CHAPTER 121 – Waking in a World Without Light
Silence.
A silence so absolute it pressed down, a crushing, palpable weight.
A silence that existed outside of sound, outside of meaning.
Xiao Xi opened her eyes, but found no relief from the darkness.
She woke into endless black.
No sky.
No ground beneath her transparent feet.
No sound to mark time.
No time to mark sound.
She tried to breathe—a purely instinctual, human habit—and realized she didn't need to.
Her existence was now purely conceptual.
Her Core thrummed weakly inside her chest, a cracked, dim violet light, but it was functional.
The seal had worked.
The world was saved.
But she was trapped.
She whispered into the empty void, the sound failing to travel, existing only in her own conceptual space:
"…Where am I? What is this place?"
A low, guttural, rumbling chuckle answered her.
It came not from in front or behind, but from everywhere at once, vibrating the very concept of her being.
"O-U-R P-R-I-S-O-N, LITTLE ROOT."
Xiao Xi froze, her entire essence hardening in defensive readiness.
A shape materialized a few meters away—not by entering, but by being there.
It was a towering, vast mass of shifting shadow and the broken light of consumed stars.
The First Root.
It was bound.
Chained by immense, glowing violet and gold chaos threads that dug into its primal form, freezing its movement in eternal stasis.
It snarled in contempt, its voice a grinding, furious whisper.
"YOU DID IT, LITTLE ROOT.
YOU SACRIFICED YOUR FLESH, AND YOU SEALED US BOTH."
Xiao Xi stared down at where her physical body should have been.
"My body… is gone? Destroyed?"
"DESTROYED," the First Root confirmed with a pause of malign amusement.
"BUT NOT BEYOND RECONSTRUCTION.
THE CORE SURVIVED."
She swallowed the terror that didn't need breath to exist.
"So I'm alive. Just… as a soul."
"ALIVE ENOUGH.
A GHOST, TO HAUNT ME."
She clenched her fists, transparent and flickering.
"I'll keep you here forever.
For all the worlds you hurt."
The First Root laughed—a deep, resonant, mocking sound—
but now, she could hear something else beneath the mockery.
Fear.
Genuine, structural fear of her power.
"FOREVER?
WHEN FOREVER HAS NO MEANING HERE,
LITTLE ANOMALY?"
Xiao Xi looked down at her hands—transparent, flickering like a glitching code-sequence.
She was fading, unable to maintain her physical projection.
Her soul was surviving, but her body was gone, her Core fractured.
And she had no way back.
But the First Root wasn't finished with its psychological torture.
"YOU HAVE DOOMED YOURSELF, XIAO XI. YOU ARE ALONE.
AND YOUR LOVER IS ALONE."
She glared, refusing to show weakness.
"I saved them.
I saved him."
"DID YOU?" The First Root's voice dripped with the poison of doubt.
"LET US SEE HOW THEY FARED… WITHOUT THE ANCHOR."
The void rippled—
and a window of reality, a sickeningly clear projection of the outside world, opened before her.
Showing Gu Yanzhou.
Broken.
Screaming her name into the devastation.