering rage toward the Observers and a bitter realization of their own powerlessness.
"They’re physically 'bleaching' the boundaries of the world itself. They want to wipe it all away before we can finish reading the truth."
Kuon closed the Catalog and looked up at the path ahead, his face pale. The progress of the bleaching meant the stairway itself could vanish at any moment. Time was not their ally.
Further up the stairs, several steps had already begun to lose their color. From the surface of the whitening stone, the carved characters were vanishing one by one. Nothing remained where the letters had been—only a stark, white vacuum that spread like an open wound.
"…Bleaching?" Koyoi asked, tightening his grip on his pouch. His voice bounced off the stone walls, sinking into the abyss as a layered echo. "Does that mean... the 'pain' we're feeling right now will eventually disappear into that whiteness too?"
His question wasn't philosophical. It was a desperate cry of fear for the feelings he held for his friends, his reverence for the gods, and every memory they had gathered on this journey. Would it all be painted over in white?
Koyoi pressed the pouch against his chest, feeling for the heartbeat of the Drop. The warmth was still there. But would even that warmth be erased one day? His eyes welled with tears; a single droplet caught on his lashes, reflecting the information particles to create a tiny, fleeting rainbow. It colored the darkness for a heartbeat before being swallowed by the abyss.
Asahi kept his right hand on the hilt of his sword, eyes fixed on the furthest reaches of the path. There was not a trace of fear on the swordsman’s face. To Asahi, the threat of erasure was no different from an enemy’s blade. If it could be avoided, he would avoid it; if not, he would cut through it. It was as simple as that.
Asahi stared into the darkness ahead and took a deep breath. Though the abyssal chill filled his lungs, he transformed it into strength and stepped forward.
His footfall rang out powerfully against the stone. As if responding to the swordsman’s will, the characters on the fading step surged back to life with a faint glow. The stone he stood upon shone brighter than any other, the light rippling outward and upward like a wave.
"…Let’s go," Asahi said, readjusting the sword on his shoulder. "We left the answers behind us."
His voice rang true, straight down to the bottom of the abyss. The characters on the stairs erupted in a chorus of soft light, illuminating the path beneath their feet.
Koyoi watched his companion’s back, and drawn by that unwavering stride, he forced himself to take the next step. Kuon tucked his Catalog away, pulling his sleeve down to hide his bleached fingertips, and fixed the focus of his prosthetic eye on the very top of the climb.
Their shadows stretched long and thin over the abyss. Resisting the bleaching of logic, they aimed only for the heights. In that windless space, their breath rose as a white haze, and the ancient characters of the stairs drank in that warmth, relighting their dying glow once more.