Silence isn't the absence of sound.
It's the presence of an end.
As Izanami's finger touched my throat, the world didn't just go quiet; it became hollow. I could feel the letters of my own name dissolving in my mind, slipping away like sand through an hourglass.
Kurogami Ren.
The 'Ren' went first. Then the 'Kurogami.'
I was becoming a 'Nothing.' A blank check in the hands of the woman who owned the void.
"A refund," Izanami whispered, her breath smelling of old starlight and frozen iron. "You dared to balance the books of the universe with a wooden pen and a heart full of spite."
I tried to speak, but I had no voice. My vocal cords were no longer part of the 'Active Ledger.'
I was an asset. A commodity.
I looked at the Pale Watcher standing behind her.
He had my face—the face of a boy who had never seen the rain of District 9. He was the 'Ren' that should have been. The 'Ren' who hadn't been sold to the Shinigami before his first breath.
He was the 'Original Debt.'
*"Look at him, Sovereign,"* the Watcher said, his voice a perfect, haunting echo of my own. *"The boy who survived. The man who refused to pay. Do you know why you can't die?"*
I stared into Izanami's void-like eyes.
*"Because you don't exist,"* the Watcher answered for me. *"You were never born into the ledger. You were a clerical error that grew teeth."*
Izanami's grip tightened.
The Tenth Petal beneath us—the one that had turned black—began to pulse with a gravitational force that started to pull the library into its center. The books, the shelves, the very air were being ground into a fine, dark ink.
"If you are a glitch," Izanami said, a cold smile touching her ethereal lips, "then I shall use you to rewrite the laws of the living. A currency that cannot be spent. A soul that cannot be redeemed."
Suddenly, a streak of crimson fire cut through the grey frost.
Elena.
She wasn't wearing her armor anymore, but her blood was literally boiling beneath her skin, glowing with a fierce, desperate light. She lunged, not at Izanami, but at the ground beneath the goddess's feet.
"REN! GRAB THE INK!" she screamed.
She slammed her palms into the black petal.
Her own blood sprayed from her pores, turning into jagged, crystalline spikes that pierced the surface of the Tenth Petal. She was using her life force as a wedge, trying to crack the foundation of Izanami's authority.
The goddess didn't even look at her.
With a casual wave of her hand, Izanami sent Elena flying across the room. I heard the sound of ribs snapping, the sickening thud of a body hitting stone.
But it was enough of a distraction.
The contact between Izanami's finger and my throat broke for a fraction of a second.
In that heartbeat, the Ninth Petal—the cracked, ashen one on my arm—screamed.
I didn't reach for the pen. I didn't reach for my knife.
I reached for the Pale Watcher.
If he was me, then his existence was my collateral.
My grey arm shot forward, moving with a speed that defied the suspended time of the vault. I grabbed my 'other self' by the throat.
The Watcher's eyes widened. He didn't expect the prey to bite the auditor.
"If I don't exist," I hissed, my voice returning in a jagged, distorted rasp, "then neither do you."
I pulled him into me.
The collision was like two galaxies crashing in silence.
White light met black ink.
The Ninth Petal on my arm didn't just glow; it shattered, the shards of bone-white skin flying outward like shrapnel.
Izanami recoiled, her star-lit gown fluttering as the shockwave of my 'merger' hit her.
*"Impossible,"* she hissed, the first sign of genuine emotion—anger—flickering in her eyes. *"You cannot absorb the Auditor. He is the price!"*
"I told you," I wheezed, my body convulsing as the Watcher's memories poured into my brain like molten lead. "I'm not… paying."
The merger wasn't a union. It was a war.
I saw the white room again. I saw my mother's face. I saw the Grand Arbitrator handing her a contract.
*"The child will be a King,"* the Arbitrator had promised her. *"But his kingdom will be the silence after the song ends."*
My mother hadn't sold me for money. She had sold me to ensure I would never have to live in the filth of District 9. She had traded my 'reality' for my 'sovereignty.'
She had made me a ghost so I wouldn't have to be a slave.
I felt the Watcher's form dissolve into my marrow.
The Tenth Petal on the floor stopped pulling. It began to push.
"Jisoo! Now!" I roared.
Jisoo, who had been standing in the shadows like a statue, finally moved.
His eyes—the gold and black vortexes—flared with an intensity that blinded the Shinigami Sentinels. He raised his hand, and the very concept of 'Distance' began to buckle.
"Ten seconds!" Jisoo shouted, his nose bleeding profusely. "I've locked the exit to a moment that hasn't happened yet! Run!"
I lunged for Elena, scooping her broken body into my arms.
My arm wasn't grey anymore.
It was a terrifying, translucent blue—the color of the deep void between stars.
The Ninth Petal was gone.
In its place was a scar in the shape of a zero.
The Mark of the Null.
Izanami screamed, a sound that tore the ceiling of the Under-City apart. The star-light in her hair turned into spears of black flame that rained down upon us.
"You think you can escape the Owner?" she shrieked. "I am the End of every Requiem!"
"Then write your own ending," I told her.
I triggered the Null Authority.
The library didn't explode. It simply ceased to be occupied.
We weren't in the Under-City anymore.
We weren't in District 9.
The world around us was a blur of grey mist and shifting shadows. We were in the 'In-Between'—the cracks in the ledger where the Archive couldn't see and the Shinigami couldn't breathe.
I collapsed onto a patch of cold, dead grass.
The sky above us wasn't black or blue. It was a pale, sickly yellow.
We were in the Outlands. The wasteland beyond the Kurohane Continent. A place where the Laws of Contract had no power, and the only thing that survived were the things the world had forgotten.
I looked at Elena. She was breathing, but barely. Her crimson light was a dim ember.
I looked at Jisoo. He was sitting a few feet away, staring at his hands.
"Ren," he said quietly.
"I'm here."
"I can't see the future anymore."
"I know."
"No," Jisoo said, looking up at me. His eyes were no longer swirling. They were hollow pits of white sand.
"I can't see the future because there isn't one. You didn't just refund the debt, Ren. You canceled the contract of Time for us."
I looked at my translucent arm.
I could see the dead grass through my own skin.
I wasn't a Sovereign of the Requiem anymore.
I was a Sovereign of the Void.
I had saved them. But I had taken them to a place where 'existence' was an optional setting.
A shadow moved in the yellow mist.
It wasn't a Shinigami. It wasn't an Inquisitor.
It was a man in a tattered suit, carrying a rusted lantern. He looked like he had been walking for a thousand years.
He stopped a few yards away, the light of his lantern flickering.
"New arrivals?" the man asked, his voice like dry parchment.
"Who are you?" I asked, standing up and shielding Elena.
The man raised the lantern.
The light hit my translucent arm, and for a second, I saw a new petal forming.
The Eleventh Petal.
It was the color of a faded memory.
"I'm the one who handles the bankrupt," the man said with a crooked, toothless grin.
"Welcome to the Requiem's End, Sovereign. You're just in time for the auction."
"Auction?"
The man pointed his lantern behind him.
The mist cleared, revealing a massive, skeletal city built from the wreckage of a thousand fallen empires. And in the center of the city, hanging from the sky like a dead moon, was a massive heart of iron and gold.
The Heart of the World.
"Izanami wants her refund back," the man whispered.
"And she's selling the rest of the world to get it."
I gripped the shard of obsidian I still held.
The Eleventh Petal bloomed.
And for the first time, I felt a new emotion.
Not anger. Not fear.
Hunger.
The Void wasn't just a place. It was a stomach.
And I was finally starting to get an appetite.
I looked at Jisoo and Elena.
"Stay close," I said, my voice echoing with the weight of the Null.
"We're going to buy back the world."