The crying didn't stop.
It wasn't a sound that traveled through the air. It vibrated through the hilt of the obsidian dagger, sinking into the marrow of my white, dead arm.
It was the sound of a beginning that had been denied.
I looked at the Quill of the Unwritten. The blade was translucent now, pulsing with a faint, rhythmic light. Inside the obsidian, something small and pale was squirming—a flicker of consciousness trapped in a cage of divine ink.
"Ren… make it stop," Elena whispered.
She was huddled against the damp tunnel wall, her hands pressed tightly over her ears. Even with her power suppressed, her sensitivity to life-force was turning the crying into a physical assault.
"It's not a baby, Elena," I said, my voice sounding hollow in the vast emptiness of the subway tunnel.
"Then what is it?"
"It's potential," I muttered.
I remembered the scrolls in the Archive. The way the Scribe's fingers were stitched together from unfulfilled promises. The Archive didn't just trade in lives; they traded in what those lives *could* have been.
The sound in the dagger was the collective scream of every soul that had been sold before it was even born. It was the purest form of energy in the world: Pure, unadulterated debt.
And I was holding the bill.
"The future is screaming, Ren," Jisoo said.
He hadn't moved from his spot near the Pale Watcher. His eyes—those crimson petals burning in his sockets—didn't blink. He was looking through the walls, through the earth, into a place I couldn't follow.
"Jisoo, come back," I commanded, stepping toward him.
The Watcher tilted his head. He didn't move to stop me, but the temperature around him dropped until the moisture on the tunnel walls turned to frost.
"I am back," Jisoo replied. His voice was no longer his own. It was a chorus—a thousand Jisoos speaking in perfect, terrifying unison.
"I see the Archive's plan. They didn't want the stone to keep it. They wanted you to take it. They wanted you to bloom the ninth petal."
I froze.
The itch on the back of my hand—the bone-white lotus—flared with a cold, numbing heat.
"Why?"
"Because a Sovereign is a predator," Jisoo whispered, finally turning to face me. The crimson petals in his eyes spun slowly.
"And every predator needs a cage. This city… these tunnels… they aren't your refuge, Ren. They are your stomach. And you're about to start digesting."
The tunnel groaned.
Deep beneath us, something ancient and massive shifted. It wasn't the movement of machinery or the city's plumbing. It was the sound of a heart beating against the bedrock.
I looked down at the tracks. The rust was peeling away, revealing a network of silver veins that pulsed with the same rhythm as the dagger in my hand.
"We're in the Graveyard," I realized.
The Under-City wasn't just a myth for the poor. It was the foundation of the Kurohane Continent. A massive, subterranean machine designed to process the souls the Shinigami collected.
And we had just walked into the intake valve.
"Ren… my blood…" Elena gasped.
I turned just in time to see her collapse. Her skin was turning the same bone-white as my arm. The veins in her neck were bulging, glowing with a faint, silver light.
The city was starting to drink her.
I lunged for her, but my white arm refused to obey. It locked in place, the ninth petal glowing with a blinding intensity.
*"The toll must be paid,"* the Watcher spoke.
His voice didn't come from his mouth. It came from the shadows under my feet.
*"She is a Hemomancer. A vessel of debt. She has no place in the new world. Offer her to the engine, and the ninth petal will be complete."*
The crying in the dagger reached a fever pitch. It was no longer a cry; it was a command.
*Eat. Absorb. Ascend.*
I looked at Elena. She was staring at me, her eyes clouded with the grey dust of oblivion. She couldn't even speak. She was just a body now, a battery of blood and memory waiting to be drained.
Then I looked at Jisoo. He was watching me with a detached, prophetic curiosity. He wasn't my friend anymore. He was a spectator at my execution.
The choice was clear.
Save her and stay a "monster" who couldn't protect his own.
Or sacrifice her and become the Sovereign the Watcher wanted.
I felt the Authority surging through me. It wasn't the cold ice of the Requiem anymore. It was something heavier. Something that felt like the weight of a thousand years of silence.
I reached out with my white hand.
My fingers touched Elena's cold, damp forehead.
The silver veins in her skin leaped toward my touch, hungry for the power I held.
"Ren… please…" she managed to whisper.
I looked into her eyes. I saw the fear. I saw the girl who was afraid of her own power. I saw the only person who still looked at me like I was a human being.
And then, I gripped the obsidian dagger.
I didn't plunge it into her.
I plunged it into my own white arm.
The scream that left my throat was loud enough to crack the tunnel's ceiling.
The obsidian blade sank deep into the bone-white flesh, the "unwritten" energy of the dagger clashing with the "dead" light of the ninth petal.
It was like pouring gasoline on a frozen lake.
The crying stopped instantly.
Instead, a roar of pure, conceptual energy erupted from the wound. The silver veins in the tunnel recoiled. The Watcher hissed, his misty form flickering like a dying candle.
"What are you doing?" the voices in Jisoo's head shrieked. "You are destroying the vessel!"
"I told you," I wheezed, my vision swimming in a sea of red and white.
"I don't… make… contracts."
I twisted the blade.
The energy I had stolen from the Scribe—the potential of a billion unwritten lives—didn't go into the city's engine.
I forced it into Elena.
I used the Requiem not to take, but to give. A reverse transaction. A violation of the most fundamental law of the universe.
Elena's body arched. Her eyes flew open, the grey dust exploding out of her sockets like steam. The silver veins in her skin turned a deep, violent crimson.
She wasn't a Hemomancer anymore.
She was something else.
The blood in her body didn't just clot; it solidified into a suit of jagged, crimson armor that pulsed with the light of my own eighth petal.
I slumped back, the dagger falling from my limp, bleeding hand.
The ninth petal didn't bloom. It didn't disappear either. It stayed there, half-formed, a jagged scar of bone and ink that refused to resolve.
The Watcher stepped forward. For the first time, he didn't look like an auditor. He looked like an enemy.
*"You have delayed the inevitable, Ren kurogami,"* the Watcher said, the air around him vibrating with malice. *"You have traded your sovereignty for a servant. But the city is still hungry."*
The tunnel walls began to pull apart.
Behind the concrete and the silver veins, I saw them.
The Former Sovereigns.
Dozens of them, fused into the walls of the Under-City. Their bodies were bone-white, their eyes replaced by obsidian stones. They were the processors of the world's debt, the living hardware of the Archive's bank.
And they were all looking at me.
One of them—a man whose face was half-melted into a rusted pipe—opened his mouth.
"Welcome… to the throne…" he croaked.
The floor beneath us dissolved.
We weren't falling into a pit. We were being pulled into the heart of the machine.
"Jisoo! Elena!" I shouted, reaching out through the dark.
I felt a hand grab mine. It was cold, but it had a pulse.
Elena. Her crimson armor was glowing like a flare in the abyss.
"I've got you, Ren," she said. Her voice was deeper, resonant with the power I had forced into her.
But Jisoo was gone.
I looked up as we descended into the depths.
Jisoo was standing on a ledge that was rapidly receding. He wasn't falling. He was staying behind.
He looked down at us, and for a split second, the amber light returned to his eyes. Just a flicker.
"Find the heart, Ren," he shouted, his voice finally singular again.
"The Archive isn't the bank. It's the vault. The bank is *inside* you!"
And then, he was gone.
We hit the bottom with a bone-shattering thud.
It wasn't a tunnel. It wasn't a machine.
It was a library.
A library that stretched for miles in every direction, filled with books made of human skin and ink made of blood.
In the center of the room sat a single, small wooden cradle.
And inside the cradle was a pen.
A simple, wooden fountain pen.
The crying started again. But this time, it wasn't coming from the dagger.
It was coming from the pen.
I stood up, my white arm hanging uselessly at my side.
I looked at the ninth petal. It was starting to glow again.
But this time, the light wasn't bone-white.
It was gold.
The color of a debt that has been paid in full.
"Elena," I whispered, staring at the cradle.
"Do you see it?"
She stepped beside me, her crimson armor clicking against the stone floor. She looked at the library, then at the pen.
"I don't see a pen, Ren," she said, her voice trembling.
"I see a child."
I looked back at the cradle.
The pen was gone.
In its place sat a small boy with hair the color of midnight and eyes that contained the entire infinite future.
He looked exactly like I did when I was six years old.
The boy smiled.
"Hello, Ren," he said. "Are you ready to sign the final page?"
Beyond the library, the sound of ten thousand Shinigami wings approaching echoed through the dark.
The Archive was no longer hunting me.
They were coming to witness the end of the world.
And I was holding the only thing that could write the next chapter.
The ninth petal finally bloomed.
And the world began to bleed gold.