The last chime of the midnight bell dissolved into the silence of the ancient temple, its resonance swallowed by the dust of centuries. Wang Chuan stood alone in the cavernous hall, his breath misting in the frigid air. Before him, the colossal statue of a forgotten deity gazed into the void, its features eroded by time, yet its presence an immutable weight upon the world.
He was here to record. As the last Keeper of the Unwritten Chronicles, it was his duty to inscribe the fading echoes of divinity before they vanished into oblivion. But as his fingers traced the cold stone of the altar, a tremor passed through him—not of the earth, but of the soul.
A memory, sharp and clear as fractured crystal, pierced the veil of his mortality.
Not a memory. An echo.
He saw a citadel of swirling stardust, its spires piercing the heavens. He felt the fabric of reality yield to his will, weaving laws from thought and breathing life into nascent suns. The taste of creation was on his tongue, sweet and terrifying.
Godhood.
The vision shattered, leaving him gasping, his knuckles white where they gripped the stone. The musty scent of the temple was now an affront, the confines of his flesh a prison. The echo was not a mere whisper from the past; it was a summons. A debt, incurred in a lifetime beyond time, remained unpaid.
And the cosmos, patient and relentless, had begun its collection.