A cold dread, sharp as broken glass, scraped down Chen Mo's spine as he stared at the dead pixel on the monitor.
It wasn't a hardware failure. He could feel it in his bones. This was something deeper, a fundamental law of the universe giving way. It felt as if the cosmos were having its ribs snapped out, one by one.
As the youngest chief scientist at the National Quantum Computing Center, he'd witnessed phenomena that defied belief. But this… this didn't just defy his worldview. It shattered it.
"Another one gone," he whispered, his voice a dry rasp. On the screen, the light representing the prime number 67 had extinguished. It hadn't flickered out like a faulty bulb; it had been erased from existence.
He thought of the faded photograph on his office wall: a ten-year-old him, clutching a mathematics trophy, his eyes shining with a pure, unshakeable faith in eternal truths. Thirty years later, watching the primes die, that faith was bleeding out.
"Dr. Chen!" His assistant burst through the door, his face the color of ash. "Global encryption is collapsing! Banking, government communications… anything built on prime-number security is failing!"
Chen Mo shot to his feet and lunged for the blackboard in the corner. It was his sanctuary, his intellectual battlefield. Now, it looked like a tombstone.
He began to write, the chalk screaming against the slate in a frantic scrawl. Sweat soaked through his lab coat, but he didn't notice.
*Let P be the set of all primes. Let f be an unknown mapping function…*
He needed a pattern, an explanation. But every derivation led to the same, soul-crushing conclusion: this was not a natural phenomenon.
The moment he drew the equals sign to complete his equation—
*Drip.*
The chalk slipped from his fingers. The equals sign he had just drawn began to bleed. A dark, viscous crimson oozed from the lines, trickling down the blackboard like a fresh wound.
Screams echoed through the lab. Chen Mo stood frozen, his eyes locked on the bloody symbol. It wasn't paint, not ink. It was as if mathematics itself had been cut open.
"Clear the room. Everyone out," he said, his voice unnervingly calm, a stark contrast to the hurricane in his mind.
When he was alone, he approached the board and reached out a trembling hand to touch the blood.
The moment his finger made contact, a tsunami of information crashed into his consciousness:
*Vast, black structures spun in the void, their surfaces etched with impossible, non-Euclidean geometries. Countless civilizations screamed as their laws of physics were rewritten, their stars extinguished like candles. And a symbol, burning through the chaos: three interlocking rings encircling an inverted pyramid.*
The image seared itself into his mind, possessing a kind of ancient, alien beauty.
"Dr. Chen!" The center's director, Zhao Qiming, burst in, flanked by two figures in severe black suits. "We have a situation—"
Chen Mo pointed a shaking finger at the blackboard. "I think it's worse than you can possibly imagine."
Director Zhao saw the bleeding equation and his face went slack with horror. "It's happening again… Seven other major research institutions are reporting the same phenomenon."
One of the suited men stepped forward, flashing a badge. "Li Jian, Special Advisor, National Security Council. This is Professor Zhang Lin, our chief mathematical consultant."
Professor Zhang, a woman with eyes as sharp as a hawk's, strode to the board. "Dr. Chen, our intelligence suggests this is connected to an unknown entity codenamed 'Reaper.' But first, we need your help. We need you to predict which prime will be next."
Chen Mo closed his eyes, the distribution of primes mapping itself across his mind. The numbers danced, arranging themselves into a pattern he had never been taught, a pattern he felt rather than saw.
"73," he said, opening his eyes. His voice was certain. "The next one is 73. It will happen in… three hours."
Li Jian's brow furrowed. "Are you sure?"
As if on cue, the lab's emergency alarms blared. On the main monitor, the global prime-monitoring network lit up with a unified warning: *Existential Fluctuation Detected in Prime Number 73.*
Zhang Lin stared at him, her professional composure shattered. "How did you…?"
"They aren't disappearing randomly," Chen Mo said, gesturing to his formula on the board. "This is a test. Something is testing the structural integrity of our reality."
---
The government jet was stable in the stratosphere until the first jolt hit without warning.
"Not turbulence!" the pilot's panicked voice crackled over the intercom. "Nav systems are shot! Euclidean geometry no longer applies!"
Chen Mo scrambled to a window and what he saw stole the air from his lungs. The clouds below had formed impossible shapes—the topology of a Klein bottle rotated slowly in the sky, while the distant mountains repeated in an infinite, fractal pattern.
"They're rewriting geometry," he breathed, his fingers tracing the impossible shapes on the cold glass.
Zhang Lin grabbed his arm, her grip tight. "Can you stabilize it? Even temporarily?"
Chen Mo closed his eyes, forcing his mind to build a new model. If Euclidean space was failing, compensate with Riemannian curvature. If linear logic was collapsing, introduce fuzzy sets.
"Paper. Pen. Now," he snapped.
The moment he wrote the first symbol, a miracle occurred. The warped space around the aircraft began to settle. The impossible geometry receded.
"My God…" Li Jian whispered, staring at the data feeds. "What did you do?"
"I didn't create," Chen Mo said, wiping sweat from his brow. "I translated. I spoke to it in a language it understands."
---
By the time they landed on the Antarctic ice sheet, he was drained. But all fatigue vanished when he saw the massive subterranean base, and at its center, a floating metal plate.
The plate was covered in a glowing sequence of prime numbers, many of them already dark. But as Chen Mo approached, the surface flared to life. The numbers began to shift and rearrange, forming entirely new patterns.
"It's responding to you," Zhang Lin murmured.
Chen Mo reached out and touched the plate. Information flooded his mind again, but this time it was clearer, more direct.
*The death of the primes is not an end, but a beginning. The bleeding equation was not a warning, but an invitation.*
The surface of the plate rippled, melting away to form a shimmering, blue-white portal that pulsed with silent energy.
Chen Mo took a deep breath. In that final moment, he understood. The equation wasn't bleeding because math was dying. It was bleeding because *reality* was dying.
He glanced back at Zhang Lin, and saw the same grim resolve in her eyes.
"If we're not back in one hour," Chen Mo told Li Jian, "seal the base."
Then, he stepped through.
After a nauseating instant of deconstruction and reassembly, he found himself standing on an infinite platform. Rivers of flowing equations and rotating mathematical structures surrounded him. In the distance, the colossal black entity from his vision turned slowly, silently.
*3iAtlas.* Not a ship, not a creature. A living mathematical god.
A voice spoke, not in his ears, but directly inside his skull.
[**Welcome, Guardian of the Primes. The judgment is about to begin.**]
Chen Mo turned to see Zhang Lin materialize beside him, her face a mask of terror and awe.
"Where are we?" she whispered.
He looked up at the vast, silent being, a feeling of profound dread and reverence washing over him.
"I think," he said, watching as a complex new equation began to form on the platform beneath their feet, "this is the source of mathematics. This is where it all ends—"
He paused, a new, terrifying thought dawning.
"—Or where it all begins."