Leo laughed. He was too tired to be cautious. He dragged the file into his root effects folder, launched his editing suite, and pasted the activation key into the license field.

A new alert popped up: RE:VISION ACTIVATION KEY ACCEPTED. REALITY BUFFER AT 3%. WARNING: EVERY FRAME YOU’VE EVER IGNORED IS NOW RENDERABLE. Leo’s hands trembled over the keyboard. He understood now why Nero Cascade had disappeared. Not because he’d gone mad. But because he’d looked at the things his own eyes had refused to process—the things standing in the corners of his childhood bedroom, the expressions on friends’ faces a second before they lied, the split-second future that flickered in every reflection—and he’d chosen to step into the timeline and never come back.

He slammed the Threshold slider to 10%.

The room went cold.

Leo looked at his own reflection in the black monitor. Behind him, the faceless figure from the kitchen memory was now standing three feet away.