The Denbergh house was quiet, enveloped in the heavy, suffocating stillness that had settled over it ever since the funeral.
Downstairs, the faint, rhythmic ticking of the hallway clock was the only sound piercing the gloom, counting down moments in a world that felt increasingly fragile.
In his small room on the second floor, Zhou Yuxuan sat at a narrow wooden desk.
The air in the room was cool and damp, carrying the faint scent of rain and wet asphalt from the street outside.
A single desk lamp cast a pool of warm, amber light over the dark grain of the wood, illuminating the object resting in front of him: a thick, leather-bound volume handed to him earlier by Sheren.
On its spine, embossed in faded gold lettering that caught the low light, were four words: NS BEYOND INFINITY.
Beneath them, in a smaller, starker script, was the name of the author: Smith Zero.
Yuxuan stared at the cover for a long time, his fingers hovering just above the worn leather.
His mind, usually a fortress of cold logic and sharp observation, felt burdened.
He had spent his first days in this city trying to map its physical realities—its gloomy skies dominated by the pale sun Luxius, its strange European architecture, its police hierarchy, and the brutal mechanics of its underworld.
But as he looked at the book, he knew that the answers to Hullsperk did not lie in its streets.
They lay in the theoretical framework of the man who had laid its invisible foundations.
He took a slow, deep breath, reached out, and opened the cover.
The pages were made of a heavy, textured parchment, yellowed at the edges.
The handwriting inside was precise, almost mathematical, filled with complex diagrams, geometrical shapes, and dense paragraphs of prose.
Yuxuan pulled the lamp closer, leaned forward, and began to read.
Section I: The Geometry of the Vessel
“To understand the nature of our existence, one must first abandon the primitive illusion of an expanding universe.
Space does not stretch outward into an endless, empty void.
Rather, reality expands inward, constructing itself through infinite, self-contained layers.
Imagine a series of vessel containers, each nested flawlessly inside another.
What an observer inside a vessel perceives as the edge of the cosmos is merely the interior wall of the host vessel enveloping them.
Because these vessels are arranged in a state of absolute recursion, any attempt to reach the ‘end’ of space will merely bend the traveler back into the origin point of the next inner layer.
You do not travel forward into the unknown; you loop inward into the same continuous architecture.”
Yuxuan paused, his index finger resting on a detailed diagram of concentric circles, each ring etched with fine, microscopic equations.
He closed his eyes, visualizing the lift in the Suiban headquarters—the European-style cage that had lowered him and Sheren through endless, unnumbered floors, descending into a depth that logically should have extended far below the bedrock of the city.
The lift wasn’t just moving through a building, Yuxuan realized, a cold shiver running down his spine.
It was traversing through nested vessels.
If space folded inward, then Hullsperk was not just a city located on a coast.
It was a localized vessel—a closed pocket of reality designed to hold a specific set of variables.
The endless fog at the End Boundary, the fortress housing the correctional facility, the strange sky…
they were not natural phenomena.
They were the physical walls of the container.
He turned the page.
Section II: The True Zero Paradigm
“If the vessel represents the rendering of dynamic data—matter, light, time, and consciousness—then what lies beyond the outermost boundary?
It is True Zero.
True Zero is not merely ‘nothingness’ in the physical sense, for physical nothingness is still a spatial concept.
True Zero is a dimensionally active void.
It holds the structural dimensions of reality, yet contains no information, no matter, and no sequence.
Consider an illustration rendered on the display of a device.
The image contains boundless detail, vibrant colors, and defined boundaries.
To the entities inside the image, their world is absolute.
But the display itself—and the power that clears the screen—is the True Eraser.
True Zero is the frame and the eraser.
When the limit is reached, True Zero absorbs the vessel, clearing the canvas so that the cycle may begin anew.”
Yuxuan leaned back in his chair, the wood creaking softly in the quiet room.
He adjusted his glasses, his eyes wide as he digested the text.
A display and an eraser.
He thought of his own theories, of the cosmological models he had pondered in quiet moments before coming to this place.
Smith Zero had articulated it with terrifying clarity.
The Big Bang was not a singular, triumphant birth of the universe out of nowhere.
It was a System Reboot.
It was the moment when True Zero swallowed a saturated vessel, erased its corrupted data, and reset the clock to zero.
A reboot system…
Yuxuan whispered to himself, the words tasting like ash.
If reality was subjected to periodic reboots, then everything inside it—history, memories, human lives, grief—was temporary data.
When the reboot occurred, the universe didn’t die; it simply cleared its memory banks.
The subtle feelings of déjà vu, the inexplicable shadows that lingered in the corners of Hullsperk, the strange consistency of human suffering…
they were ghost data.
Leftover remnants from previous cycles that had not been fully scrubbed by True Zero.
He felt a sudden, sharp ache in his chest as he thought of Ronald.
Ronald, who was currently sleeping in the next room, broken by the loss of Moon Will.
Ronald, who believed that his grief was a personal, sacred tragedy.
Section III: The Finite Infinity Paradox
Yuxuan turned to the next chapter, where the handwriting became tighter, more urgent, as if the author were writing against a ticking clock.
“A common fallacy among theoretical observers is the belief that a system must be either finite or infinite.
They fail to grasp the Dual State.
A vessel within the NS framework is simultaneously strictly finite and endlessly boundless.
Look to the nature of a radioactive isotope: its physical mass is finite, measurable down to the exact milligram, yet its decay curve extends infinitely into time, a perpetual approach toward a zero it never truly touches.
So too is our world.
Measured from the outside—from the perspective of True Zero—the vessel has fixed, unyielding boundaries.
But from the inside, the internal recursion creates a localized infinity.
An observer moving through the vessel will find that the horizon constantly recedes, the corridors endlessly elongate, and the mathematical possibilities never terminate.
It is a finite box holding an infinite loop.”
Yuxuan rested his forehead in his hand, staring at the words A finite box holding an infinite loop.
It explained the Suiban Organization’s headquarters.
It explained why Sheren had stated, without a hint of irony, that the building contained infinity floors.
To an outsider walking past on Baker Street, the building was a modest two-story European structure.
But once inside, once you crossed the threshold into the internal geometry of the vessel, the space expanded into an infinite sequence of corridors, sub-levels, and hidden halls.
“They aren’t just operating a detective agency,” Yuxuan muttered into the empty room.
“They are operating within the seams of the architecture itself.”
He flipped through several more pages, skimming complex mathematical proofs that demonstrated how light curved when passing through folded space-time, and how emotional resonance could create “Resonance Events”—moments where tragedy in one layer of the vessel caused a mirroring event in another.
Then, near the middle of the book, he reached a section titled in dark, heavy ink: The Null Tangent and the Anomaly.
Section IV: Ghost Data and Absolute Erasure
“When an entity inside the vessel dies by natural or physical means, their matter returns to the vessel’s system, preserved for the next reboot.
But there exists a secondary mechanism—a cold, deliberate protocol executed by forces operating outside the standard loop.
When a subject is targeted for Null Tangent erasure, they are not merely killed; their structural footprint is excised from the vessel’s current ledger.
Their history, their connections, their very presence in the memory of the vessel begins to dissolve.
They become ‘Ghost Data.’ Those left behind will feel a profound, hollow void—a bleeding wound in their consciousness—yet they will struggle to comprehend why the void exists.
The agents of this erasure operate under systematic routines, moving through the sectors like a ticking clock.
They are the executioners of the vessel’s equilibrium, ensuring that no anomaly threatens the stability of the loop.”
Yuxuan’s breathing slowed.
The image of the ruined sector in Hullsperk flashed vividly in his mind.
He saw the concrete stage again.
He saw the gelatinous, hummed machinery.
He saw the woman—Moon Will—bound and blindfolded with black cloth, screaming into the damp night air.
He heard the cold, metallic declaration of the man in the skull mask: “Caravan of Execution is accomplished for this month!”
The Caravan of Execution was not a rogue syndicate of murderers.
It was the physical manifestation of the Null Tangent protocol.
It was the vessel’s maintenance crew, systematically purging anomalies and executing subjects to maintain the “Finite Infinity” equilibrium.
And Moon Will had been caught in their gears.
Yuxuan closed the book with a heavy, muted thud.
He sat back, staring at the dark leather cover in the dim light of the lamp.
The silence in his room felt different now.
It was no longer just the quiet of an old house at night; it was the suffocating silence of a containment unit.
He looked around at the wooden walls, the single window showing the grey, rain-slicked glass, the simple furniture.
Everything looked solid, real, and permanent.
But according to Smith Zero, it was all an illusion rendered on the surface of a vessel that could be cleared at any moment by True Zero.
He stood up, walked slowly to the window, and rested his hand against the glass.
The chill of the Hullsperk night seeped through his skin.
Down on the street, the dim glow of the gas lamps flickered faintly against the wet cobblestones, casting long, distorted shadows that stretched toward the horizon.
Lie Longterm, he thought, remembering the alias he had taken at Suiban.
I chose the name ‘Lie’ because I felt this world was hiding something from me.
But the truth is far worse.
The world itself is the lie.
He thought of Ronald, sleeping down the hall, holding on to the memory of a woman whose head had been severed and left on a doorstep as a warning.
Ronald believed he was seeking justice against men.
He didn’t know that he was raging against the very laws of the universe he inhabited.
Yuxuan’s expression hardened.
The analytical detachment that usually defined him began to burn away, replaced by a cold, quiet resolve.
If Smith Zero was the architect who had documented the loop, and if the Caravan of Execution was the machine that enforced it, then Yuxuan would not simply be an observer.
He would not just be a Grade 8 Tuner filing reports for Suiban, nor a helpless witness to the cosmic reset.
He turned back to the desk, picked up the book, and carefully placed it inside his coat pocket.
Tomorrow, he and Sunny were heading to the Hullsperk Correctional Facility to interrogate inmate 489—Neil, the man linked to the Null Tangent dispute.
Neil held the next piece of the puzzle.
Neil had touched the seams of the vessel and survived.
Yuxuan switched off the desk lamp, plunging the room into shadow.
As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he looked out the window one last time toward the obscure sky, where the unseen black hole Xiphoenix hung somewhere in the void above the clouds.
“If this universe is an infinite picture inside a finite box,” Yuxuan whispered into the dark, “then I will find the hand holding the eraser…
and I will break its fingers.”
He read the book borrowed from his senior Sheren,next day after the meeting with Wilson.