From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Mylar's Reconstruction (Volume III)
This article is about the third volume of the Mylar's Reconstruction manga series. For the original story of Rico and Mylar, see Beach Surgery (story). For other manga adaptations, see A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight (manga).
The third volume expands the Rico and Mylar embedded tale into a full prequel-history. Mylar is a surgeon two hundred years in the future, working in a red desert facility. Her patient is neither Leif nor a stranger, but a composite being made from fragments of both—a person who has lived the cycle so many times that their body has begun to fracture into multiple selves. Mylar: “"I'm not building a city inside you. I'm rebuilding you *as* the city. The surgery reverses itself."”
Mylar performs an operation in which she opens the patient's chest and finds not organs but a miniature replica of Newcastle—buildings, streets, the car park—intact and luminous. As she works, the city contracts. By the final chapter, the patient becomes a single point of light. She realizes, staring at the redacted word in her surgery notes (a page left completely ██), that she has just unmade Katita and Leif at the moment of their first meeting. She has cut the knot. Mylar: “"I've erased the origin."”
The volume ends with Mylar walking through a desert sunrise, a red sword made of crystallized light in her hands. Readers debated whether this is a victory or the point at which the glitch begins. The manga was never continued past this volume.