The path to the beginning of time was not a road of stars or a tunnel of light. It was a descent into the architecture of memory itself. The gods did not travel through space, but through the stratified layers of cosmic recollection, a landscape built from the solidified echoes of all that had ever been.
Wang Chuan led, his nature as a chronicler allowing him to navigate the treacherous currents of lapsed time. Around them, the memories of dead galaxies hung like frozen tapestries. The birth-cries of the first stars were preserved here as silent, radiant vibrations. But as they journeyed deeper, the vibrancy faded. The colors of the past bled into monochrome. The sounds became muffled, as if heard through a thickening wall.
"This is the atrophy," Wang Chuan observed, his form shimmering as he interfaced with the dying memories. "It is not random. It is a systematic unraveling, starting from the very oldest recollections and moving forward. A wave of oblivion."
Wang You followed, a bastion of pure will in the dissolving landscape. He felt the profound discomfort of a creator in a place where the act of creation was being systematically undone. He reached out, trying to reinforce a fading memory of a nebula's formation, but his power slid off it. He could not create here; this was a realm of preservation, and preservation was failing.
They arrived at a place that was not a place. It was a void within the memory, a wound. Here, the record of the Primordial Divinity's first act should have been—a cataclysm of light and intention that set the wheel of existence in motion. Instead, there was only a perfect, resonant silence. It was not empty; it was full of absence, a negative space that actively pushed against their presence.
And in the heart of this silence, they found the first anomaly.
It was a shard of memory, sharp and jagged, refusing to dissolve. It was not a memory of light or creation. It was a memory of observation. A single, silent, witnessing gaze directed at the Primordial Divinity from the outside, from the Nothingness that existed before the Something.
"This... this is impossible," Wang Chuan breathed, the shard's data lancing into his consciousness. "Nothing existed before. There was only the Primordial. This is a memory of something that could not have been there to remember."
Wang You approached the shard, his own divine essence recoiling at its cold, alien nature. "Unless our definition of 'Nothing' is wrong. Unless the Silence was never empty. Unless it was... watching."
The implication was universe-shattering. The Debt of Silence was not a passive consequence of their actions. It was not a simple fading. It was the result of a gaze, a pressure from outside creation itself. They had come seeking a forgotten song, only to find evidence of a listener in the void—a listener whose attention was now causing reality to forget itself.
The silence around them was no longer neutral. It was attentive. It was conscious.
Their quest was no longer a rescue mission. It was an investigation. The crime was not forgetfulness. It was a theft of memory, and they had just found the first clue left at the scene. The question was no longer "How do we make the universe remember?"
It was, "What, in the name of all that is, was doing the watching?"