---
The next morning didn't feel like a morning.
It felt… wrong.
The light through the window hit differently. Sharper. The colors seemed slightly off, like the world was a few pixels out of sync. Xion sat motionless on the floor, staring at the small round device he had built last night.
The scanner.
Still active.
Still showing that faint pulse — the invisible energy signature curled in the corner of his room like a ghost with nowhere to go.
"Do not trust what you see. The silence has eyes."
The words looped in his mind.
He hadn't slept. Not really.
His body had gone still, but his brain had kept moving — building, analyzing, unraveling threads of thoughts he hadn't even known existed.
And now… a new one had formed.
The First Lock.
He didn't know where the term came from.
He just knew it existed.
A part of every human mind. A natural limiter.
Or maybe… not natural at all.
'What if people weren't meant to stay small? What if something was keeping them that way?'
---
Xion opened his notebook and began writing. Not notes — diagrams.
He drew a structure that wasn't physical. A layered filter placed over human cognition. It blocked abstract thought beyond a certain level.
Kept people inside boundaries.
A mental firewall.
He shaded it in and circled the top.
"Cognitive Lock – Layer One: Pattern Suppression."
They don't even know it's there…
He paused.
Something else had just arrived in his vision.
A notification — like a message in a system no one else could see:
"Internal Firewall Breached. Layer One Dissolved."
"Warning: Lock Status Now Visible."
His body tensed.
Not in fear. In recognition.
He was already past it.
Whatever system had kept humanity from thinking beyond certain lines…
He had just stepped outside of it.
---
Far away, within a hidden chamber buried beneath the Intelligence Nexus in the capital, an emergency alert triggered.
"Unsecured Mind Detected."
"Cognitive Lock Failure — Eastern Grid."
A man in a sharp black suit with cybernetic eyes leaned forward.
Agent Raan.
Again.
He stared at the glowing data string:
Xion Talek — Open Mind Class: First Break.
"It's started," he whispered.
A young analyst beside him swallowed hard. "Should we lock the area?"
"No. We watch. The first lock's always the quietest. It's the second one… that screams."
---
Back in his room, Xion stood up slowly, the scanner in his hand humming.
He walked toward the door.
Opened it.
And paused.
Something was wrong with the hallway.
He tilted his head.
Everything looked normal… but something in his brain lit up red. A pattern mismatch.
The hallway was too perfect.
Too symmetrical. Too still.
And the scanner in his hand started to shake.
"Perceptual Anomaly Detected," a voice whispered softly inside his head.
"What… is this place?"
He reached out — not physically, but with thought — the way he had learned last night.
And the hallway glitched.
Just for a second.
The walls rippled. The lights bent inward. The entire space flickered like bad code. Then it returned to normal.
But he had seen it.
The Veil is real.
Reality wasn't just being filtered.
It was being projected.
And he was no longer buying the illusion.
---
Suddenly, a distant bang echoed through the building.
A door slamming open? No — heavier. More like…
Boots.
Multiple.
Xion's breath caught.
They had found him.
Too soon…
He rushed back to the workbench, grabbed the scanner, the notebook, a flash drive of backup schematics.
His eyes darted toward the window.
Too high.
But not impossible.
He calculated wind drag, fall angle, impact force — all in under a second.
And then—he leapt.
---
End of Chapter Three.
Word Count: ~609 word
---