"The easiest way to find a place that doesn't exist is to use a map of something that never happened." — Ken Hiroki, On the Conceptual Compass
The exit from the subway tunnel was nothing more than a rusted grate hidden behind a collapsed cargo container. Tina-sensei had made the final preparations: Kabe was strapped into a custom harness on Ken's back, his weight an immediate, heavy anchor. The Pillar of Grief containment unit was fastened securely beneath Kabe, radiating a constant, low thrum of sorrow that settled directly into Ken's bones.
"You won't be able to Trail Walk in the conventional sense, Ken," Tina-sensei had warned him. "Not with that burden. Your only way is to find the Unwritten Trail—the hidden path that bypasses the Mugenkyou's chaotic flow entirely. The Pillar of Dreams is your only guide."
Ken stood alone under the pale, late-afternoon sky. In his dominant hand, he clutched the translucent pouch containing the Pillar of Dreams. It was an object of pure, gentle luminescence, contrasting violently with the cold dread emanating from the backpack behind him.
Ken focused his will, urging the Pillar of Dreams to function. Unlike the brutal shock of the Pillar of Grief, the Pillar of Dreams responded subtly. It didn't explode with energy; it created a faint, almost imperceptible Conceptual Wake—a ripple of pure possibility across the fractured landscape.
The ground ahead of him, a broken street riddled with dimensional fissures, seemed to shift slightly. The Dream Shard in his hand wasn't showing him a road; it was showing him the memory of a non-road, a path that Ryo's influence had never managed to touch.
If Nagalira is the city of unbroken history, the Trail must be the path of unbroken causality.
He took the first step, the weight of Kabe and the Pillar of Grief forcing him to lean forward. Every stride was a physical and psychic effort. The Pillar of Grief immediately started its insidious work, flooding his mind with worry: You're too slow. You will fall. You will fail Kabe just like you failed your mother.
Ken focused on the Pillar of Dreams. Its soft glow was the counter-argument: But what if you don't? What if the potential is real?
The balance was a terrifying act of self-control. Ken had to maintain his own Anchor, not by rejecting the despair, but by accepting it as a constant background hum, while simultaneously focusing on the pure, forward-looking conceptual energy of the Pillar of Dreams.
After an hour of agonizing walking, the Conceptual Wake led him off the main road and into a dense, silent forest that seemed impossibly deep and old. The air grew damp, and the only sound was the rustle of leaves that didn't appear to be moving.
Suddenly, the Pillar of Dreams pulsed rapidly, glowing with a sharp, urgent intensity. Ken stopped immediately, his body rigid.
The conceptual silence of the forest was broken by a sound that made his blood run cold: geometric noise. It wasn't the raw, screeching chaos of a typical Hybrid; it was ordered, rhythmic, and chillingly familiar.
Uhayyad is learning Ryo's blueprints.
Ken felt a conceptual intrusion—a perfect, crystalline mental image of the path he had just taken, overlaid with a predator's calculated trajectory. Uhayyad wasn't using raw power to find him; it was using the Geometry of Scars methodology Ryo had taught it, calculating Ken's movements based on their known weaknesses.
Ken quickly moved into the deep shadows of a gnarled, ancient tree. He knew he couldn't fight. The combined psychic output of Kabe's silent mind and the Pillar of Grief was a massive beacon—a spotlight in the conceptual dark.
He looked at the Pillar of Dreams. Show me the way out, not the way forward.
The Pillar of Dreams flared, and Ken suddenly saw the forest not as trees, but as interlocking conceptual barriers. The Pillar showed him a small, invisible gap in the geometry—a point where the forest's actual memory resisted the Mugenkyou's influence.
Ken shifted his weight, moving Kabe and the Pillar of Grief through the tiny, invisible seam.
The change was immediate and profound. One second, he was in a silent, dark forest; the next, he stepped into a field bathed in strange, perpetual twilight, the sky a deep indigo, but the air calm and electrically charged. The ground beneath his feet was not earth, but a strange, flexible material that felt like dense, compressed cloud.
He was on the Unwritten Trail.
The Pillar of Dreams settled, its glow becoming a steady, gentle light. The pressure of the Pillar of Grief was still there, but muted—the chaos was now contained within a stable environment.
Ken carefully set Kabe down on the soft, cloud-like ground, checking his vitals. Kabe was still unresponsive, his breathing shallow. Ken gently touched his brother's face, a surge of fierce determination overruling the fatigue.
"We're on the Unwritten Trail, Kabe," Ken whispered. "Ryo couldn't find this. Uhayyad can't rewrite this. We're going to Nagalira, and we're going to find the Pillar of Memory. We're getting you back."
But as Ken turned back to the Trail, he saw something horrifying. The Pillar of Grief containment unit, despite being sealed, had left a minute, oily conceptual residue on the strange ground where it had rested. A single, dark, shimmering line pointing backward toward the gate he had just used.
Uhayyad hadn't found him using Ryo's blueprints. Uhayyad was so powerful it was tracking the residue of his grief. The Trail might be unwritten, but Ken's burden was leaving a conceptual scar.
Ken grabbed Kabe and the Pillar of Grief, hoisting the unbearable weight back onto his shoulder. He had to keep moving, and he had to find a way to silence the conceptual noise he was leaving behind, or the City of Unbroken History would become his final, absolute graveyard