THE LAST KEEPER

Chapter 331: 331. MEMORY

Silence.

There was no time or any feeling then...

Sagiri felt something far more terrifying.

It began as a pressure inside his head. A faint ache behind his eyes. Then it grew. Memories he had carried his entire life started shifting and rearranging themselves. It felt as though invisible hands had reached into his mind and begun turning pages he didn’t know existed.

Faces he had forgotten suddenly became clear. Moments he had never experienced flashed through his thoughts with impossible familiarity. The sensation was agonizing. Every instinct screamed that something was wrong.

That his mind was being altered. Yet beneath the fear was a certainty that these memories were not foreign. They had always belonged to him. They had simply been buried. Locked away somewhere beyond his reach.

Then the Archive reacted. For the first time in his life, Sagiri felt it awaken completely. The darkness he had always commanded was suddenly too vast to comprehend. It expanded beyond him in every direction, no longer feeling like a technique or gift but a living world connected to something ancient and endless.

He felt corridors of memory stretching across centuries. Countless lives. Countless voices. Entire histories flowed through the darkness like rivers. The Archive broadened until it seemed large enough to contain mountains, cities, generations, and forgotten ages. The markings covering his body erupted with movement, spreading across his skin as though responding to a call older than civilization itself.

Pain lanced through every nerve of his body so raw that he could have died if he had a choice. His heart hammered in his chest. His vision fractured into a thousand pieces. Yet alongside the agony came understanding.

The Archive had never truly belonged to him. He belonged to it. And now, deep beneath the fortress, standing at the source from which it had been born, the Archive was finally remembering what it had once been.

The darkness swallowed Sagiri completely, and suddenly, he was no longer beneath the fortress. He was somewhere older. Far older. The vision unfolded around him like a forgotten dream. Mountains stood where no mountains existed today. Rivers flowed through lands that had long since become desert. Then he saw them.

Five tribes standing together beneath a sky untouched by history. Not four. Five.

Five?

The ancestors of the South. Each gathered around a vast black pool that stretched beyond the horizon, its waters calm and endless. The pool was not beneath the fortress then. The fortress did not yet exist. Instead, the pool sat at the heart of the world, and from it flowed the gifts that would shape the tribes.

Around the pool stood five ancient relics, each resting upon a stone altar. A golden spear crowned with shifting grains of crystal sand. A horn carved from the skull of a colossal beast. A hammer forged from black metal veined with living stone. A silver mask whose surface reflected paths that did not exist. And finally, a blade of pure darkness that seemed less forged than born from the shadows beneath the water. The relics radiated power unlike anything Sagiri had ever felt. Ancient. Sovereign. Alive. The moment his eyes fell upon them, recognition stirred within him. These were the voices that had haunted his dreams. The distant calls he had felt since arriving in the South. They had been calling to him all along.

Sagiri watched as one tribe learned to command sand, another mastered beasts, another forged bonds with stone and metal, while the fourth learned to walk paths hidden from ordinary eyes. Then his gaze settled upon the fifth tribe. They stood closest to the water.

Closest to the darkness.

Black markings crawled across their skin like living ink, and when they moved, shadows followed. The Archive. It had always belonged to them to protect. Well, he knew that much already. The pool and the Archive were the same, connected like two parts of a single living thing.

The vision shifted. The relics vanished from their places and appeared in the hands of five rulers standing before the tribes. Their voices echoed across the ages, speaking words Sagiri somehow understood. A treaty. An oath binding the five tribes together beneath a single banner. The relics were not merely symbols of authority. They were keys. Anchors of power are entrusted to each tribe. It was said that should the treaty ever break and the South fall into division, only a true ruler could unite the relics once more and wield all five. Such a ruler would command the legacy of every tribe and stand above kings, chiefs, and warlords alike.

Then Sagiri saw it.

A creature sleeping beneath the pool.

Vast beyond comprehension.

Its body stretched through the darkness beneath the world itself. Eyes like moons watched from the abyss while countless memories flowed through its form like rivers. The Beast of Memory. Guardian of the pool. Keeper of the relics. When the treaty shattered, and the tribes turned upon one another, the beast had taken the relics into its care, hiding them from the world until a worthy ruler appeared.

He watched centuries pass. The tribes flourished. Cities rose. Wars were fought. Alliances shattered. Then something changed. Fear. The fifth tribe had grown too close to the darkness beneath the pool, drawing upon powers the others neither understood nor trusted. Old friends became enemies. The vision fractured into battles, betrayals, and burning settlements. The fifth tribe dwindled. Generation after generation vanished until only fragments remained. Their name was erased. Their history is buried. Yet the Archive survived, passing from one descendant to another like an ember refusing to die.

As the vision faded, Sagiri understood something that sent a chill through him. The pool beneath the fortress was not merely connected to the Archive. It was its source. The Beast of Memory still slept within its depths, guarding the five relics and waiting for the one destined to claim them. And somewhere in the forgotten past, the people who carried the Archive had once been the fifth tribe of the South.

What happened to the fourth tribe?

Sagiri found himself asking inside his head.

The beast of memory finally turned towards him, and Sagiri wished he had not asked.