The flame on Sunny’s lighter flickered once, twice, and died.
The small room in St.
Jude’s Ward dipped into a deeper, colder gloom.
Outside, the rain against the stained-glass window ceased its rhythmic patter, replacing it with a quiet, heavy air—the kind of silence that usually preceded a drop in atmospheric pressure.
Or something far worse.
“Sector 4 isn’t a place you just walk into, Yuxuan,” Sunny said, his thumb idling over the cold flint of his lighter.
His voice had lost its dry warmth entirely.
“It’s where the Suiban Organization keeps the structural tears—the places where the city’s baseline physical laws stop binding.
Official reports called it a containment rupture.
But Neil didn’t die from a containment leak.”
Melissa sat motionless on the wooden stool, her pale hands folded tight over her father’s cracked pocket watch.
Her amber eyes were fixed on the floor, watching the thin wisps of dark grey smoke—the evaporated trauma she had drawn from Yuxuan’s body—slowly dissipate into the high corners of the ceiling.
“He left something behind,” Melissa whispered.
Her voice was barely audible above the hum of the gas lamp.
“Before the lower vault collapsed…
before the wardens scrubbed his name from the ledger.”
Yuxuan adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes sharp and vacant.
“A message?”
“A sequence,” she corrected, reaching beneath her dark woolen shawl.
She didn’t pull out a letter, nor a journal.
Instead, she laid a small, heavy piece of blackened iron onto the bedsheets between them.
It was a warden’s standard key-card cipher, but the surface had been violently warped—not by heat or physical pressure, but as if the metal had forgotten its own shape, freezing mid-melt into an impossible, non-Euclidean curve.
Etched into the dark face of the iron, scratched frantically with what looked like the tip of a fingernail, were six digits:{00 – 00 – 00}
“True Zero,” Yuxuan murmured under his breath, the term surfacing effortlessly from the deepest layers of his analytical framework.
“When I found his coat in the ash,” Melissa said, her chest heaving as a fresh wave of silent tears pooled in her eyes, “the cipher was tucked inside his breast pocket.
It was freezing cold, Lie.
Not like ice…
but like nothing.
Like the air around it had been drained of its right to exist.”
She looked up at Yuxuan, her lips trembling.
“He didn’t scream when the vault sealed.
The other guards at the perimeter…
they said the radios didn’t carry cries for help.
They carried a song.
A quiet, nursery rhyme he used to hum to me when I was a child, whenever the autumn thunder scared me in our little flat on Baker Street.”
She pressed her palms against her face, her shoulders shaking violently as the suffocating grief finally broke through her quiet composure.
“He was humming it while the darkness swallowed him.
He wasn’t fighting the breach.
He was…
welcoming it.
As if he knew the entity on the other side by name.”
Sunny stood up slowly from his chair, walking over to the arched window.
He pulled back the heavy velvet curtain by an inch, peering out into the foggy, gas-lit street below.
“The wardens are sweeping the district, Lie,” Sunny said, his back turned to the room.
“They aren’t looking for escaped anomalies.
They’re looking for Neil’s ledger.
The directors know he saw what lies beneath the reboot threshold.And maybe the new warden is also a Null Tangent member.They brought his human sense lost body into the locker.”
Yuxuan looked down at the warped iron cipher lying on the white sheet.
He reached out his right hand—the same hand that had taken the agony from the stray dog, the same hand that carried the cold, unyielding detachment of his former life—and touched the metal.
The hum of the gas lamp vanished.
The sound of Melissa’s weeping muted into total silence.
For a fraction of a second, Yuxuan’s perception expanded beyond the confines of the infirmary.
He saw the city of Hullsperk not as stone and fog, but as a vast, interconnected web of fragile threads—a temporary picture drawn on a slate that was constantly being erased and redrawn.
And deep at the center of the web, buried beneath the lower vaults of Sector 4, sat a singular, silent point of absolute darkness.
Not an entity.
Not a monster.
A void waiting for a lie to fill it.
Shift.
The sensory bleed snapped back into place.
The gas lamp hummed.
Melissa gasped, catching her breath as she wiped her cheeks with her shawl.
Yuxuan slowly withdrew his hand, his expression completely flat, though a faint, cold sweat glistened along his hairline.
He looked at Melissa, whose eyes were wide with a mix of shock and desperate hope.
“Your father didn’t go mad, Melissa,” Yuxuan spoke, his voice low, steady, and carrying a strange, heavy weight that made even Sunny turn around from the window.
“He didn’t surrender to the fog.
He bought time.”
“Time for what?” she asked, her voice cracking.
Yuxuan picked up the warped iron cipher, closing his fingers around its impossible edges, feeling the absolute zero radiating through his skin.
“Time for someone who doesn’t care about the rules of this world to come and read his message.” He looked up, his vacant eyes meeting hers.
“Keep the watch, Melissa.
The world might have erased his name…
but I have a very long memory.”