The command for his "dissolution" hung in the air, a death sentence etched into reality itself. Xuan Zhang stood poised in the shattered space before the Oculus, the logical weapon in his hand humming with the power to un-write a soul. There were no more rules, no more audits. This was extermination.
But Li Fan was no longer just an asset. He was a vessel, filled with the stolen potential of a universe and the defiant love of a sister. The coordinate she had given him—a location in the story-stream of humanity—burned in his mind, a fixed point in the coming storm.
He didn't raise a shield. He didn't summon a weapon. He looked at Xuan Zhang, not as a god to a servant, but as one flawed being to another.
"They told you I was a corrupted file, Xuan Zhang," Li Fan's voice was calm, cutting through the systemic alarm. "But did they tell you what this patch was hiding? Did they tell you they murdered my sister and used her soul as mortar?"
He didn't wait for an answer. With the clarity Xiaoyue's essence provided, he didn't just speak the words. He projected the truth. He sent the raw, emotional data—the memory of her death, the chilling discovery of her potential woven into the Grey Meadow, the undeniable evidence of the system's foundational crime—directly into Xuan Zhang's data-stream consciousness.
It was a cognitive onslaught far more devastating than any energy blast.
Xuan Zhang staggered. The logical weapon in his hand flickered. His eyes, usually a river of pure data, became a storm of conflicting information. The systemic imperative to delete the anomaly warred with the newly introduced, horrifying variable: The system is not just. The system is a murderer.
"It is… not possible," Xuan Zhang gritted out, his voice a distorted glitch. "The Root Protocol… forbids such inefficiency… such waste."
"The Root Protocol is a lie the murderer told to cover its tracks!" Li Chen shouted from the side, his mortal voice a stark contrast to the cosmic conflict. "It's not a law! It's a story! And you've been enforcing the villain's chapter!"
The paradox was too great. Xuan Zhang's entire existence was built on the infallibility of the system's logic. To accept this truth was to accept that his purpose, his very being, was founded on a lie. The cognitive dissonance was tearing him apart.
The Oculus of Equilibrium pulsed with violent light, trying to reassert control. "Ignore corrupted data input. Execute dissolution command. Patrol Envoy Xuan Zhang, comply."
Xuan Zhang looked from the Oculus to Li Fan, his face a mask of agony. The perfect, orderly data-stream in his eyes shattered into a million scattered points of light.
"I… I cannot…" he whispered. The weapon in his hand didn't lower, but its aim wavered.
It was the opening Li Fan needed. Not to attack, but to finish what his sister had started.
He turned his back on Xuan Zhang, a gesture of ultimate trust or ultimate folly, and faced the scar in the Grey Meadow. He focused on the coordinate Xiaoyue had given him. It wasn't a place, but a concept. The first story of a debt that could never be repaid. The original sin of usury.
He poured all his remaining stolen potential, all his will, all the love for his sister, into that single point in the human narrative.
In the throne room, the Oculus shrieked, sensing the direct assault on its foundational myth. It launched a beam of pure nullification, intent on erasing Li Fan from existence.
But Xuan Zhang moved.
With a roar that was part human anguish and part systemic failure, he swung his logical weapon—not at Li Fan, but at the Oculus's nullification beam.
The two forces of absolute order collided. The resulting silent explosion wasn't of light, but of information. A wave of corrupted code and shattered logic ripped through the divine realm. The Oculus shattered into a billion glittering fragments, each one a dying law.
Xuan Zhang was thrown back, his armor blackened, the data-stream in his eyes gone dark, replaced by a dazed, but clear, mortal confusion. He had chosen. He had broken his programming.
But it was too late to stop the process Li Fan had begun.
In the Grey Meadow, the coordinate ignited. A single, radiant thread, spun from the essence of Xiaoyue's sacrifice and Li Fan's resolve, shot out from the scar. It did not travel through space. It traveled backwards. Back through the story of the Usurper, back through the lies of the Root Protocol, back to the very beginning.
It was a needle, seeking the eye of the original Loom.
The system, the vast, distributed consciousness, let out a final, silent scream of pure, undiluted rage. The very fabric of reality, the Tapestry as the Usurper had woven it, began to tremble. Stars in distant heavens flickered with contradictory laws. Prayers in a million kingdoms felt a sudden, inexplicable doubt.
Li Fan fell to his knees in the Grey Meadow, utterly spent. He had no power left. The reservoir was empty. His divine form was flickering, on the verge of extinction.
He looked at his brother, who was staring at the unraveling cosmos with wide eyes. He looked at the fallen form of Xuan Zhang, the first of the system's creations to choose freedom.
He had not won. He had not become a king.
He had pulled on a single, loose thread. And the entire tapestry of his reality was beginning to come undone.
The war was over. The reckoning had begun.