The ninth bell didn't just toll.
It unmade the air.
The sound was a heavy, tectonic vibration that stripped the silver leafing from the Cathedral's pillars and turned the ancient marble into a fine, grey powder.
I felt the vibration in my marrow. It wasn't sound; it was a demand for silence.
The Grand Arbitrator had fallen to his knees, not in prayer, but in submission. The silver cane he had wielded as a symbol of Law lay in pieces, its shattered fragments dissolving into liquid ink.
"You've done it," the Arbitrator whispered, his voice trembling with a terrifying mix of awe and horror. "You've summoned the Scribe."
I didn't care about his titles.
I looked at my hand.
The eighth petal was no longer a mark. It was a wound.
The crimson light it emitted didn't illuminate the room; it stained it. Everything the light touched—the walls, the floor, even the air—began to bleed.
The "Law" of the Archive was a contract of order. My power was a requiem for that order.
"Ren, we have to move!" Jisoo's voice was a jagged edge of panic.
He was staring into a future that no longer had a horizon. His eyes, once a steady amber, were now swirling like a dying sun.
"The shadows… they're not just moving anymore," he gasped. "They're eating the light."
He was right.
Behind the bone throne, the darkness didn't just deepen. It solidified.
A hand emerged first.
It was twenty feet long, composed of thousands of thin, needle-like scrolls stitched together with black veins. Each finger ended in a quill made from the beak of a dead god.
This was the Curator of Scars.
The entity that wrote the contracts the Shinigami enforced.
If the Shinigami were the collectors, this thing was the Ledger itself.
It didn't have a face. Its head was a massive, rotating sphere of ink that pulsed with every toll of the bell.
*Gong.*
The tenth bell.
The floor beneath us buckled. Elena screamed as the marble turned into a viscous, tar-like substance that tried to pull her down.
I didn't think. I didn't have time to calculate.
I reached out with my crimson-stained arm and grabbed the air itself.
"Cease," I commanded.
The word felt like a mountain of ice sliding down my throat.
The Crimson Authority didn't subjugate the Scribe. It couldn't. This thing was beyond the concept of a "petty" death god.
Instead, I attacked the logic of the room.
I didn't tell the floor to stop being tar.
I told the room to forget what a floor was.
The space beneath Elena's feet shattered into a void of white noise. I lunged forward, catching her by the waist as she fell into the nothingness.
"Jisoo! Jump!"
He didn't hesitate. He dived into the fractured reality I had created.
The Curator of Scars let out a sound that I can only describe as the screech of a billion pens breaking at once.
The quill-fingers lashed out.
They didn't aim for my heart. They aimed for my hand.
They wanted the eighth petal.
I felt the quill-tip graze my shoulder.
It didn't cut the flesh. It wrote on it.
A searing heat erupted in my arm. I looked down and saw a line of black script carving itself into my skin.
[Property of the Void.]
"Not today," I hissed.
I slammed my palm against the writing, the crimson light of the petal clashing with the black ink of the Scribe.
The world turned white.
Then grey.
Then, the freezing, soot-filled rain of the city hit my face.
We were back in the alleyway of Sector 4.
The transition was so violent it felt like being reborn through a meat grinder. I collapsed into a pile of rusted scrap metal, my lungs burning, my vision a blur of static and red.
Elena was coughing beside me, her hands trembling as she felt her face, making sure she was still there.
Jisoo was standing a few feet away, leaning against a damp wall. He was staring at the sky.
The Archive's Cathedral wasn't there. It never had been, physically.
But the sky over the city was different.
The clouds were swirling in a perfect, geometric circle.
The Eye of the Archive was open.
"They're not going to stop," Jisoo said, his voice strangely calm.
I sat up, clutching my arm. The script the Scribe had written on me was still there, glowing with a dull, sickly light.
"They can't stop," I said, spitting blood into the mud. "I stole their pen."
I opened my hand.
In my palm, clutched tight, was one of the Scribe's quill-fingers. I had torn it away in the white-out.
It felt like holding a piece of absolute zero.
"You're insane," Elena whispered, her eyes wide with terror. "You didn't just escape. You robbed the Curator."
"He wanted a signature," I muttered, struggling to stand. "I gave him a divorce."
I looked at the quill. It was already changing. The black scroll-needles were uncurling, turning into a small, obsidian dagger that hummed with a low, funeral frequency.
A new Relic.
The Quill of the Unwritten.
"We need to leave the sector," I said, looking at the street.
The people who had been lobotomized by the Stone of Oblivion were still there. But they weren't standing still anymore.
They were turning.
Synchronized.
Ten thousand heads snapped toward our alleyway at the same time.
"The Archive is using them," Jisoo said, his amber eyes flaring. "They don't have memories anymore, so the Archive is filling the empty space with a single command."
*"Kill,"* a thousand voices whispered from the street.
It wasn't a shout. It was a soft, sibilant rustle, like dry leaves.
*"Kill… Kill… Kill…"*
The Hollows began to move. They didn't run; they walked with a terrifying, rhythmic pace.
"I can't kill them, Ren," Elena said, her voice breaking. "They're just… they're civilians."
"They're not civilians anymore," I said, the coldness of the eighth petal settling into my heart. "They're meat-puppets."
I looked at the obsidian dagger in my hand.
I could feel it pulse. It didn't want blood. It wanted stories.
"Jisoo, can you see a way out?"
He closed his eyes, his brow furrowing in concentration.
"The future is… it's like a broken mirror, Ren. I see a thousand versions of us dying in the next three minutes. I see the street turning into a river of blood. I see the Pale Watcher standing on every rooftop."
He opened his eyes, and for the first time, I saw a tear of amber liquid fall down his cheek.
"There is only one path that doesn't end in a pile of ash."
"Tell me."
"The Under-City. The tunnels beneath the old subway lines. The place where the contracts don't reach."
I nodded.
"Elena, can you move?"
She stood up, her jaw set in a hard line. The grey dust had settled on her skin like a permanent pallor, but her eyes were sharp.
"If I'm going to die, I'm doing it on my feet."
"We're not dying," I said, though I didn't believe it.
I stepped out of the alleyway.
The first of the Hollows was only ten feet away. It was an old man, his eyes milk-white, his mouth hanging open.
He lunged at me with a strength that shouldn't have been possible for a man of his age.
I didn't use the dagger. I didn't use the Requiem.
I simply stepped aside and shoved him into the wall.
"Don't touch them if you can help it," I warned. "Their skin is cold. The Archive is draining their life force to keep the connection open."
We began to run.
It was a nightmare of neon and grey.
Every street we turned into was filled with the same empty-eyed people. They blocked the roads. They crawled out of windows. They fell from fire escapes.
A sea of humanity, used as a human barrier.
I felt the eighth petal pulse again.
The crimson light was becoming more aggressive. It wasn't just staying in my arm anymore. It was creeping up my neck, a web of red veins that burned like acid.
I could hear a voice.
It wasn't the Shinigami. It wasn't the Scribe.
It was the Pale Watcher.
*"Eight petals for the king of nothing,"* the voice whispered, sounding like wind through a ribcage. *"Nine for the king of ghosts. Ten for the king of silence. Eleven for the king of dust."*
*"And twelve?"* I thought, my heart hammering against my ribs.
The voice chuckled.
*"Twelve for the one who pays for everyone."*
I stumbled, my vision flickering.
"Ren! Look out!"
A heavy-set man in a security uniform lunged at me from behind a parked car. He had a combat knife, and his movements were guided by a precision that was purely mechanical.
He was an Executioner-vessel.
The knife sliced through the air, inches from my throat.
I didn't have the luxury of mercy anymore.
I swung the obsidian dagger.
The blade didn't cut his flesh.
It passed through him like a shadow through smoke.
The man froze.
He didn't bleed. He didn't scream.
He simply dissolved into a cloud of black ink, his entire history—his childhood, his name, his sins—erased in a single heartbeat.
The dagger glowed with a dark, satisfied hum.
It had just eaten a man's soul.
I stared at the blade, a cold dread pooling in my stomach.
"Ren, keep moving!" Jisoo grabbed my arm, pulling me toward the entrance of the Iron Lung Terminal.
The gates were being swarmed.
Hundreds of Hollows were piling on top of each other, forming a wall of living flesh to block our escape.
"I can't clear that," Jisoo shouted over the rising din of the wind. "There are too many of them!"
I looked at the eighth petal.
I looked at the obsidian dagger.
Then I looked at the Pale Watcher.
He was standing on the roof of the terminal, his featureless white face tilted toward the storm.
He wasn't waiting for me to die.
He was waiting for me to choose.
I turned to Elena and Jisoo.
"Get behind me. Whatever happens… don't let go of my coat."
"Ren, what are you doing?" Elena asked, her voice trembling.
I didn't answer.
I closed my eyes and reached into the place where the Last Requiem lived.
It wasn't a song anymore.
It was a scream.
I didn't command the Hollows to move.
I didn't command the Archive to let us go.
I commanded myself to be the End.
"FORGET THE GATE!" I roared.
The eighth petal didn't just glow. It shattered.
The crimson light erupted in a violent shockwave, turning the rain into red steam.
The wall of people didn't die.
They simply ceased to be in our way.
Reality folded. For a split second, the terminal wasn't a building; it was a memory.
We sprinted through the gap, the world screaming around us.
We dove down the stairs of the subway, the darkness of the tunnels swallowing us whole.
The sounds of the city faded, replaced by the rhythmic dripping of water and the distant, hollow echo of our own breathing.
We stopped in the middle of a rusted track, miles beneath the surface.
I collapsed, the dagger clattering to the ground.
My arm was no longer black.
It was white.
Bone-white.
The skin had been bleached of all color, all life. It felt like a piece of dead wood attached to my shoulder.
The eighth petal was gone.
In its place was a jagged, bleeding hole in the shape of a lotus.
"We're safe," Elena whispered, sliding down the wall. "For now."
Jisoo didn't respond.
He was staring into the darkness of the tunnel ahead.
His eyes were no longer amber.
They were gone.
In their place were two burning, crimson petals.
"Jisoo?" I whispered, my voice failing.
He turned to look at me, and his smile was the coldest thing I had ever seen.
"The future didn't go away, Ren," he said, his voice echoing with a thousand different tones.
"It just moved into me."
I looked at my hand.
The hole where the eighth petal had been was closing.
But it wasn't growing new skin.
It was growing a ninth petal.
And it wasn't black.
It was the same bone-white as my arm.
The Watcher stepped out of the shadows at the end of the tunnel.
He was no longer twenty yards away.
He was standing right next to Jisoo.
"The ninth bell has finished tolling," the Watcher said, his voice finally clear and resonant.
"Now, the Sovereign begins his true reign."
I looked at the dagger, then at my friend who was no longer a friend, then at the creature that had been following me my whole life.
I realized then that the Archive wasn't the enemy.
They were just the appetizers.
The real dinner was about to begin.
And I was the only one on the menu.
I picked up the dagger and stood up, my white arm pulsing with a dead light.
"Fine," I said, the darkness of the tunnel closing in.
"Let's see who eats first."
But as I stepped forward, I heard a sound that made my blood turn to ice.
A baby crying.
In the middle of a dead tunnel.
And the sound was coming from inside the obsidian dagger.
The tenth petal was already screaming to be born.