Chapter 35: The Aftermath
They breached the surface into a different world.
The Maw's chaotic column still churned, but the light had changed. The violent, clashing colors had softened into a turbulent, but natural, spectrum—like a storm giving way to a rough sea. The hum was lower, a basso profundo instead of a shriek. The air tasted of ozone and wet stone, not of madness and metal.
The Anteroom was in chaos of a different sort. The remaining Broken Blade members and technocrats were shouting, instruments screeching with conflicting data. The Secondary Team's few survivors babbled of betrayal and geometric ghosts. The air crackled with panic and fury.
When Xiao Feng's ragged group stumbled from the gate, hauling the unconscious Silent, a dead silence fell.
Chapter Master Shard stood at the center of it all, a statue of cold wrath. Her porcelain face was flawless, but the vein pulsing at her tattooed temple betrayed her. She looked from Xiao Feng to the changed Maw, then back. The Secondary Team had failed. The Custodian was gone. The Anchor was not in their possession. And the Maw… the Maw was quiet.
"You," she said, the word a shard of ice. "What did you do?"
Xiao Feng, leaning on Lin, met her gaze. He had no strength left for lies or subterfuge. "The foreign object. The Anchor. It's gone. It's been… displaced. The Maw is no longer infected. It's just wounded now. It can heal."
"Displaced?" Shard's voice rose, cutting through the room. "You were ordered to secure it! Not to 'displace' it! Where is it?"
"Buried," Xiao Feng said flatly. "In a lobe of dead rock. Deep. It can't siphon from there."
A collective gasp. The technocrats stared at their readings in horror. The core of the Broken Blade's power, the source of the chaotic tribulation they weaponized, was no longer a bleeding wound, but a healing one. Their entire purpose had just been made obsolete.
Shard took a step forward, her Foundation Establishment aura pressing down like a mountain. "You have destroyed a legacy. You have crippled this chapter. For what? A moment of… empathy?" She spat the word like a curse.
"For an end to the infection," Xiao Feng said, his voice barely a whisper, but it carried in the stunned quiet. "The chaos wasn't a resource. It was a scream. The scream has stopped."
"Then you have made us deaf!" Shard roared. "Guards! Seize him. Seize all of them! They are traitors to the Shattered Star Alliance. Their flaws will be dismantled for study. Their bodies will fuel the forges until nothing remains!"
Blade warriors moved forward, their faces hard. Vex was among them, her mercury whip coiling, her expression unreadable.
This was it. The final betrayal. He had saved the world's soul and doomed his own.
But then, a new voice cut through the tension, dry and rustling like old paper.
"Chapter Master Shard. That would be… unwise."
Lum stepped from the shadows near a control console. He was no longer trying to blend in. His transparent body glowed with a soft, authoritative light, and in his hand, he held not a weapon, but a sigil—a complex, three-dimensional knot of shifting light that pulsed with ancient, undeniable authority.
Shard froze. "An Archive Sigil of Override. You… you're a Curator."
"An Archivist, yes," Lum corrected. "And this operation was under the Silent Archive's oversight. The artifact known as the Anchor was a Class-A Extradimensional Contaminant. Its secure containment, not its weaponization, was the priority. Probationary Blade Xiao Feng's actions, while unorthodox, have resulted in its neutralization and deep sequestration—a satisfactory outcome per Archive Protocol 7."
He was rewriting history. Turning Xiao Feng's rebellion into sanctioned protocol.
Shard's face was a mask of fury. "This is my chapter! My domain!"
"Your chapter exists in the Scarred Wastes, which falls under Archive Survey Jurisdiction," Lum stated, his hollow voice gaining a metallic finality. "By the authority of the Silent Archive, I am placing Chapter Master Shard under review for reckless endangerment of a world-spirit and mishandling of a dimensional contaminant. The Broken Blade chapter is hereby suspended pending investigation. All personnel will stand down."
He looked at Xiao Feng and his group. "The individuals designated Fang-7, along with associates Lin, Kaelan, and Lian, are remanded to Archive custody as material witnesses. They will be transported to a secure holding facility for debriefing."
It was a rescue. A brutal, bureaucratic, cold-blooded rescue. They were trading one cage for another, but the new cage had rules, not just cruelty.
Shard looked like she would shatter her own teeth. But she looked at the Archive sigil, at the Blade warriors who now hesitated, unsure who to obey. The Archive's influence was subtle, but absolute. To defy them was to be erased from history itself.
"This isn't over," she hissed, her gaze locked on Xiao Feng with a promise of eternal vengeance.
"For you, Chapter Master, I suspect it is," Lum said. He gestured to Xiao Feng. "Come. The shadow-caravan awaits. Your… pack is included in the extraction."
They were marched out of the Anteroom, past the seething Shard and the confused Blade warriors, up through the canyon. No one stopped them. The authority of the Archive was a ghost that chilled the blood of even the hardest killers.
At the northern rim, as Lum had promised, a strange vehicle awaited. It was long and low, made of a matte black material that seemed to drink the light, pulled by four beasts that were all sinew and silence. A shadow-caravan.
Lum ushered them inside. The interior was padded, silent, and windowless. As the door sealed, the last thing Xiao Feng saw was the Weeping Pillar in the distance, and the vast, sighing plume of the now-changed Maw.
The caravan moved, impossibly smooth and quiet.
In the dimness, they tended to Silent. The boy was alive, but his shadow was gone, utterly dissolved. He was just a pale, quiet boy now. His flaw had been burned out saving Xiao Feng.
Ember's flames were banked, his eyes hollow with spent adrenaline. Marrow's hands shook. Jinx stared at his own fingers as if they were foreign objects. They had been a weapon, and then they had been discarded. The whiplash was profound.
Lin checked Xiao Feng's injuries—superficial, but his spirit was a gaping void. "You're empty," she murmured.
He nodded. He had given everything. The storm-pride was a guttered candle. The Enforcer's focus was a cracked lens. The god-sorrow was a still, cold lake, now reflecting only exhaustion. The empathetic connection to the world's pain was a raw, open nerve. He was a palace of borrowed power, and every room was now dark.
Kaelan formed a chair of sand for him. Lian sat beside Silent, her own faint shadow trying to comfort him.
After an hour of silent travel, Lum spoke from the front of the compartment.
"The Archive is not a benevolent organization," he said, his back to them. "But it is logical. Your actions resolved a significant anomaly. Your testimony on the Anchor and the World-Spirit is invaluable data. Therefore, you have value. You will be taken to an Archive Enclave. You will be debriefed. Your flaws will be catalogued. You will be given a choice: enter Archive service as field agents for the study and containment of anomalies… or be placed in indefinite, but comfortable, stasis."
"Stasis?" Lin asked sharply.
"A dreamless sleep, in a secure vault. Your bodies and flaws preserved for future study. It is not a punishment. It is… curation."
It was the same choice the Broken Blade had given, wrapped in colder, more sterile paper. Be a tool, or be a specimen.
Xiao Feng closed his eyes. He was so tired. The hunger was gone, replaced by a hollow ache. He had fixed the big hurt. And in doing so, he had used up every bit of himself.
He had started as a Debt-Slave digging graves. He had become an Error, a Storm-Eater, a Catalyst, a Liberator.
Now, he was just… empty.
The shadow-caravan sped on, carrying them towards a future of questions, not battles. Towards the silent, watchful halls of the Archive, where stories were filed away, not lived.
Xiao Feng, the boy who ate tribulations, had finally found a tribulation he couldn't consume: the aftermath of victory.
And as the vehicle carried him into the unknown, a single, quiet thought echoed in the void where his hunger used to be:
What do I do now?