Chapter 287: What If None of It Was Real?

Gideon knew this was a dream. He knew the house, the breakfast, and the woman sitting across from him had been pulled from his own memories. None of that changed the simple fact that, for a little while, he could hear her voice again.

He helped clean the kitchen afterward, endured another lecture about leaving water on the counter, and spent the afternoon following the familiar rhythm of their old life.

Callista took a day off today, Gideon handled his remote job, and whenever he took a break, she found another small task for him to do. They talked between chores, argued over trivial things, and shared a meal later in the day.

Nothing extraordinary happened.

That was the point.

He had faced monsters, built a settlement, and acquired enough power to make entire factions think twice before crossing him. Yet the memory that remained closest to his heart was not a victory or a moment of glory. It was a day when the worst thing he had to worry about was his sister complaining that the house was a mess.

By evening, he had almost forgotten the Hive Mind.

Almost.

***

"Gideon! Get up! You’re going to sleep through the entire morning!"

His eyes opened to sunlight spilling across his familiar bedroom. The ceiling fan turned lazily overhead, while his phone lit up beside the computer. Still half-dazed, he reached for it and checked the date, only to find himself staring at the same morning he had already lived through, with the same familiar voice waiting to call him awake.

"Ah right, Jade tell me something about this. Looping." he shook his head, "Damn this hive mind needs to be smarter, for an S rank aberrant, this is dumb."

Gideon sat up slowly, his smile fading. The day had reset. The breakfast, the conversations, the chores, and every little argument had been returned to their starting point.

His sister shouted from the other room again.

"Are you deaf? Get out here!"

He stared at the bedroom door.

The Hive Mind was keeping him here, feeding him a memory it had found buried deep enough to make him reluctant to leave. It had chosen something he wanted, something he would never willingly trade away. It did not need to make the memory perfect. It only needed to make him comfortable enough to stop looking for the exit.

Unfortunately for the creature, Gideon had never been particularly good at leaving things alone and he had a lot of responsibility.

He then called the system again and the system gave him another countdown.

[Time remaining 3 minutes 0 second]

Gideon blinked, "So there is time dilatation. Good, if it doesn’t, Jade probably will try to kill me again for leaving them for a day."

He got out of bed, but instead of following the familiar routine, he began pulling clothes from the wardrobe and throwing them across the room. He knocked books off the desk, overturned a chair, and deliberately scattered the neatly arranged items his sister would inevitably complain about.

Then he walked into the kitchen and dropped a plate onto the floor.

Callista spun around.

"What the hell is wrong with you?"

Gideon looked at the broken pieces. "Nothing. Just redecorating."

"Are you out of your mind? Pick that up before someone steps on it!"

She snatched a broom from beside the refrigerator and shoved it into his hands. Her expression was furious, her voice sharp enough to cut through the room.

For one brief moment, the familiarity of it almost made him laugh.

Then he deliberately knocked another plate from the counter.

His sister stared at him as though she could not believe what she was seeing. "Gideon!"

"Come on," he said, meeting her eyes. "Get angry. You’re very good at it."

"Are you trying to get yourself killed?"

"Not today."

Callista grabbed his arm and turned him toward the mess. "I don’t know what kind of problem you’re having, but you are going to clean this kitchen, and then you’re going to explain yourself. I didn’t spend all these years keeping this household together just so you could wake up one morning and behave like an idiot!"

The words struck harder than he expected.

Not because she was wrong, but because he could hear the truth beneath her anger. She had worked herself to exhaustion for them.

She had carried the household when their father refused to. Even when Gideon was sick, she had never treated him as though he were helpless.

She ordered him around whenever he was able, scolded him when he was careless, and expected him to contribute because he was still her brother, not another burden she had to carry alone.

Gideon looked at her face and felt the familiar ache in his chest return.

He wanted to tell her that he had missed her. That he had spent almost a year wishing he could hear her complain one more time.

That he was sorry for every time he had made her life harder, even when he had been too young or too sick to understand what she was carrying.

Instead, he gave her a crooked smile.

"You’re still terrifying before breakfast."

"And you’re still an idiot before breakfast!"

He laughed.

For a second, the room felt real enough to hurt.

Then a voice slipped through the silence behind her.

"Such a beautiful memory you have. Such an ordinary and tedious one, don’t you think?"

Gideon’s smile disappeared.

The voice did not come from his sister. It seemed to seep through the walls, the floor, and the spaces between his thoughts, its overlapping tones faintly out of sync.

"Isn’t it strange that someone with such an ordinary life could somehow possess such tremendous power?" It continued. "What if all of this isn’t real?"

Gideon glanced at his sister. Callista had gone still, the broom clutched in one hand. Her expression remained familiar, but something about the way she watched him felt wrong.

The Hive Mind pressed on.

"What if your memories are false? What if the life you remember never existed? Perhaps the person you believe yourself to be is nothing more than another illusion."

Gideon lowered his eyes to the broken plates scattered across the floor.

He had expected the creature to use fear. It had already tried tempting him with power, promising him a world he could rule. Now it was trying to make him doubt the very foundation of his identity.

It was a reasonable strategy, in its own way. If Gideon could not trust his memories, perhaps he would hesitate. If he hesitated long enough, the Hive Mind could keep him here until there was nothing left of the person who had entered its body.

But the creature had made one mistake.

It assumed that an ordinary life was something to be ashamed of.

Gideon looked up at his sister. She was still waiting for him to explain the mess he had made, her irritation so familiar that he almost wished he could stay a little longer.

"I know you’re not real," he said quietly. "But that doesn’t mean what you represent is meaningless."

The Hive Mind fell silent for a moment.

Gideon picked up a broken piece of ceramic and turned it between his fingers. "My life wasn’t extraordinary. I wasn’t some secret genius chosen by fate, and I didn’t spend every morning discovering a new power. Most days, I worked, cooked, cleaned, and tried not to give my sister another reason to yell at me."

He glanced toward her again. "And honestly? That was enough."

He let the ceramic fall. It struck the floor and shattered, sending fragments skittering beneath the kitchen cabinets.

The Hive Mind laughed. Not the low, mocking chuckle Gideon had expected, but a burst of genuine amusement that seemed to come from every corner of the house.

"Oh, Gideon. You still don’t understand, do you?"

Callista stopped moving. She stood beside the kitchen counter, one hand resting on the edge of the sink, her mouth slightly open as if she had been about to say something. Then the entire room seemed to freeze with her.

A strange distortion spread across the walls. The sunlight fractured into bands of red, green, and blue, each color slipping out of alignment with the others. The edges of the cabinets doubled and flickered. His sister’s face broke into overlapping images, like a corrupted video struggling to display the same frame.

Gideon stared at her. "What the hell?"

A sharp electronic tone sounded somewhere beyond the walls, followed by voices that were far too calm for the scene unfolding around him.

"Subject Archetype Zero, body temperature within normal range."

"Heart rate stable."

"Blood pressure holding. Respiration normal."

"Neurological activity remains consistent. No significant changes detected."

The reports continued, each voice overlapping the next. They sounded distant and clinical, as though a group of people were monitoring him from the other side of a glass wall.

His stomach tightened. He knew those voices didn’t belong in his kitchen.

The Hive Mind laughed again.

"You remember this life so fondly. Your home, your sister, those ordinary mornings you treasured so much." Its voice deepened, layered with a dozen subtly different tones. "Tell me, what makes you so certain any of it was real?"