Chapter 400: The Subject
432 Hz.
The graph beneath it was the most stable on the wall. The smooth line was beautiful here - clean, even, every arc identical to the next, every period perfectly measured. The page felt almost peaceful to look at, the way the Ukai’s Ruler’s music was peaceful, the way certain spaces in nature are peaceful for reasons that have less to do with their components than with their proportions.
And the sharp line, on the same page, was the second-most violent on the wall. Aggressive. Cutting upward and downward in jagged spikes that had nothing to do with the smooth line’s calm.
Raizen breathed out. Slowly.
He’d seen that smooth line before. The memory came up from somewhere deep, slowly, the way memories surface when the brain has been refusing to retrieve them and finally gives up.
A workbench. Saffi’s lab, months ago. He’d walked in unannounced - which was typical for him, and which Saffi had stopped complaining about, which had also been typical - and she’d been hunched over a sheet of paper with her shoulders curved inward, the shrimp posture she used when she was looking at something she didn’t want anyone else to see.
She’d tried to slide the paper under another stack when she heard him. Not fast enough. He’d seen the top of it.
A graph. A waveform. A smooth line traveling across the page in slow, even arcs.
"What’s that?"
"Nothing."
"That’s a waveform."
"It’s a... Uhh... Class assignment."
"You don’t even attend the Academy. I thought Alteea teaches you everything personally."
She’d glared at him. The glare had been her best attempt at deflection, and her best attempt hadn’t worked. He’d waited her out, leaning against the workbench, until she’d sighed and pulled the paper back into view.
The graph was 432 Hz. Luminite Resonance, on the strange, corrupted chunk of Luminite they got from the mountain. It was a full study – all made by Saffi. The kind of thing scientists spend weeks on – she’s done more progress in a couple of days, it seemed. She tried responsiveness to different resonances, and frequencies. And the result: the smooth, arc-like line. But there was a small variable. The line that started smooth became suddenly spiky, like two patterns blending into each other in a way that suggested the crystal was producing both signatures at once, simultaneously, from the same chunk.
Raizen’s eyes widened. He understood it now. It wasn’t producing one, anomalous frequency. It was producing two frequencies. Layered.
But Saffi didn’t know it yet.
He remembered her words: I think it’s corrupted. I don’t know how, and with what.
Raizen never thought about it again until this moment.
In Eiden’s office. With his back to a door he hadn’t closed properly. Looking at a graph that was the same graph Saffi had been studying, except Eiden’s didn’t even pretend the two patterns were the same line.
There weren’t two patterns blending. There were two separate signals. Saffi had seen them merged together because her instruments hadn’t been sensitive enough to separate them. Eiden’s instruments were better. Eiden’s instruments had pulled the smooth line and the sharp line apart and shown them for what they were.
Two types of Eon.
In the corrupted Luminite. In Eiden’s body. Layered, simultaneous, occupying the same space, vibrating at different frequencies.
Raizen’s chest tightened. He looked at the central table.
The papers on it were dedicated entirely to 396 Hz.
The graphs here were different from the ones on the walls. More detailed. The two lines on these pages weren’t just patterns - they were combatants. The sharp line wavered violently at 396 Hz, its spikes distorted by something that was pushing on it from outside. The smooth line, by contrast, looked happy here. Stable. Settled.
Raizen’s eyes slid across the central papers. There were notations in Eiden’s handwriting - subject pulse rate at 396 Hz exposure: elevated. Subject reports increased clarity. Subject’s dark hand exhibits increased pigmentation darkening within fifteen minutes of exposure. Subject’s Eon channels show frequency interference at -
Subject. Eiden had been calling himself the subject. He’d been running these experiments on his own body. The wall full of frequencies wasn’t theoretical research. It was a man trying to understand what was happening to him by using himself as the variable, plotting his own data against the standard frequencies the medical journals had published, hoping one of them would resonate with the foreign energy and tell him what it was.
396 Hz had told him.
Raizen took a step back. His eyes moved across the room again. The walls. The graphs. The brass instruments humming at frequencies he could almost feel.
The whole room was a confession. Eiden hadn’t been studying the staff. Eiden had been studying himself. He’d come back from the mountain with something inside him, and he’d spent years in this room, alone, trying to figure out what he was carrying. He’d known he was infected. He’d known the Eon was foreign. He’d known -
Raizen stopped. The thought he’d been building wouldn’t finish.
There was something at the edge of his memory. A shape. A moment. Something on a glass roof, something with light that wasn’t quite the right colour, something that should have been a memory but instead was a hole where he should have remembered. He’d been there. He knew he’d been there. He couldn’t remember what happened at all.
His chest tightened again. Harder this time. His eyes caught on the back wall.
The progressive series of darker images he’d noticed on the way in. He hadn’t looked closely before - they’d been at the edge of his vision, and his attention had been pulled to the graphs on the central table. Now, with the ringing in his ear and the pressure in his chest and the moving lines across every wall, his eyes finally focused on what the back wall was showing.
Photographs. Eiden’s right hand.
The earliest in the series was almost normal. A discolouration near the palm, easy to miss, the kind of thing a person would attribute to a bruise or a temporary irritation. The next photo, the discolouration was larger. The next, larger still. The series ran along the wall in chronological order, each photo dated in Eiden’s neat handwriting, the dates spaced by weeks at first and then by months as the changes slowed enough to be tracked over longer intervals.
The most recent photo was from nineteen months ago.
What he hadn’t seen was the rest of the wall.
There were diagrams below the photos. Cross-sections of a hand, drawn in careful technical detail, showing the spread of the discolouration through the layers of tissue. Below the cross-sections were graphs — spread rate over time, with annotations. 0.02mm/day, day 62. 0.025mm/day, month 8. 0.021mm/day, month 19.
Eiden had been measuring the spread. For years. Researching his own silent transformation across a wall in a basement lab, watching the line creep upward in millimetres per year, knowing exactly how much time he had left and how much faster it was getting.
Raizen’s chest felt too tight to breathe properly. He needed to leave. He’d come down here without a reason and stayed for too long and now the room’s walls felt like they were pressing in.
He slowly walked backwards toward the door. Raizen slowly took a step... But he didn’t even finish the second one-
The door snapped open.
