Neo stayed quiet longer than he should have, his shirt still off, the last trace of cold from the sensors clinging to his skin while Cedric and Elara waited across from him. He had gone into the room expecting pressure from the start, some polite version of a trap, the kind where adults smiled while deciding how much they could take from him before he noticed. That feeling had not vanished, but it had changed shape. Cedric had asked what he needed to ask. Elara had measured what mattered. Neither had pushed once he drew a line. That alone had already moved them away from the ugly picture he had built in his head.

He let out a breath through his nose and spoke at last. "I don’t know what the other survivors told you, but I’ll give you my version from the beginning."

Cedric’s face lit up with the restrained delight of a man being handed something rare and trying not to scare it away by looking too pleased. "Please. Go on. We want everything we can learn from Breaches. If we’re lucky, one day we’ll understand why our world became what it is now. Truthfully, it would help us a great deal."

Neo gave a small nod.

Elara was already ready with the tablet in both hands, concentration settled over her face so completely that it looked like rain could fall on her head for an hour and she still would not blink until she finished writing.

"When I passed through the Breach," Neo said, "I appeared somewhere alone. I didn’t know where I was at first. Only that it wasn’t where I entered from."

Cedric inclined his head. "That part is normal. In most Breaches, people appear at scattered points inside the Breach world instead of a single entrance."

Neo continued. "Yeah. I noticed. The first thing I saw was the tower. A huge tower in the middle of the jungle. It stood out so much that it felt obvious that was where we had to go, so I headed that way. I had a group before entering. That had already been the plan."

Elara wrote without pause.

Neo waited a beat, but neither of them interrupted, so he kept going. "What felt strange was everything around it. There were structures. Old ones. Some looked like churches, or what I think churches used to look like. Others looked ancient in a way you don’t really see in the world now."

Cedric’s interest deepened at once. "Yes. That fits." He leaned back slightly, one hand touching his knee while his thoughts ran ahead of him. "Architecture changed with the world. When the Breaches appeared, classes appeared with them. Once that happened, engineering, materials, and the way cities were built changed as well. We no longer make things the way the old world did. A few remnants survive, but almost nothing new follows those styles anymore."

His expression shifted after that, the tired researcher giving way to the part of him Elara had already warned Neo about. "Actually, I have a theory about that. Would you like to hear it, young Neo?"

Neo did not see why not. "Alright."

That was all Cedric needed.

He leaned to the side, opened a small metal case, and pulled out a thermos like a man preparing for a picnic rather than a conversation about the end of the world. He poured tea into the cup-lid and offered it across the desk.

Neo stared at him.

Elara did not even stop writing. "Don’t worry. He gets like this when he’s excited. Most awakened come in here half-broken after a Breach, so he rarely gets the chance to talk about the part he actually loves. He’s harmless. Just obsessed with science and history."

Cedric coughed lightly, set the tea down on the desk instead, and carried on as though nothing embarrassing had happened.

"The Breaches appeared four hundred years ago," he said. "We still don’t know why. Soul Beasts began emerging from them. In that same period, everyone who had reached sixteen or beyond awakened a class. Not all equally. Some received classes barely worth speaking about. Some awakened nothing useful at all. Most of the older generation did not awaken because their bodies and souls simply were not made to endure that change. Many of the ones who did awaken never climbed past the first Soul Core. In that part, the world has not changed very much. A great many awaken. Very few keep walking once they understand the price."

Neo listened in silence.

Cedric folded his hands together. "Controlled Breaches have better odds. Uncontrolled ones do not. In the worst cases, survival falls to ten percent or less. One in ten may live. The rest become part of the lesson. People hear about power and think only of the reward. The world keeps a harsher count."

He let that settle before continuing. "The Breaches were not the only thing that appeared during the Great Change. Godscar Ruins appeared too. Geography twisted. The Earth that existed before ceased to be what it had been. Continents stretched, split, sank, merged, or turned into something unrecognizable. Old nations vanished. New lands rose. Whole regions became territories of Soul Beasts, dead civilizations, or secrets no one has truly mapped even now. The world grew larger and more broken in the same stroke."

Cedric’s voice lowered a little there, not for drama, but because he had crossed into the part that genuinely held him. "That is why we call it Atlas. The Earth before it is gone in every way that counts."

Neo’s attention tightened.

Cedric noticed and smiled faintly before the smile faded under the weight of what came next. "My theory, if you want it simply, is that the Breaches are not accidents. I do not believe they are meaningless tears in reality. I think they were made for a purpose. Training grounds, if you want the blunt version. Places meant to force awakened people to grow, fight, harden themselves, and climb. I do not know who made them or toward what end, but too many pieces point in that direction."

Elara’s stylus moved faster over the screen.

Cedric kept speaking, though some of his attention had already drifted toward older thoughts, darker ones. "The Godscar Ruins support that suspicion. Some are cities. Some are temples. Some are fortresses. Some..." He paused there, and his voice deepened. "Some do not feel like ruins at all. They feel like sealed places. Prisons. Sites built around something that should never have been loose."

A cold line passed through Neo’s back.