Those words were played back as a fragment of unrecorded lecture audio.

Unknown source. Unknown speaker. Unknown transmission time.

But to Juliana’s ears, it resonated as a “familiar voice."

“…Father?"

Lately, Juliana had become unable to “distinguish dreams."

No, rather than dreams, she could see “layered realities" overlapping in multiple dimensions.

Places she walked in dreams certainly existed after she awoke.

She was convinced she “knew" the faces of people she should never have met.

Her memories of her mother changed in detail from day to day──

“The sixth consciousness = mind consciousness constructs reality according to the 'assumptions’ of the perceiver.

When your consciousness wavers, the world itself transforms."

In the Empire, individual “consciousness filters" were mandatory.

These were microscopic neural elements designed to control the direction of thought.

News, advertisements, even cityscapes were displayed through filters that were “individually optimized."

──Therefore, everyone lived seeing “different realities."

Juliana’s filter was “neutralized" by accident.

One day, the moment she awoke, everything appeared “naked."

Sounds distorted, colors oversaturated, and people’s words entered her ears as “meaningless sequences of sound."

──Her consciousness was rebooting.

For those who couldn’t face true reality directly,

consciousness creates convenient “stories."

But Juliana chose.

She chose to reject dreams and go see the “truth" that sank to the depths of reality.

And so she headed to the underground “Mindless Palace."

This was the ruins of a “consciousness alteration facility" built in the early days of the Empire.

The moment she opened the door, the boundaries of consciousness began to collapse.

She was in three worlds simultaneously.

All of them were “Juliana," and at the same time, “not Juliana."

──Who am I?

The question shook her consciousness.

Her face in the wall mirror changed into someone unknown.

But then she realized.

It wasn’t “changing."

“It was never fixed to begin with."

Consciousness is a flowing bundle of “nows," neither past nor future.

What exists there is only one thing──a continuous series of choices.

Johannes’s figure finally appeared.

But it was not the “Johannes of memory."

He was an existence that her consciousness had created “here and now."

Juliana closed her eyes and sank into the depths of consciousness.

There were no words, no time, no form.

Only the primordial possibility particles existed there.

She reached out into that ocean and began to “rewrite" the story called “reality" with her own will.

At that moment, Juliana’s sixth consciousness = mind consciousness awakened completely.