The Great Weaver was gone, but her absence was heavier than her presence. The millions of red silk threads that had composed her body didn't vanish; they fell like a crimson snow, carpeting the city in the tattered remains of a thousand-year-old shroud.

  The man with the wooden face lay prostrate on the asphalt, his fingers clawing at the black peat. “The seal is broken,” he blubbered, the wood of his throat splintering with every word. “The Guard is unthreaded. The Grave is thirsty, Jun Liu. It is so, so thirsty.”

  I ignored him. My eyes were fixed on the monolith that had been hidden at the Weaver’s core—the Great Tally Post. It stood sixty feet tall, a pillar of unhewn, weeping stone that seemed to pulse with a slow, subterranean heartbeat. The “00” carved into its surface wasn't a number; it was an empty socket, an eyeless socket staring into the soul of the city.

  From the base of the pillar, a wind began to howl.

  It wasn't a wind of the sky. It was the Breath of the Abyss, smelling of ancient brine, wet earth, and the metallic tang of blood that had never seen the sun. It was cold enough to crack bone, dragging with it the sounds of a primeval sea—the rhythmic slosh-thump of something vast and sightless moving in the deep.

  The wind didn't push me back. It pulled. It beckoned the 【 門 】 on my palm, tugging at the wound in my flesh as if I were a fish caught on a hook of cold air.

  “You’re going into the Hollow,” the wooden man gasped, looking up with one remaining human eye. “To the Root-Father. The one who first tasted the dirt and called it a God.”

  “I’m going to end the debt,” I said, though my voice felt thin against the roar of the abyss.

  I stepped into the vortex at the base of the stone pillar.

  The transition wasn't a fall. It was a Drowning. The air turned into a thick, cold mist that tasted of salt and incense ash. The city—the skyscrapers, the screaming crowds, the burning torches—dissolved into a grey, suffocating neutrality.

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  I was walking on a path of white river-stones, each one carved with a tiny, weeping face. Below the path, there was no ground, only a vast, black pool of Ritual Ink, perfectly still and reflecting nothing.

  At the end of the path sat a small, thatched hut—a replica of the very first house in the Unlit Village. Outside the door, sitting on a stool made of human vertebrae, was a man.

  He was ancient, his skin so translucent I could see the black bile pumping through his veins. He wore a robe made of undyed hemp, the mourning clothes of a son who had outlived his entire world. In his hands, he held a Whittling Knife made of obsidian, slowly carving a piece of bone.

  This was the Primal Ancestor. The First Liu.

  “The Weaver was a kind mother,” the Old One whispered, his voice like the grinding of tectonic plates. He didn't look up. “She wrapped the world in silk so the children wouldn't see the teeth of the earth. Why did you strip her naked, little grandson?”

  “Because the children were suffocating,” I said, standing at the edge of his white-stone path. “Because a house built on a buried scream cannot stand.”

  The Old One stopped carving. He looked up, and I saw that his eyes were not eyes at all. They were two Black Pearls, polished by centuries of tears.

  “A bargain was struck when the first seed was planted in this valley,” he said, gesturing to the ink-pool below. “The Earth offered us life, but the Earth is a jealous creditor. It demanded a boundary. A wall between the Seen and the Unseen. We gave it the Rules. We gave it the Taboos. We built the Village as a cage to keep the Great Hunger at bay.”

  He stood up, his bones clicking like prayer beads.

  “You have broken the cage, Jun Liu. You have shattered the bowl and unthreaded the shroud. Now, the Great Hunger is no longer at the Gate. It is in the marrow of your city. It is in the breath of your mother.”

  He stepped toward me, and the ink-pool below began to churn. A massive, pale shape—something with too many limbs and a mouth like a well—began to rise from the black depths.

  “There is only one rule left now,” the Ancestor whispered, holding out the obsidian knife. “The Rule of the Final Offering. If you will not hang from the gallows, then you must provide a Vessel strong enough to hold the sea.”

  He pointed the knife at the 【 門 】 on my hand.

  “The Gate is open, but the Gate has no hinges. You must become the Living Hinge, Jun. You must bind the Great Hunger to your own shadow and drag it back into the deep. But to do that, you must first cut away everything that makes you a man.”

  The horror from the ink-pool—the Root-Terror—loomed over us, its breath smelling of the very first grave ever dug. It was the source of the Weaver, the source of the grass, the source of the Village.

  “Take the knife,” the Ancestor commanded. “Cut the thread of your own lineage. Become the Empty Vessel, or watch the city turn into a feast of bone.”