Shanghai, 72 hours after the black hole died.
The city still stood, unaware it had become the capital of a war that would outlive its language.
Lin Kexin sat on the edge of the roof, legs dangling 300 metres above the Bund. The night wind tasted of rust and neon. Behind her, Hassan stood with his coat open to the void, the darkness inside it deeper than the space between stars.
They were waiting for the Custodians' answer.
It came at 04:13 a.m. as a polite knock on reality itself.
A man appeared on the rooftop without transition. Mid-forties, charcoal suit, silver tie clip shaped like an ouroboros. He carried a slim aluminium briefcase and the exhausted calm of someone who had done this since the Toba eruption.
"Miss Lin," he said, bowing exactly fifteen degrees. "Deputy Archivist Wei-7. We would like to open negotiations before the regrettable escalation."
Hassan did not move, but every shadow in Shanghai lengthened by one metre, as though the city itself leaned forward to listen.
Lin Kexin did not stand. "You're late."
"We were… recalculating," Wei-7 admitted. "The disappearance of Sagittarius A* required us to discard seventeen thousand years of contingency scripture. A first."
He set the briefcase on the concrete between them and opened it. Inside: a single sheet of paper that hurt to look at directly.
"Your surrender terms," he continued. "You and the entity retain full memory and personhood. You will be relocated to a private pocket universe (Pleistocene aesthetics, no intelligent life, unlimited duration). In exchange, Blue Star continues its scheduled history. No further anomalies."
Lin Kexin finally looked at him. Her eyes had begun to carry the same impossible depth as Hassan's.
"And if I say no?"
Wei-7's smile was thin and very tired.
"Then Protocol Ereshkigal begins at sunrise. Every city with population over eight million ceases to exist at the quantum level. Not destroyed. Unwritten. Their absence will be retrocausal; history rewrites itself so they never were. Eight billion casualties reduced to a rounding error in textbooks that will never mention them."
He closed the briefcase.
"You have until the sun touches the horizon."
Then he was gone the same way he came.
Silence.
Hassan spoke first, voice soft. "They're not bluffing. I can feel the seal forming, nine layers of causality braided around the planet like a garotte."
Lin Kexin looked east, where the first stain of dawn was already bleeding across the water.
"How long do we actually have?"
"Four minutes, thirty-seven seconds."
She stood, brushed non-existent dust from her coat.
"Then let's not waste it."
She took one step forward and spoke to the sky itself, clear, unafraid.
"I choose option three."
There was no third option.
Reality hiccupped anyway.
Hassan smiled like a wolf who had just heard the shepherd die.
Across the planet, every Custodian sigil burned white-hot at the same instant. Their archives (hidden under Antarctica, under the Mariana Trench, under the far side of the Moon) filled with the same three words in a language that predated baryons:
SHE CHOSE WAR
The sun paused on the horizon, confused.
Hassan lifted one hand. Darkness rose from the streets below in slow, perfect silence, a tide made of the concept of night. It climbed buildings, swallowed satellites, drank starlight until the only illumination left on Earth came from two pairs of eyes on a rooftop in Shanghai.
Lin Kexin reached out and threaded her fingers through his.
"Begin," she said.
The First Century of the Custodian War ended exactly four minutes after it was declared.
And the rest of time began to burn.
End of Chapter 7