The vision of the Tapestry faded, but the silent, shimmering truth of the Grey Meadow remained. They stood at a scar in reality, a place where the system's narrative patchwork was thin, and the older, frayed threads of the original story showed through. The weight of the discovery was immense, a compass needle finally settling after an eternity of spinning.
"The Weavers," Li Fan repeated, the word feeling both alien and deeply familiar on his divine tongue, like a childhood melody heard in a dream. "They didn't command. They maintained. They repaired." He looked at the empty space where the tangled threads had glimmered. "This… this wasn't an attack. It was a neglect. A part of the Tapestry the last Weaver failed to mend before the Usurper took over."
Li Chen nodded, his sharp, mortal eyes scanning the seemingly empty air as if he could still perceive the ghostly architecture. "And that," he said, pointing to the specific knot where his own fierce, new thread had plunged in, "is where Xiaoyue pulled. She wasn't trying to break it. She was trying to fix it. To reconnect a severed line."
The realization was a gut punch. His sister wasn't a random victim of a cosmic harvest. She had been a threat because she was a potential successor. A new Weaver, arising from an unexpected quarter, threatening to expose the Usurper's negligence and reclaim the Loom.
"The system didn't just harvest her potential," Li Fan said, his voice low and cold. "It performed a preemptive strike on a rival."
"Exactly," Li Chen's face was grim. "It saw a thread it couldn't control, a pattern it didn't authorize, and it cut it." He stepped forward, his focus intense on the scarred space. "But you can't just cut a thread in a tapestry this big. You can only hide the loose end. The energy, the meaning, the potential of that thread… it has to go somewhere. It doesn't just vanish."
A terrifying, brilliant possibility ignited in Li Fan's mind. The system was the ultimate accountant. It balanced its books with ruthless efficiency. If it had severed his sister's thread—a thread of immense potential—that potential had to have been logged, stored, or…
"Recycled," Li Fan breathed.
His divine consciousness, now attuned to the subtle frequencies of the Grey Meadow, reached out. He wasn't probing for power or faith. He was searching for a resonance. The unique, brilliant, and loving signature of his sister's soul. He filtered out the roaring torrent of his own Prayer's faith, the cold, static hum of the system, and the chaotic scream of the Abyss. He listened for the ghost of a single, stolen melody.
And in the silent heart of the Grey Meadow, he found it.
Not the soul itself, but an echo. A faint, crystalline imprint of pure potential, woven directly into the patch the system had used to cover its crime. It was like finding a single, perfect fingerprint pressed into the cement used to bury a victim. The system, in its haste to cover its tracks, had used the very substance of its victim as sealing material.
"Ge," Li Fan said, his voice trembling with a volatile mix of grief and fury. "It's here. A piece of her… her potential. The Usurper used it as mortar for its patch."
Li Chen's face went pale, then hardened into a mask of such profound, cold rage that the very air around him seemed to still. He didn't speak. He simply looked at Li Fan, and the command in his eyes was clear: Get it out.
This was beyond theft. This was exhumation.
Li Fan approached the scar. He raised his hands, not to summon destructive power, but with the delicate intention of a surgeon. He pushed his awareness into the system's patch, feeling the cold, rigid logic of its code. And there, tangled within it like a strand of gold in concrete, was the shimmering echo of Xiaoyue.
Touching it was agony. It was a memory of her laughter, her fierce intelligence, her unwavering love, all trapped and frozen. To extract it, he would have to carefully unravel the system's patchwork without triggering its defenses. It was defusing a bomb with his heart as the payload.
He began, his will a finer tool than it had ever been. He didn't break the code; he persuaded it. Using the stolen potential still left in his reservoir, he fed the system's patch a logical paradox, a narrative inconsistency—the story of a caretaker who destroys what it's meant to protect. The patch, a mindless piece of code, began to glitch, its integrity softening as it tried and failed to resolve the contradiction.
In that moment of softness, Li Fan reached in.
He did not pull. He called to it. With all the brotherly love he had sealed away for an eternity, he called her name, not as a god, but as the boy she had protected. "Xiaoyue."
The shimmering strand of potential stirred. It recognized him. With a soundless sigh of release, it slipped free from the crumbling patch.
It flowed into him, not as power, but as a gift. A wave of pure, untainted love and clarity filled his Divine Spark. It contained no words, only a profound sense of purpose and a single, burning piece of information—a coordinate. Not a place in space, but a location in the annals of forgotten human stories. The location of a "Narrative Shard" large enough to be a key.
The system's patch, now critically unstable, dissolved. The Grey Meadow seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, the silvery grass glowing with a soft, inner light for a moment before returning to its muted state.
But the collapse of the patch sent a shockwave through the system's foundational layer. This was not a missing decimal point in the ledger. This was a whole page being torn out.
An alarm screamed across the cosmos, a sound of pure, undiluted systemic rage.
In the throne room far away, the Oculus of Equilibrium didn't just reappear. It shattered into existence, fracturing the very space it occupied. Xuan Zhang stood before it, but he was different. His armor was scorched, his data-stream eyes were wild with conflicting inputs. He had been pulled from the Abyssal front, and he was holding a crackling, unstable data-spike—a weapon of pure logic.
"Asset Li-Fan-734!" His voice was a distorted shout, stripped of its usual calm. "You have compromised a foundational narrative integrity patch! This is not embezzlement! This is architectural sabotage! Stand down for immediate memory scour and structural dissolution!"
The final pretense was over. The system was no longer auditing its asset. It was coming to delete a virus.
Li Fan turned from the Meadow to face the storm, his brother at his side, and the warm, defiant echo of his sister burning like a star within him. He had his key. Now, he had to survive long enough to use it.