The world didn't end when Ren disappeared.
It simply… moved on.
Spring melted into summer. Students filled the halls with laughter and complaints about exams. The sakura petals fell, swept away by janitors and forgotten in shoe lockers. Everything continued as if it always had.
But for Yuki, something had gone missing before it ever existed.
She couldn't explain it. Not to Mio. Not to herself. And certainly not to the boy in the back row whose smile almost hurt to look at — a new transfer who had arrived mid-semester, polite, quiet, and strange in the way a dream lingers long after waking.
His name wasn't Ren.
But sometimes, when Yuki glanced at him from across the room, she caught herself mouthing the word anyway.
She started dreaming again.
It wasn't unusual. Everyone dreamed. But these dreams were different — too vivid, like memories bleeding through another life. A red moon. A shrine gate. A voice she had once known so deeply that her chest ached with its absence.
In the dreams, she always ran toward someone.
She never reached him.
At lunch, Mio cornered her by the windows. The breeze pulled at Yuki's hair, and for a moment, she looked like a girl in someone else's painting — paused between pages.
"You've been spacing out again," Mio said.
Yuki blinked. "I guess."
"You've been drawing weird things in your notebook too," Mio added, pulling it from Yuki's bag.
Inside: sketches of a moon, fractured. A mirror. A boy with his back turned. A forest full of clocks.
Yuki didn't remember drawing most of them.
"I don't get it," she whispered. "I feel like I'm looking for someone who never existed."
Mio didn't speak right away. Then, almost too softly:
"Maybe you are."
That night, Yuki wandered.
She didn't tell her parents. She just walked. Through the empty streets, past the train station, and eventually up the long stone steps of a half-forgotten shrine.
She didn't know why her feet took her there. But when she reached the top and saw the twisted old torii gate beneath the pale moonlight, she remembered — not in full, not in clarity. But in feeling.
Her breath caught.
Her legs collapsed beneath her.
And she wept.
Behind her, footsteps.
She turned, wiping her eyes quickly.
The transfer student stood there, as if he'd been waiting the entire time.
"You came," she whispered.
He looked confused. "Did you… call me?"
Yuki rose slowly. Her chest ached. She didn't know his name, not really. But her hand reached for his without thinking.
And when their fingers touched—
System Tsuki: Archive Fragment Accessed.
Emotional Residue: [RECOGNITION]
She gasped. He did too.
Images flashed through both of them — incomplete, disjointed, like puzzle pieces of a story the world had forgotten:
A red moon. A thousand lives. A boy who kept dying. A girl who kept forgetting. A final smile. A choice.
Then silence.
They stood there, fingers still linked. Neither said a word. But something passed between them.
Not memory. Not logic.
Just truth.
Something once broken had begun to hum again.