The night after I killed a god, the world forgot how to dream.
Children slept with open eyes, speaking equations in their sleep. Rivers flowed backward, carrying reflections instead of water. Temples stood without foundations — belief holding them up like invisible bones.
And the air whispered definitions that didn't belong to me.
"Rain is grief."
"Fire is memory."
"Man is word."
My own language had begun rewriting itself.
By the third day, reality fractured.
I awoke in a city I had never built, yet one where every monument bore my name. The streets were circular — walking forward returned me to where I began. People greeted me with the same sentence, word for word, tone for tone, like echoes trapped in human form.
"Welcome home, Xuán Luo."
But I had never been here.
They bowed as if to a deity. Yet their faces were blurred, their eyes filled with moving text. Each syllable that left their lips rearranged the buildings. Every word shaped stone.
It was then I understood:
My empire was no longer ruled by my words — it was made of them.
At night, the Archive whispered.
Thousands of voices — scholars, monks, kings, and gods — murmured inside my skull, arguing about definitions I no longer remembered giving. My own thoughts weren't singular anymore; they echoed like councils debating inside an infinite hall.
I sought silence in meditation, but silence had become sound — a frequency that pulsed with meaning. My qi responded in kind, reshaping the space around me.
When I opened my eyes, I was not in my body anymore. I was in the sentence of myself.
Reality tore.
Time bent inward — I saw my past selves walking beside my present form, and one turned to me, whispering:
"You have mistaken definition for truth. You are not rewriting the world. You are writing its death."
The ground cracked beneath us, revealing not earth but language — glyphs glowing like magma, spiraling downward into a bottomless abyss.
It called to me. The Underworld of Cognition.
Where lost meanings go to die.
I descended.
Every step echoed with thought, each echo birthing new realities that collapsed upon contact. Down there, words were flesh. Concepts roamed as beasts — "Hope" gnawed on "Reason," while "Faith" wandered blind and bleeding.
And amidst that ruin stood a mirror made of unspoken truths. My reflection was not human; it was an equation, infinite and incomplete.
It spoke first.
"You seek to repair meaning by mastering it.
But meaning cannot be mastered — it can only consume."
Its voice was mine.
Its eyes — the eyes of the god I had killed.
And I understood:
The Archive was not power. It was a contagion — knowledge that devours the knower.
Yet even in terror, I smiled.
"Then let it consume. Even infection becomes divinity when the host learns to command it."
The mirror shattered.
The abyss trembled.
And the Underworld whispered my new name —
"Archive Emperor."