Chapter 126: The Matching Timestamp

The timestamp from Mercer's server log sat at the center of the conference-room screen. Freya had repeated the date from memory before Mercer showed his records, which made the match harder to dismiss as suggestion. Still, Louis refused to call it proof of anything supernatural.

Mercer explained that at 11:47 p.m. his time, someone accessed the final Gentle Devotion narrative from an isolated archive associated with Adrian's old Northwind environment. The user credentials belonged to Julian Cross, despite Julian having been dead for years.

Derek immediately suspected copied credentials. Mercer agreed. Old accounts were sometimes preserved because deleting them could break legacy systems. Anyone with administrative access might have used Julian's login.

The file was opened, copied, and closed. No destination survived in the logs.

Freya remembered seeing the edited epilogue in her previous world shortly afterward. The platform had displayed an update notice, and the strange sentence about the wrong person waking up had appeared beneath the ending.

Nadia compared Mercer's copy with her own old narrative. The accessed file contained Julian's sentence in a metadata note, not in the story itself. Whoever transformed it into the web novel could have moved that sentence into the visible text.

That explained the source of the line but not the bridge between worlds.

Mercer wanted to explore the anomaly immediately. Freya stopped him. "You already treated me like a failed model. I'm not becoming your next research project."

He apologized again and offered only technical records from then on.

Louis asked the practical question: who possessed administrative access at 11:47?

Mercer named four accounts: his own, Adrian's security administrator, Thomas Grant's technical liaison, and a dormant recovery account controlled by the Northwind foundation.

Derek began verifying each.

Mercer had been logged into another system at the time, though that did not completely clear him. Thomas's liaison had died months earlier. Adrian's administrator remained unidentified behind a contractor alias.

The recovery account was stranger. Its authentication token had been generated physically from a device stored in Julian Cross's sealed archive.

Miriam Cole confirmed the token device had disappeared during an archive inventory years ago.

Nadia looked disturbed. "Julian kept that device in his desk safe."

Freya asked when it vanished.

Miriam checked old records.

The missing-device report was filed on the same date as the server access.

Someone had entered the foundation archive, taken Julian's authentication token, opened the Gentle Devotion file, and apparently vanished without triggering any later use.

Derek requested the old visitor log.

Only one visitor had signed in that evening.

The name was fake.

But the security photograph still existed.

When Miriam enlarged it, Freya did not recognize the woman.

Nadia did.

Her voice dropped to a whisper. "That's Julian's daughter, Claire."

Freya insisted that the matching timestamp be recorded exactly as a correlation, not a conclusion. Mercer seemed almost disappointed by her caution. She reminded him that his fascination with unexplained data was precisely what had allowed him to treat people as experiments before. If they ever found an answer, she wanted it to survive skepticism rather than depend on excitement.

Freya insisted that the matching timestamp be recorded exactly as a correlation, not a conclusion. Mercer seemed almost disappointed by her caution. She reminded him that his fascination with unexplained data was precisely what had allowed him to treat people as experiments before. If they ever found an answer, she wanted it to survive skepticism rather than depend on excitement.

Freya insisted that the matching timestamp be recorded exactly as a correlation, not a conclusion. Mercer seemed almost disappointed by her caution. She reminded him that his fascination with unexplained data was precisely what had allowed him to treat people as experiments before. If they ever found an answer, she wanted it to survive skepticism rather than depend on excitement.