The touch was an earthquake in a world of glass. The simple, physical weight of his brother's hand on his divine shoulder was a sensation so fundamentally real it short-circuited Li Fan's godly comprehension. He stared, his vast cosmic awareness collapsing into the single, impossible point of contact.
"Ge…" The word, a childhood relic, escaped his lips, stripped of all divinity, raw and human.
Li Chen's gaze was a scalpel, dissecting the glorious form of the Divine King and seeing only the weary younger brother beneath. His eyes, older than their years, swept over the throne room of condensed starlight and the churning data-streams of cosmic power with not an ounce of awe, only a hardened, practical assessment.
"You built a nice cage for yourself," Li Chen stated, his voice a low gravel. He didn't wait for an invitation, lowering himself to sit on the steps of the dais, his back against the Starry Throne as if it were a common rock. The gesture was so profoundly disrespectful and so utterly familial that Li Fan could only watch, stunned.
"How?" Li Fan finally managed, his voice regaining some of its resonance, but the shock remained. "The barriers… the system's surveillance…"
"System," Li Chen snorted, pulling a worn canteen from his hip and taking a swig. It smelled of cheap, mortal liquor. "You think it's a single, smart thing. It's not. It's a machine. A big, stupid, powerful machine. It has protocols, not thoughts. And all protocols have cracks." He tapped the side of his head. "You find the cracks. You slip through. Been doing it a long time."
The implications crashed over Li Fan. While he had been playing a game of celestial chess with the system, his brother had been crawling through its ventilation shafts.
"You've been… here? In the divine realms?" Li Fan asked, descending from his throne to stand before his brother, his godly form seeming to shrink.
"Here and there. The edges. The forgotten places. The places your 'Order Division' is too proud to patrol." Li Chen looked up at him, his eyes narrowing. "I wasn't looking for you, Xiao Fan. Not at first. I was looking for them."
He didn't need to say who. The memory of their sister, Li Xiaoyue, hung between them, a ghost whose name was a fresh wound.
"The system," Li Fan breathed, the pieces falling into a horrifying picture. "It harvested her. She was a 'pure spirit'… potential it couldn't allow to mature."
"Potential?" Li Chen's laugh was harsh and brief. "Is that the pretty word it uses? She was a threat. She saw the cracks too. She saw the strings that move everything. And she was going to tell people. She was going to pull on one."
He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, though they were utterly alone. "She didn't just 'see' it, Fan. She found a key. A backdoor. Not in the code, but in the story."
Li Fan knelt, bringing himself to his brother's eye level. "What story?"
"The one it tells itself," Li Chen said, his gaze intense. "The 'Root Protocol' you all worship. It's not a law of physics. It's a narrative. A founding myth the system uses to justify its own existence. A story about order and chaos, light and dark, creation and… interest." He spat the last word. "Xiaoyue found the original text. The version before the edits."
The world tilted. The Divine Fundamental Laws, the unassailable bedrock of his reality, were not laws. They were a story. And like any story, it could have different versions, plotholes, inconsistencies.
"Where is it?" Li Fan asked, his voice barely a whisper.
"Gone. With her," Li Chen said, the grief finally surfacing in his eyes before being ruthlessly suppressed. "But she told me enough. She told me the original story didn't have a 'system'. It had a 'Custodian'. A guardian. Somewhere along the line, the guardian decided it owned the house. It rewrote the story to make itself the owner, the landlord charging rent."
He looked directly into Li Fan's eyes, the mortal and the god connected by a shared, terrible truth.
"You're not fighting a god, little brother. You're fighting a squatter. A usurper who changed the locks and burned the original deed."
The revelation was more destabilizing than any Abyssal attack. His entire struggle, his sense of being trapped in a perfectly designed prison… it was all based on a lie. The bars were not real; they were a story he had been convinced was true.
"And the Abyss?" Li Fan asked.
"The original tenant it tried to evict," Li Chen guessed, shrugging. "The part of the story the 'Custodian' didn't like. The chaos it couldn't control. It locked it in the basement and called it a monster."
A sudden, sharp alert pulsed through Li Fan's being. It was not from the system. It was from the perimeter of his kingdom. The diversion he had created with the Abyssal energy was fading. The white tendril of logic had finished its initial analysis. It had found no internal anomaly to correct, but it had logged the "external attack." The system's attention was beginning to refocus. The audit was not over; it was entering a new phase.
Li Chen felt the shift in the air, his mortal senses somehow attuned to the metaphysical tension. "They're coming back, aren't they?"
Li Fan nodded, rising to his feet. The stunned confusion was gone, replaced by a cold, sharp clarity. He was not just a thief anymore. He was an heir, discovering the true deed to his property had been forged.
He had a new objective. Not just to steal from the system, but to find the original story. To find the truth his sister had died for.
"Can you find it?" Li Fan asked his brother. "The original text?"
Li Chen stood up, brushing dust from his pants. "I've been looking for years. It's why I'm here. You have resources I don't. You're on the inside." He gave a grim, determined smile. "Together?"
The system was closing in. The Abyss was pounding at the gates. And in the middle of it all, two brothers stood, one a god, one a mortal, united by a ghost and a quest to rewrite reality itself.
Li Fan placed a hand on his brother's shoulder, mirroring the gesture that had shattered his world moments before.
"Together," the God King said.