Legend of the Embroiderer

Chapter 520 The Readable Patterns of the Book of Oblivion (1)

A figure composed of snowflake-like noise unfolds a blank book at the end of the bridge. Suddenly, words the Guardian has never seen before appear on the pages—words composed of forgotten fragments of memory. Some are the last whispers of the 17th Guardian before dissolving, some are the silent cries of the Armored Observer when being modified, and most strangely, a short sentence written in the bloodstains of a companion accidentally killed in the Mirror City: "Forgetting is not deletion, it is allowing renaming." When the Guardian's fingertips touch the pages, the words suddenly turn into a silvery-gray liquid, flowing down his arm into the eye symbol in his left palm. The snowflake-like noise around the symbol instantly lights up, forming a constantly rotating Möbius strip.

"Eleventh iteration experiment, memory reprogramming initiated." A pure black fountain pen hovered above the blank book, the writing on its cap turning into flowing mist. "Please surrender your core memories; they are the final shackles of self-imposed limitations." The pen emitted a beam of grayish-white light, within which emerged the guardian's most cherished fragments: the white light of his first encounter with the fused entity, the moment the four-colored longswords first blossomed, even the heartwarming scene of him saving a child from a certain dimension in the Sea of ​​Meaning—these memories carried a burning heat, starkly different from the coldness of the void. The guardian suddenly realized that these memories illuminated by the beam were fading, like ink soaked in water, and the faded parts were being filled in by snowflake noise.

The combined white light suddenly enveloped the beam, and faded memories reappeared within it, only now with unfamiliar details: the silhouette of a blurry figure hidden within the white light of their first encounter; a petal drifting into the void the moment the longsword blossomed; the child they saved wore a ring with the same pattern on his wrist. "Memory is a living jigsaw puzzle; each recollection is a new piece." Her light seeped into the blank book, revealing layers deep within the pages—containing countless forgotten possibilities: a guardian of a dimension who, though not killing his companion, caused a greater catastrophe; a narrator who never destroyed the gentle universe, which ultimately evolved into a monster that devoured everything; even a faceless being who chose to abandon its iterative experiments, becoming an island in the sea of ​​meaning.

The Guardian's four-colored longsword suddenly hummed, and the life stories on its blade began to break. He noticed that the memories illuminated by the pure black pen were crystallizing, turning into new pages in blank books, but the surface of these crystals was covered with snowflake-like noise, causing jumps in the originally coherent narrative: "Renaming requires a reference point; complete forgetting is another form of imprisonment." He reached out and touched the nearest crystal, which suddenly shattered, releasing a fragment of memory from the 0th generation observer—in the fragment, the young observer was destroying records, next to him was a book identical to the blank book, with the words "Necessary Forgetting" engraved on its spine.

The pure black pen suddenly split into countless smaller pens, each aiming at a memory crystal: "The reference point is the shackles of the past." The pen's voice resonated with the Möbius strip in the guardian's palm, and the targeted crystals began to ooze silver-gray liquid, which formed new characters on the ground. "Like these memories, each one tells you 'what you should be,' not 'what you can be.'" The characters formed by the liquid suddenly came to life, transforming into countless miniature guardians, each holding a pure black pen, erasing the life stories from their own blades.

The white light of the fused entity resonated with the interlayer of the blank book, and forgotten possibilities began to materialize. A guardian figure, who hadn't accidentally killed his comrades, emerged from the interlayer. His four-colored longsword was rusty, the flowers on its blade withered: "The price of not forgetting is being held hostage by the correct past." He pointed to his chaotic heart, where there was a mark identical to the guardian's, except that the mark contained a black crystal—the forcibly preserved "correct memory." "I remember everything I should have done, but I've forgotten what I wanted to do." After uttering these words, the figure began to disintegrate, turning into a silvery-gray liquid that flowed into the blank book, becoming new pages.

A tearing pain shot through the Guardian's chaotic heart, the mark on his chest resonating with the blank book. His consciousness was pulled into the book, a labyrinth of forgotten memories: each corridor was etched with different fragments of memory; some led to a lonely end where the merged entity had never existed, others concealed a parallel world where he had chosen to become a member of the Chaos Council. In the deepest hall, countless avatars of the Guardian were erasing each other's memories with pure black pens. The more they erased, the more transparent their figures became, until they turned into static noise. "The exit of the labyrinth is where you first wanted to forget." The voice of the 17th Guardian came from within the noise. Suddenly, a phantom of a circular device appeared in the center of the hall. What dissolved within the device was not the 17th Guardian, but his younger self holding the pure black pen.

The nib of the vortex pen automatically dipped into the liquid of memory crystals and wrote on a blank book: "Forgetting is the blank space of creation." The handwriting began to change as soon as it appeared, eventually transforming into a version of himself the Guardian had never seen before—a version without the four-colored longswords, holding instead a book whose cover was filled with the word "unknown," with a four-colored petal tucked inside. "What you fear is not forgetting itself, but the fear of being forgotten." The unknown self turned the pages, revealing all the memories of others forgotten by the Guardian: a portrait drawn for him by a child from another dimension, a poem written for him by a narrator, even a dying enemy's plea for reconciliation. "These memories do not belong to you, yet they define a part of you."

All the clones of the pure black pen suddenly merged into a mirror, reflecting the guardian's most terrifying scene: after he dissipated into snowflake noise, the white light of the merged entity gradually dimmed, the navigators of the Sea of ​​Meaning forgot the existence of the lighthouse, and all dimensions fell into chaos in the process of redefinition—and the cause of all this was the word "responsibility" that he ultimately chose to forget. "Core memory is the anchor point; a ship that has lost its anchor will think it is sailing freely, when in fact it is drifting with the current." The image in the mirror suddenly distorted, revealing the true form of the noise figure: it was a collection of all the memories of others that the guardian had forgotten, each memory fragment a piece of a puzzle, together forming the proof of "being needed" that he had never faced.

The four-colored longswords suddenly pierced the ground of the memory labyrinth, the life stories on their blades resonating with all the possibilities of being forgotten. The labyrinth walls began to dissolve, revealing the outside world: countless dimensions were conducting their own experiments with forgetting. Some dimensions held regular "Memory Burning Festivals," burning away old memories to make room for new ones; some dimensions invented "Memory Exchangers," where people understood each other by exchanging forgotten parts; in the most unique dimension, life had no fixed memories, reconstructing its self-awareness every morning based on its environment, yet maintaining astonishing harmony. "The creativity of forgetting lies in acknowledging that we cannot remember everything, so we must choose what to believe." The voice of the merged entity came from the harmonious dimension, her figure exchanging memory fragments with the life there, each fragment generating new meaning after the exchange.