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Chapter three: World three—The Tragedy of Resonance
I had chosen a death outside its aesthetic. Messy. Uncontrolled. Unglamorous. And I saw that look of the collector, a look of waiting before my vision got blurred. And then I woke up with a jolt. My wrist burned, and now the ribbon was showing 叁 (3). Instinctively, my hands reached for my throat, and I felt a little blood on my palm—and then the wounds closed up. The skin knit together under my fingers, smooth and unbroken, leaving only a phantom ache and sticky, cooling blood as proof.
"My wounds are closed..... I was right. There are two possible ways to ascend. Sleep and Death." The realization was cold and solid. In World 1, the trigger was passive—sleep. In World 2, it became active—a death you had to choose, to fight for. It was only then did I notice the surroundings.
I was sitting in the middle of a road made of fused, black glass, still warm beneath me. The sky was a uniform, dull grey, like the inside of a brain. No sun, no stars, no source of light, yet everything was illuminated in a flat, shadowless twilight. I could see even without any light there. Everything was getting more nonsensical. The silence was different here. It wasn't the curated silence of the town. This was a thick, muffled silence, as if the world was packed in cotton wool. My own breath sounded deafening. I stood up. My legs were steady, my body whole, but I felt… hollowed out. The defiant rage that had driven me to put a shard in my own throat was gone, leaving behind a cavernous fatigue and the ghost of that final, wet gasp.
The buildings lining the glass road were where the true wrongness began. They were not built. They were grown. Structures of twisted, petrified wood and smooth, bulbous stone rose in organic, nonsensical shapes—spirals that ended in flat walls, arches that led to solid rock, doorways three stories up with no stairs. Windows were mismatched holes, some filled with what looked like opaque amber, others with gently vibrating membranes. And everything hummed. A low, sub-audible vibration thrummed through the glass beneath my feet, up through my bones. It wasn't a sound you heard; it was a frequency you felt in your teeth and the pit of your stomach. It was the source of the muffled silence. This world was drowning in its own resonance. I began to walk, my footsteps making no sound on the glass. The ribbon's light, 叁, was the only sharp color in the monotone world. I turned a corner and froze. In the middle of an intersection stood a figure. The figure didn't move. It was a Ji Tang—a Silent Listening made flesh. Its hollow gaze wasn't sight; it was perception turned to stone. I had been heard. And now, it would make me part of the silence. It was humanoid, but utterly still. Its skin was the same texture as the petrified wood, grey and striated. It was posed mid-stride, one arm slightly raised, its face tilted upward. It wasn't a statue. It was a person who had been turned into one. I could see the fine details of its clothing—frozen in stone-like flow—and the expression on its face: not terror, but a deep, profound listening. A warning shivered down my spine. Don't make a sound? But the world was already humming. I took a cautious step back. My shoe, finally finding a tiny piece of loose debris, scraped ever so softly against the glass.
SCRITCH.
The figure moved. Not with life, but with a sudden, jerking re-orientation. Its stone head snapped down from the sky to look directly at me. Its raised arm pivoted, a finger now pointing at my chest. The movement was silent, swift, and utterly horrifying. What happened next was what I expected but also unexpected. There was a hole in my chest, and beside me that same figure stood. His finger went through my chest. I felt unimaginable pain. The pain was a cold fire, a paradox of sensation that froze and burned simultaneously. It wasn't just in my chest; it echoed. Each heartbeat sent a fresh, wet spike of agony radiating down my arm, up into my jaw, settling behind my eyes as a throbbing pressure. I could feel the violated architecture of my body—the phantom shape of the finger that had pierced me, the way my ribs now seemed to vibrate out of tune with the world's hum. The blood on my hands wasn't just warm; it felt alive, squirming with a faint, parasitic resonance of its own.I took some steps back, before I realized another horrifying thing.
"I.... I'm not dying. What is wrong with why am I still here? Why didn't I die?" There was an unanswered question. I clenched my chest feeling all the pain. I looked at the figure again, his hollow eyes staring at my soul. Those eyes meant nothing but just instinct. A new rule crystalized in my mind, colder than the glass beneath me.
World 1 punished sleep.
World 2 punished vulnerability.
World 3, it seemed, would punish attention.
The wrong sound, the wrong movement—would it turn me to petrified wood? Would I become another frozen listener in this silent, humming gallery? This time it was different. I couldn't die if any of these beings attacked me. I had to suffer the pain. I started feeling my breathing get heavier, the pain was insufferable, but I couldn't keep standing there. The hollow feeling in my chest was gone, replaced by a familiar, chilling clarity. I looked at the ribbon, at the angry blue 叁. I had refused to be the Collector's Art. Now, I had to learn how to be a ghost in a world that turned the exhibits into statues. I had to move. But more than that, I had to become inaudible, invisible, irrelevant. I had to walk through World 3 without letting it listen to me. I took a breath, focused on the weight of my feet, and began to move with a thief's precision, away from the frozen sentry, deeper into the labyrinth of humming stone. My legs were wobbly from the pain. My hands were filled with blood. I knew that the only way to stop the suffering was to ascend to World 4. "Damn it, how long do I have to keep hiding? Should I die again ?" I thought of using the same tactics as before, but this time I thought, "It doesn't matter how many times I die, but the next world is not going to be soothing." Ascending to the next world means reaching for another horror. Certainly more terrifying. I moved further slowly, forgetting the pain and reaching for an isolated place. I saw a lamp standing tall there. My gaze shifted to a tree and I saw something staring at a bird…the bird was black like a moonless night, its eyes glowed purple, its wings were made of feathers but not only feathers—it was decorated as if it were someone's pet. The bird was humming a tune that was audible and stopping the silence from coming. On the ground beneath it, there was a figure: an impossibly lean man wearing black clothes and a very silly-looking cap that had five corners and a long tip. My gaze looked upon his hands…there were no hands. I thought that was the only awkward thing, but then he looked at me, with a long grin, his nose half broken. "What in the horror have I fallen into?" I thought, and I moved away quickly. I was trying to find a way to ascend. I ducked into a low archway of bulbous stone, my back against a cold, vibrating membrane. I needed a plan, not just panic. As my eyes adjusted, I saw it. Not carved, but condensed—like frost on glass—on the amber pane of a nearby window. Words, in a graceful, desperate hand:
The Conductor hears but does not listen. His bird sings the only true note. To move forward, you must first create silence. Then move to the well in the south, there you will find what to do next.—. Lin. A name. A person. Someone who had been here, understood this, and left a message for whoever came next. The script was fresh, the condensation still beading. I reached out, not to touch the words, but to feel the surrounding air. The condensation wasn't water. It was a byproduct of silenced resonance, tiny droplets of null-frequency beading on the amber. As my shadow fell over the script, the humming in the membrane behind me changed pitch, flattening into a warning drone. This wasn't just a note. It was a tripwire. Lin hadn't just left a message; she'd left it in a place that would alert anyone—or anything—attuned to reading it. I was now on a clock. I memorized the words in two heartbeats: The Conductor hears but does not listen... My eyes scanned the rest of the pane. In the very corner, almost invisible, was a second, smaller mark: a star, identical to the one on the locket in my pocket and the box from the shop. She'd been here. She'd seen the same connections. And she'd marked this as a verified truth. She couldn't be long gone. The clue was a paradox. Create silence? There was another chosen one and, from my guess, she would be here for a long time. And then I thought of the words, in a world that was all hum? My eyes drifted back to the intersection, to the grinning Conductor and his adorned Bird. The bird's purple eyes pulsed in time with the deepest layer of the hum. It wasn't a pet. It was a live tuning fork, the source of the local frequency. The Conductor wasn't its master. He was its custodian, ensuring its note remained pure. To create silence, you must first steal the song. The logic of this absurd place clicked into place, cold and sharp. I needed that bird. I waited, becoming part of the architecture, until the Conductor's gaze—hollow and distracted—wandered toward a dissonant ripple in the distant hum. I moved. It was not a fight; it was a snatch. My hands closed around the bird. The moment my hands closed around it, the world… simplified. The oppressive, layered hum resolved into a single, pure tone—a clear A-flat that vibrated in the marrow of my bones. It was the most beautiful, terrible sound I'd ever felt. The bird didn't struggle. It looked at me with its glowing purple eyes, and in them, I didn't see animal fear. I saw a kind of sad, infinite knowing. It was a sacred object, and I was a defiler. My hands trembled. Lin's clue demanded silence. This was the only way. The silencing effect from the note was immediate. The Silent Listeners at the edge of the plaza didn't react. They simply… calmed, their stony postures easing as if soothed. The Conductor went preternaturally still. Then, he turned. Not his body, but his head, rotating farther than any joint should allow, the long grin fixed on me. I didn't hesitate. Lin's clue said create silence. I didn't know how to turn it off. So I did the only permanent thing I could think of. I twisted its neck. It made no sound. But the effect was instantaneous and violent. The perfect note shattered. Not into noise, but into a vacuum of sensation. A sphere of absolute, deafening void erupted from the dead bird in my hands. The Silent Listeners convulsed. Cracks webbed across their stone forms. And the Conductor… unmade. The Conductor didn't scream. The world screamed for him. The petrified wood of the nearby buildings splintered with reports like gunshots. The glass road beneath our feet developed a spiderweb of cracks, each one emitting a high, dying shriek. His form wasn't just revealed; it was born from the unraveling of his disguise. The silly cap didn't just dissolve—it was consumed by the two vortex-eyes now opening on his face, vortices that spun not light, but layers of audible grief: the whisper of a lost lullaby, the fading echo of a final scream, the immutable hum of a world whose heart had just been stilled. "THIEF," the word did not hit my ears. It unfolded inside my skull, a concept stamped directly onto my consciousness."MURDERER. YOU HAVE BROKEN THE CHORD." It wasn't angry. It was incomprehensibly bereft. I hadn't just stolen its instrument; I had killed a fundamental piece of the world's music. It moved toward me, not by walking, but by re-tuning the space between us. The ground harmonized into a wave that carried it forward. The dead bird in my hands crumbled into ash. I was defenseless. But I couldn't stay there with another move, I reached toward the lamp and when it appeared. My hand closed around the lamp. It wasn't metal, but a solidified resin of hardened soundwaves, cold and strangely fuzzy. I didn't aim. I just flung it in the path of the advancing resonance-being. It didn't hit. When it crossed into the field of distorted space around the Conductor, it unraveled. The solid form blurred, stretching into a long, wailing note that was immediately shredded into dissonant fragments. It bought me two seconds. I turned and ran, not with human speed, but with the desperate, lung-burning propulsion of a creature being deleted from reality. I ran towards the south according to what Lin said. As I ran, the world was bleeding. The once-uniform hum was now a cacophony of dying frequencies. The amber windows wept viscous, slow-moving tears of solidifying resonance. The Silent Listeners I passed weren't just cracked; they were melting, their stony forms slumping into odd, mournful shapes, their listening expressions finally contorted into something like agony. The path to the south wasn't a street anymore; it was a scar through the convulsing city, the ground softening underfoot into something like pitch, clinging to my shoes with every step. The air itself felt thin, starved of its sustaining vibration. I wasn't just running from the Conductor. I was running through the death throes of a realm I had mortally wounded. Then I saw a well there. The well wasn't stone. It was a perfect cylinder of absolute silence. The surrounding air didn't hum; it was dead, void. Looking into it was like looking into a hole cut out of existence itself. No reflection, no bottom, just an infinite fall into quiet. The words weren't carved on its rim; they were floating, suspended in the air just above the silent void like ghostly projections, shimmering in and out of legibility as if the memory of the person who wrote them was fading. I had to lean into the unnerving null-space to read them, the absence of sound making my own heartbeat thunder in my skull. "The Box, it's… reacting to disruption... The Conductor is a symptom, not the source…find the hollow tree where the roots drink silence… Next thing you have to do yourself." The hollow tree. The image from my first moments here flashed—the twisted, petrified tree near the first Ji Tang that attacked me. Its roots had looked like they were burrowing into the glass, not for water, but for something else. Now I understand. They were siphoning the foundational silence the world tried to mask with its hum. It wasn't just a tree. It was a silence, well, an anchor point. And Lin was telling me to go to the epicenter of the very thing this world feared. I stood at the silent well, the crumbling note of the dead world in my ears, the ghostly words of a girl named Lin fading before my eyes. I had come here to escape, to ascend. Instead, I had become a catalyst for collapse. The Box, the ribbon, the Collector, the Conductor—they were all pieces of a system, and I was kicking apart its foundations. The hollow tree wasn't just the next step. It was a point of leverage. To silence a world of noise, you don't just break a speaker. You find the amplifier and rip out its power source. A shudder passed through the dead air. Not a sound, but a propagation of absence. He was coming. The Conductor. The guardian of a song I had murdered. And he wasn't coming to fight. He was coming to conduct my final, permanent rest in the void. I was going to move before— The Conductor-entity loomed over me, a standing wave of grief and fury, raising a limb that was now a blade of focus, I noticed instantly those hands were not his! We were going to erase me from the song permanently. I had the clue from Lin. I had a desperate, failing signal of words. And I had awakened the true heart of World 3's horror. The song of the eternal void.
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