The silence in the Hall of Arbitration was no longer peaceful. It was accusatory. Wang Chuan closed his eyes, not to rest, but to gaze inward, sifting through the infinite archives of his own divine memory. He sought the first memory, the cornerstone upon which all subsequent history was built. He found only a fog, thick and impenetrable, where a blazing sun of genesis should have been.
"It is not just the Scroll," he communicated to Wang You, a thread of unease weaving through his thought. "The erosion is within me as well. The memory of my own origin as a chronicler... it feels borrowed. Secondhand."
Across the cosmos, Wang You stood on a world he had shaped a millennium ago—a symphony of crystalline spires and rivers of liquid light. He reached out with his will, seeking to feel the vibrant, chaotic potential he had woven into its core. Instead, he felt only a perfect, static harmony. The planet was complete. It was finished. And in its finished state, it was, for the first time, mortal. Its end was now conceivable, because its capacity for true, unpredictable change was gone.
"We are managing a terminal patient, Chuan," Wang You's response was grim. "We stabilized the universe, but we sterilized it. We paid the debt of chaos with the currency of possibility."
Their combined awareness, vast enough to encompass countless galaxies, now focused on a single, insignificant point. A mortal scholar on a backwater world, who had dedicated his life to studying the myth-cycle of the "First Song," suddenly found he could no longer read the ancient texts he had deciphered a week prior. The letters were familiar, but their meaning had evaporated. He wept in his study, not out of frustration, but out of a profound, inexplicable grief for something he could no longer name.
There. The gods focused. This was the evidence. The erosion was not merely historical; it was phenomenological. It was actively unraveling the present by severing its connection to the past.
"The 'First Song' was the Primordial Divinity's act of creation," Wang Chuan realized, the truth dawning with cold clarity. "To forget the song is to unmake the singer. And when the singer is unmade..."
"...the song itself begins to fade from reality," Wang You finished. The artifact he had failed to create was unnecessary now. The density of Meaning was decreasing palpably, everywhere. The universe was becoming lighter, emptier. More silent.
They had traced the symptom to its source. The Debt of Silence was the universe slowly forgetting its own creator. And in doing so, it was losing the fundamental imperative to exist.
A new resolve hardened between them, a fusion of will that resonated through the foundations of reality. They could not merely guard what was left. They had to journey to the place before memory, to the edge of the fading echo, and reintroduce the universe to its own heart.
The next step was not preservation. It was resurrection. Their destination was not a place in space, but a point in the forgotten past. They would find the silence at the beginning of time, and they would break it.