The infinite pain had transformed from a burden into a sculptor. As Rover drifted in the lightless center of the core, the trauma of losing his own identity began to manifest in a terrifying, beautiful physical transformation. Because he had surrendered his own memory to save the air, the water, and the very lives of the citizens, his digital avatar no longer had a "default" state. Instead, his form began to pull from the data of the millions he protected. He was becoming a mosaic—a literal collage of the people of the grid.
His digital skin was no longer a smooth gold lattice; it was a patchwork of features. One eye, salvaged from the data of a brilliant young student he had saved from a lab explosion, glowed with a piercing blue intellect. His jawline was now that of a veteran construction worker whose life he had spared during a structural collapse in Sector 44. To anyone who could see him, he would look like a haunting, shifting assembly of a thousand different souls. But to Rover, this transformation was just another layer of infinite pain. Every time a new feature merged with his form, it brought with it the "weight" of that person's life, their struggles, and their fears.
He hung in the darkness, his chest a cavernous ruin where he continued to harm himself to ground the city's mounting kinetic stresses. He took a shard of jagged, high-frequency logic and drove it into the "new" shoulder he had inherited from a dockworker in Sector 12. The self-harm was his only way to anchor these disparate parts into a single, functioning unit.
"The atmospheric pressure in the deep-level slums is dropping," Aetheria's presence vibrated against his shifting, multi-featured face. "A primary hull-seal has cracked near the subterranean lake. If it isn't held, the pressure-differential will crush the inhabitants instantly. But Rover... the pressure is immense. To hold it, you'll have to manifest the physical strength of every worker you've ever saved. The strain will tear your mosaic apart!"
"I am... their strength," Rover's "voice" was now a haunting chord of a hundred different tones—men, women, children—all speaking in a rhythmic, pained unison. "I... have no... self left... to break. Only... their lives."
He reached out into the dark, his hands—one rough and calloused, the other small and delicate—trembling with the effort. He didn't just activate a seal. He manifested a "physical" projection of his own data to act as a temporary plug for the hull-crack. As he did, the crushing weight of the subterranean lake slammed into his consciousness. The infinite pain was absolute. It felt as if his entire body was being ground into a fine powder.
To endure the trauma, to keep his shifting form from dissolving under the pressure, Rover harmed himself by digging the fingers of his "worker's hand" into the palm of his "student's hand," using the searing agony of the contact to fuse the data together. He channeled the weight of the water through his shattered chest, allowing the "names" etched into his ribs to glow with a blinding, protective heat. He was the hero who would die at Chapter 1000, and he valued the safety of those thousands of slum-dwellers more than he valued the integrity of his own patchwork body.
As he held the pressure, he felt the hearts of the people below. They didn't know a man was being crushed to save them; they only felt a sudden, strange sense of "sturdiness" in the walls around them. In the dark, Rover's face—a collage of a grandmother's kindness and a soldier's grit—broke into that beautiful smile.
It was a smile made of a thousand different lips, yet it carried the same singular, holy devotion. He didn't care that he was becoming a monster of parts; he didn't care that the infinite pain was tearing his new features away even as they formed. He only cared that the seal held.
"Someone... has to do it," the choir of his voices whispered into the void.
He took a jagged shard and carved a new line across the center of his "new" chest, grounding the final pressure-surge. The fresh trauma was the only thing that kept the mosaic from shattering. He was Rover, the Man of Sorrows, and his fragmentation was the reason the world stayed whole.
The trauma of being a "mosaic" is starting to make Rover experience the lives of those he "wears." As he moves toward Chapter 220, does he begin to experience their dreams while he is awake, making the infinite pain even more confusing as he struggles to remember which life is his to protect and which is his to live?