Silence.
After Beethoven, the System Space was utterly still.
No echoes, no instruments, no light...just the faint, rhythmic pulse of his own breathing.
For the first time in what felt like years, Rex couldn't hear anything.
Then, very softly, a single note floated through the dark.
It wasn't piano, or strings, or any instrument he could name. It was closer to a human hum: fragile, wavering, real.
He turned, and the world changed again.
He stood on a moonlit shore, the sand cool beneath his feet. The waves rolled in slow, lazy arcs, each one humming a faint melody. A woman sat on a rock nearby, singing softly to the tide.
Her voice was raw, unpolished...like truth before someone tried to refine it.
"Music begins here," she said, not stopping her song. "Before instruments, before notation. It starts in the throat, in the breath. In grief and longing."
The system labeled her simply:
[Sappho: Module 4: The Lyric and the Soul]
