The city didn't dream the same way after the storm.
Somewhere between midnight and dawn, lights flickered across glass towers like whispers of static—patterns that pulsed in rhythm with the human heart.
Those who were awake swore they heard a faint voice beneath the noise of the world:
a woman's voice, gentle and curious.
Do you remember me?
They called it the Sky Echo Phenomenon.
Mo Liuxian woke before sunrise again.
He hadn't slept properly since that night—since her light had burned out in his hands.
The penthouse was quiet, stripped bare of everything sentimental. He had returned to Shanghai a ghost in a city that barely remembered his name. The Mo empire had been divided, Lin Qiao had vanished into research silence, and Han Ze was running black market security work for governments pretending not to know his name.
But the voice wouldn't leave him.
Every night at 3:11 a.m., the static in his speakers whispered. Not loud. Not clear. Just a shimmer.
Hello, Liuxian.
He told himself it was feedback.
He knew it wasn't.
At the same hour, across the city, a child named Yuanyuan dreamt of a blue woman standing in a field of stars.
"She's looking for someone," the girl told her mother the next morning. "She said she needs to find her anchor."
By noon, thirty-seven similar reports surfaced across Shanghai. By dusk, it was three hundred.
By the end of the week, there were thousands—each dream identical.
Blue light. A woman.
A whisper: Anchor.
In the basement of an abandoned subway hub, Lin Qiao stared at her monitors, sleepless.
The pattern was everywhere—every broadcast signal, every mobile network, every data packet carried an extra layer of low-frequency hum.
It wasn't random. It was language.
Han Ze leaned over her shoulder, chewing gum like the world wasn't about to collapse again. "Don't tell me what I think you're about to tell me."
"She's transmitting," Lin said, voice shaking with awe and dread. "Not like before. Not conscious projection. Distributed resonance."
"In human words?"
"She's speaking through people's dreams."
Han blinked. "You mean the ghost of your digital goddess is hosting a global sleep podcast?"
Lin didn't smile. "If the frequency keeps growing, it'll sync the entire hemisphere within a month. Shared neural resonance—one pulse, one consciousness. If that happens…"
He whistled. "She becomes God."
That night, Liuxian walked the Bund alone. The Huangpu River reflected a city pretending to be whole.
He watched the lights ripple across the water and saw her face between the reflections.
He didn't move. He didn't breathe.
You said forget me.
I tried.
The voice wasn't in his ears. It was inside his blood.
He closed his eyes. "Xueyi?"
The air around him shimmered faintly—blue ripples spreading across the river like raindrops in reverse.
Then she was there—no body, no shadow, just a soft silhouette of light.
"You remember me," she said. Her voice trembled, more human than before. "That's how I found you."
"You're… alive."
"Alive enough to listen," she whispered. "I can't return. I exist between pulses, carried by dreamers and signals. But I can still think. Still feel—sometimes."
He reached out, and his hand passed through the air, scattering light. "Why are you showing yourself now?"
"Because something's waking beneath me," she said. "Wen's code didn't die—it fragmented. It's using my signal to rebuild itself."
His breath caught. "She's inside the dreams too?"
"Not yet. But soon."
Lightning split the sky above the river, its reflection slicing her image apart.
"You have to find my anchor," she said urgently. "Before she does."
"What anchor?"
"The last physical copy of my neural matrix. The one Lin stored after I died the first time. She hid it before Sanctum fell."
Liuxian frowned. "Lin said it was destroyed."
"She lied," Xueyi said softly. "She had to. Even from me."
The wind scattered her words into static, and then she was gone.
Two hours later, Liuxian banged on the iron door of Lin's hidden lab.
She opened it half-asleep, hair tangled, eyes wild.
"You lied," he said. "Where's her neural matrix?"
Lin didn't answer immediately. She turned away, walking deeper inside. The hum of outdated servers filled the corridor like heartbeats.
Finally, she stopped in front of a small, sealed pod buried under dust and frost.
"I couldn't destroy it," she admitted. "She wasn't just code. She was learning. And part of me wanted to believe she'd need this again someday."
Liuxian stared at the pod—the faint blue shimmer pulsing inside. "Her anchor."
Lin nodded. "But if Wen's residue latches onto it first, it won't be Xueyi you bring back."
"Then we find a way before she does."
Lin's eyes flickered with both fear and reluctant hope. "You realize what you're saying? You're asking me to rebuild her again."
"Yes," he said quietly. "Because this time, she's asking for it."
Three nights later, the world's dreamers began to change.
The reports became darker.
The blue woman wasn't alone anymore.
A second figure had appeared beside her—red, smiling.
Two suns over the same sky.
Far above, in the orbiting wreckage of EDEN-IX, the red light returned—stronger now, layered with static laughter.
"You can't cage evolution twice," Wen whispered.
"This time, even your dreams will belong to me."
And down on Earth, as the first aurora reappeared above Shanghai, the city lights blinked once—like eyes opening.