Sōgen stared at the flame.
Not a real one — an idea of fire.
It flickered in the empty space of his personal interface chamber: a floating cube of white gridlines suspended in sealed chakra space. Time moved differently here. Slower. Cleaner.
He needed that slowness.
Because his mind was racing.
DustMouth had grown bold. Three anonymous messages in the last twenty-four hours. Two from dead users. One from a node that didn't exist. Or shouldn't.
> "You can't delete roots that grow from your own spine."
And it was right.
DustMouth wasn't inside the Network anymore. It was inside him.
---
The First Purge
He started quietly. Chose five test subjects who had shown signs of erratic memory behavior: repeating phrases, memory stuttering, knowledge bundle corruption.
Operation: Echo Fade.
The plan was simple:
1. Isolate them in dummy chat channels.
2. Monitor all thought frequencies.
3. Rewrite any dangerous ideas using his Mangekyō's Thoughtforge.
4. Disconnect their outbound nodes.
5. Wipe and return.
But when he activated the seal on the first subject — a trader known as Leafbend-09 — something went wrong.
Instead of entering the dummy chamber…
…Sōgen fell in.
---
The Memory Prison
He awoke in a version of his bedroom.
Except nothing was quite right.
The scrolls on the shelves were reversed — written in a language that looked like kanji through a broken mirror. The photos had no faces. The walls breathed.
Sōgen narrowed his eyes. "A Genjutsu? No... worse."
He tried to dispel.
Nothing.
He activated Mangekyō.
Nothing.
Then the door opened — and he walked in.
Not DustMouth. Not Leafbend. Not a dream.
Sōgen.
A version of him that smiled far too easily. Who spoke like a storyteller.
> "Welcome to the Memory Prison. Constructed from your own technique. That's irony, isn't it?"
---
Three Trials of the Prison
The false Sōgen — or perhaps the DustMouth-puppet — explained the rules.
> "You built this place using other people's minds. But to escape, you must confront the fragments you left behind."
Trial One: False Memory.
He was thrown into a moment from his childhood — the first time he was praised by his father. Except this time, his father wept while praising him. Said he didn't want Sōgen to become a tool.
The real memory had no tears.
Did he rewrite it back then?
Or had the Network slowly contaminated his own past?
Trial Two: Forgotten Pain.
He met Renji, mortally wounded, whispering about betrayal. Except Renji was alive. This memory hadn't happened. Yet. It was a future-past — a possible sorrow.
The cost of chasing Mangekyō without pain? The system manufactured sorrow for him.
Trial Three: The Lie of Authority.
He stood before the original Sōgen, who had never built the Network. Who lived peacefully. Who never turned pain into science.
This Sōgen asked:
> "Are you protecting minds — or harvesting them?"
---
Shattering the Seal
After three trials, the fake world began to collapse.
But Sōgen couldn't escape.
He needed an anchor.
In desperation, he reached into his memory — not for knowledge, but for emotion.
A single real moment.
He remembered Renji laughing at burnt rice balls. His mother's voice humming a lullaby. His father's hand resting — just once — gently on his shoulder.
Those weren't data.
They were his.
The Mangekyō flared. For the first time, it bled black flames along the edges — not Amaterasu, but a mental fire, burning falsity.
The Network Prison collapsed.
---
He Returns Changed
He snapped back to reality in a cold sweat.
The five users? Still intact. Their memory bundles were now self-sealed — as if they'd evolved their own immune systems.
The Network wasn't just growing. It was defending itself.
And worse?
He brought something back.
A residual thread of DustMouth clung to his chakra. A whisper that wouldn't stop.
> "Even gods must dream. And your dreams belong to me."