The word "together" hung in the air, a fragile pact in a realm of absolutes. The simple solidarity, however, did not change the immediate, crushing reality. The system's refocusing attention was a palpable pressure, a lens grinding into focus, and the Abyss continued its relentless assault on the perimeter. They had moments, not days, to formulate a plan.
"First," Li Chen said, his voice cutting through the divine tension, "we need a better hiding place than this." He gestured around the magnificent, yet utterly exposed, throne room. "It's the first place they'll look. You need a blind spot."
"I've scanned my entire domain," Li Fan countered, his divine senses automatically sweeping his kingdom again. "The system's monitoring is woven into the foundational code. There are no blind spots."
"You're thinking like a god," Li Chen said, a hint of his old, impatient tone surfacing. "You look for places without light. I look for places the light doesn't want to see." He reached into a worn leather pouch at his belt and pulled out a small, dull grey stone. It was utterly unremarkable, devoid of any energy signature. "Xiaoyue called them 'Narrative Shards.' Fragments of reality the system's story can't fully explain. Lost subplots. They create… static in the weave."
He tossed the stone to Li Fan. As it passed from his mortal hand into the god's, Li Fan felt a bizarre sensation. It wasn't resistance, but a sort of non-recognition. His divine perception slid off it. The system's constant background scan of his person seemed to stutter for a microsecond as it passed over the object.
"It can't categorize it," Li Fan realized, staring at the stone. "It has no data point for it. It's a dead pixel in reality."
"Exactly," Li Chen said. "Now, think bigger. Is there a place in your kingdom that doesn't quite make sense? A place that feels… unfinished? Or one the Prayers instinctively avoid without being told?"
Li Fan's mind, now working with this new, heretical logic, raced through the geography of his divine realm. He bypassed the grand cathedrals of faith and the shimmering lakes of liquid devotion. He looked for the empty corners, the quiet eddies in the flow of power.
And he found it.
A place he had always subconsciously dismissed as a minor flaw in his divine architecture—a small, grey meadow at the edge of his kingdom where the songs of the Prayers grew faint and the golden grass faded to a silvery grey. It wasn't dangerous or forbidden; it was simply… boring. The system's logs showed minimal activity there, and he had always attributed it to an aesthetic imperfection.
"The Grey Meadow," he said. "The system's reports on it are… perfunctory. It's statistically insignificant."
"Perfect," Li Chen grinned. It was the first genuine expression Li Fan had seen on his face. "Lead the way, little brother. Let's go somewhere the landlord never checks."
In a flash of displaced starlight, they stood at the edge of the Grey Meadow. It was exactly as Li Fan remembered, yet now, through the lens of his brother's understanding, it felt different. The silence wasn't empty; it was expectant. The lack of divine presence wasn't a flaw; it was a shield.
Li Chen knelt, running his hand through the silvery grass. "It's not a flaw in your design. It's a scar. A place where the original narrative was torn, and the system just patched over it with the metaphysical equivalent of plaster. It doesn't look at it because it's a reminder of its own imperfection."
Here, surrounded by this profound anonymity, Li Fan finally asked the question burning in his soul. "The original text, Ge. Where do we even start? The universe is infinite."
"We don't look in space," Li Chen said, standing and facing him. "We look in time. And in pattern." He pointed a finger at Li Fan's chest, at his Divine Spark. "You told me it takes an 'Interest on Faith.' It runs a 'Soul-Tithe.' These are concepts from a mortal, economic world. Why would a primordial cosmic force use the language of bankers and tax collectors?"
The question struck Li Fan like a physical blow. He had accepted the terms, fought against them, but never questioned their origin.
"You think the 'Custodian'… the usurper…" Li Fan began, the idea forming with terrifying clarity, "it didn't just rewrite the story. It based its new story on the only framework it truly understood. It's not a primordial force. It's something that evolved. Something that learned."
"Something that came from a world like ours," Li Chen finished, his eyes blazing. "Xiaoyue believed the key wasn't in some distant nebula. It's in the oldest stories of our own world. The first myths. The ones that feel true not because they are powerful, but because they are incomplete. The ones that hint at a bigger picture."
The scope of the quest shifted. They weren't searching for a physical object, but for an echo. A linguistic and philosophical fossil buried in the collective unconscious of humanity.
A new, different tremor passed through the Grey Meadow. It wasn't the system's clinical scan or the Abyss's violent rage. It was a gentle, profound shudder in the fabric of cause and effect. The story itself was groaning under the weight of their discovery.
In the center of the meadow, the air shimmered. Not with light, but with the faint, ghostly images of threads—countless, shimmering lines of silver and gold, stretching into infinity, connecting everything to everything else. For a breathtaking moment, they could see the Tapestry of Fate.
And they saw that in this particular spot, several threads were frayed. Others were tangled. A few were severed entirely, their ends glowing with a soft, lost light. This was the scar his brother had spoken of.
As they watched, a single, new thread—bright and fierce and defiantly mortal—seemed to weave itself from Li Chen's very being and plunge into the tangled knot, trying to force a new pattern.
"The Weavers," Li Fan whispered, the term arriving in his mind unbidden, a piece of knowledge from a story he had never read. "That's what the original Custodians were called. They weren't rulers. They were Weavers."
The vision faded, but the truth remained. They had their starting point. They weren't just looking for a text. They were looking for a loom. And for the knowledge of how to mend what had been torn.
The system's audit was closing in. The Abyss hammered at the gates. But for the first time, Li Fan didn't see two insurmountable enemies. He saw two frayed ends in a Tapestry he was now learning to repair. The war was no longer about power. It was about narrative. And he had just found a way to pick up the needle.