The tower didn't hum with electricity; it groaned with the weight of a thousand years of unvented grief.

  I stood in the center of the high-rise, but the floor beneath my boots was no longer carpet and steel. It was packed earth, cold and damp, smelling of graves freshly opened. The walls were lined not with screens, but with Spirit Tablets—thousands of them, stacked to the ceiling, each one vibrating with the frantic scratching of a soul trying to claw its way back to the light.

  This wasn't an office. It was an Altar to the Forgotten.

  "You opened the Gate, Jun," a voice croaked.

  I turned. My uncle sat amidst a mountain of red cloth strips. He wasn't an administrator; he was a Shaman of the Void. His skin had turned the color of old parchment, and his eyes were sewn shut with thick, black hair. In his lap lay a massive ledger made of human skin, the ink still wet and glistening like fresh blood.

  "I gave them back their names," I said, my voice trembling. The mark of the 【 門 】 on my palm wasn't a digital key—it was a Spiritual Seal, a brand of the underworld that burned with the heat of a funeral pyre.

  "You gave them a curse," my uncle whispered, his head tilting with a sickening crack. "A man who forgets his death is happy. A man who remembers his death is a Hungry Ghost. You haven't saved the city, Jun. You've turned every citizen into a vessel for the Village's ancient hungers."

  Outside the window, the city was drowning. The "Tall Grass" didn't look like nature anymore; it looked like the hair of a drowned goddess, rising from the asphalt, strangling the cars, and creeping up the sides of buildings. The sky was the color of a bruised corpse.

  The center of the room held the Red Gallows.

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  It was a primitive thing—two beams of lightning-struck wood, dripping with a thick, violet resin. The noose wasn't rope; it was the Great Red Shroud, the same cloth used to bind the eyes of the dead in the Village.

  "The Great Taboo has been broken," my uncle said, his fingers tracing the wet names in the ledger. "The local gods—the ones who lived in the dirt and the water—they have tasted the city's breath. They want the Tithe. A hundred years of silence was the price. Now, the debt is due in a single night."

  A shadow detached itself from the wall. It was my "Mother," but her face was a mask of white porcelain, cracked down the middle. She carried a Ceremonial Bowl, filled not with rice, but with the blackened teeth of the villagers.

  "Eat, Jun," she whispered, her voice a chorus of a thousand drowned souls. "If the Master does not eat the sins of the village, the village will eat the world."

  The 【 門 】 on my hand began to bleed. The blood didn't fall; it rose, forming words in the air—ancient, jagged characters that dictated the First Taboo of the New Age:

  “He who holds the Gate must be the one to hang.”

  This was the "Correction." The spirits didn't want a "system reboot." They wanted a Sacrificial King. They wanted a Liu to hang from the red silk so that the chaos would have a center, a focal point to bind the evil.

  "If I climb the gallows," I asked, staring at the swaying red shroud, "will the grass recede? Will the people wake up?"

  "They will wake up in the dark," my uncle said, his voice fading as his body began to turn into salt. "They will remember nothing. The city will be a village again—small, ignorant, and safe. But you... you will hang there for eternity, the god of a world that doesn't know you exist."

  I looked at the city. Through the Gate in my palm, I could feel the terror of millions. The "Evil Spirits" were already entering the homes, sitting at the dinner tables, waiting for the lights to flicker and die.

  My phone, lying in the dirt at my feet, didn't buzz with a message. It screamed with the sound of a thousand temple bells, all ringing at once—the sound used to ward off the plague.

  The choice was written in the blood on the floor:

  1. The Self-Sacrifice: Step into the noose. Become the Guardian Deity of the Unlit World. Close the Gate from the inside, trapping the evil within your own soul, but vanishing from the memory of man forever.

  2. The Defiance: Break the Spirit Tablets. Use the power of the Gate to invite the "Outside" fully in. No more rules, no more sacrifices—just a world where men and demons walk the same streets, fighting for every inch of shadow.