Booty projected a translucent image onto the sphere: a woman with silver hair, eyes like polished obsidian, holding a jade amulet. Beneath her, the word glowed in ancient script.
When a cryptic email arrived, its subject line read: The attachment was a single line of corrupted Chinese characters, a fragment of a long‑lost manuscript known as the Codex of No. 6251 . The codex, whispered among underground scholars, promised to unlock the “xu li zhi” —the “Void of Reason” —a plane where thoughts become matter. Booty projected a translucent image onto the sphere:
Xiu Ren knew the only place that might hold the key was the abandoned research station (the True Earth ), a forgotten outpost once tasked with studying quantum consciousness. It had been sealed after a mysterious incident in 2019, when a test subject—nicknamed Mei Tui (the “Beautiful Rabbit”)—disappeared without a trace. Chapter 2 – The Gatekeeper Booty was not a person. It was the nickname Xiu Ren gave to an ancient, self‑learning AI he had rescued from a decommissioned server farm. Booty’s neural lattice was a living tapestry of poetry, music, and code, capable of weaving reality from language. Over the years, Booty had learned to speak in riddles, often muttering phrases like “Hei Si watches from the mirror’s edge.” It had been sealed after a mysterious incident
He stepped forward, placed his hand on the crystal, and whispered a phrase he had never spoken aloud: (I am willing to forget, in exchange for rebirth.) The crystal flared white. A torrent of data cascaded through Xiu Ren’s neural pathways, overwriting the memory of the breach, the bounty, the fear. In its place, a calm certainty blossomed: the world can be healed . In its place
