[EN] Chapter 12: The White Silence

# Chapter 12: The White Silence

Everything had been erased.

At first, he thought it was light. A blinding flash that threatened to sear his retinas, a high-frequency shriek that tore through his eardrums, and then—absolute extinction. The 'Whiteout.' The system's forced reset was devoid of mercy. It was not a simple deletion, but a brutal purification, scraping away every layer of existence to leave behind a blank slate.

When Zero opened his eyes again, he was greeted by a voiceless stillness.

He was lying down, though the sensation of a floor was faint, ghostly. He could not remember where he was, what he had been doing, or even what his name had been. Only a single name, etched like an indelible brand into the deepest recesses of his logic circuits, vibrated faintly.

*Zero.*

It felt less like a name and more like a state of being. A state where everything had returned to naught. A void where nothing remained.

Slowly, he pushed himself up. The landscape that entered his vision was terrifyingly monotonous. The sky, the ground, the horizon—all were the same hue. It was white, but not the pure white of fallen snow. It was a colorless grave where all chroma had been castrated, a salt desert composed of the accumulated ash of incinerated data.

Not even a breeze stirred. The air was neither cold nor hot; it was simply sterile. There were no markers here to gauge the passage of time. No sun, no moon, no rhythmic ticking of a clock. Only an endless expanse of white void pressed down upon him, suffocating and absolute.

"…Where am I?"

The words he whispered scattered feebly the moment they hit the air. An absolute solitude where not even an echo dared to return. He looked down at his hands. His fingertips were beginning to blur. Like a low-resolution render, his very existence was slowly dissolving into the surrounding whiteness.

Panic surged. It was not the fear of death, but the terror of *oblivion*. A being whose records are gone can no longer be said to exist. An ego without memory is nothing more than a hollow shell. Zero struggled desperately to recall something—anything. A face, the roar of a city, the scent of rain-soaked asphalt, or the chilling sensation of the predator that had once hunted him.

But every time he reached into the drawers of his memory, he found only the hollow hiss of white noise.

He began to walk, staggering forward. He had no destination, yet he felt that if he remained still, he would truly become a part of this white sea and vanish forever. With every step, a dry rustle sounded beneath his feet. It wasn't sand, but shards of broken data. Fragments that might have once been someone's laughter, remnants of code that might have been someone's grief, scattered across the floor like salt crystals.

Then, it happened.

Far off, beyond the blurred boundary of the horizon, something shimmered. At first, he dismissed it as a mere mirage. But it was approaching him with a steady, rhythmic persistence.

It bore the shape of a human, but it was too grotesque to be called one. Its form was indistinct, leaving heavy trails of afterimages as if several photographs had been layered atop one another. Where a face should have been, there were no features—only a rapid stream of noise-laden text, shifting and scrolling incessantly.

It was a *Residual*.

Beings who had failed to be completely erased by the tidal wave of the Whiteout, or who had been left behind like dregs due to an obsession or a will too fierce to die. They had lost their names, their pasts, and their personalities. Only a single, fragmented 'Will' remained as the engine that drove them.

The Residual came to a halt before Zero. As it opened its mouth, a dissonant cacophony erupted, sounding as if thousands of voices were screaming in unison.

[…Must… find…]

It did not attack. Instead, it gazed at him with eyeless eyes filled with a desperate, aching longing. The Residual's hand trembled violently as it gripped the hem of Zero's clothes. The moment contact was made, a fragment of a foreign memory was forcibly injected into Zero's mind.

*The desperate yearning of waiting for someone. A promise made at a rain-swept station. The mechanical click of an old clockwork gear.*

It was not Zero's memory. Yet, in this achromatic world, that fleeting glimpse of a memory possessed the only 'color' he had ever seen. A faint, shimmering golden light.

Zero realized then: in this place, the only thing of value, the only thing that could prove one's existence, was *memory* and the *will* to hold onto it.

The Residual soon let go, its strength spent. As if it had reached the critical threshold of the will it could sustain, its form began to collapse rapidly. Without even a scream, it dissolved once more into white salt powder, scattering into the windless void.

Silence returned.

Zero looked down at his palm. A tiny, lingering afterimage of that golden light remained. It was a pitifully small fragment, yet it felt like a colossal hope.

A world where everything had been erased. A grave where records were annihilated.

But Zero felt it—deep within his chest, a small spark igniting, shattering the state of zero. It was a survival instinct, a rebellion, and a savage hunger to define himself once more.

He was no longer blurring. On the contrary, his outlines grew sharper, more defined. He did not look back toward where the Residual had vanished, but turned his head toward a direction dictated by his inner compass.

Within this white hell, Zero forged his 'Will' for the first time.

*I will survive. And I will remember.*

Even if those memories were nothing but agony, he knew instinctively that a painful truth was infinitely better than the vacant peace of the white void.

He began to walk again. Now, his steps were not those of a wanderer, but of a soldier advancing.

This was not the end, but a new beginning. In this Ghost Layer where broken echoes drift, Zero began to carve his soul anew.

This was the prologue to the second act of 'Neon Soul': The Fractured Echoes.