Chapter three: World three-- Silent hunt

  I had chosen a death outside its aesthetic. Messy. Uncontrolled. Unglamorous. And I saw that look of the collector, a look of waiting before my vision got blurred. And then I woke up with a piercing shout. My wrist was giving me a faint burn, and the ribbon was showing 叁 (3) glowing in it's moonlit silver light. Instinctively, my hands reached for my throat, and my hand touched a little blood on my palm. I survived.

  The wounds closed up. The skin knit together and regenerated almost instantly, leaving only fresh memory of pain and cooling blood as proof.

  "My wounds are closed..... I was right. There are two possible ways to ascend. Sleep and Death." The realization was cold and solid like a glacier. In World 1, the trigger was passive—sleep, because there was no danger of killing. In World 2, it became active alive, a death you had to choose, just to ascend. It was only for a moment that the surroundings gave me realization.

  I was sitting in the middle of a road made of fused, black glass, it was warm beneath me. The sky was dull, pitch black, polluted with sprinkles of dust. Without any sun nor stars or any source of light, yet everything was visible in shadowless twilight.

  I could see even without any light there. Everything was getting more nonsensical. The silence was different here. Not a curated silence, but a muffled silence, almost like the world was packed in cotton wool. My own breath sounded loud in the silence.

  With a moving motion, I stand tall. My legs were still, and my body whole, but I felt... Almost a hollow feeling. The rage that made me put a shard in my own throat was gone, leaving behind fatigue and my last gasp. I was mentally exhausted, my eyes couldn't focus clearly.

  And the buildings of the town lining the glass road were where the true absurdity began. They were not built. They were grown all by themselves. There were structures of petrified wood and smooth stone towering in nonsensical shapes, there were arches that led to solid rock, doorways, three floors without any stairs.

  Windows were mismatched, some filled with what looked like burnt wood, and some with ash. The source of the muffled noise was the humming of wind, the frequency piercing through my soul, shaking my will.

  This world was drowning in its own silence, my footsteps making almost no sound on the glass. The ribbon's light, 叁, was the only sharp color in this monotonous world. My eyes shifted to a corner and I froze. In the middle of an intersection stood a figure completely motionless. It was a Ji Tang, a flesh made for listening. It had no eyes in the place of the pair of eyes, he had two thorns piercing through it.

  It was humanoid, but utterly still and silent. Its skin had the same texture of petrified wood. It was posed, one arm was slightly raised, its face slightly tilted upward. It looked like a statue, but wasn't. Might be a person who had been turned into one. I could clearly see the fine details of its clothing, frozen in stone, like a flow, and the expression on its face, not terror, but a deep, profound listening. A sudden warning shivered down my spine. Don't make a sound! But the world was already humming. I took five cautious steps back, my ankle hit a piece of wood. And it happened what I didn't want to happen. It was predestined.

  SCRITCH.

  The figure moved. Not with life, but with a sudden, jerking re-orientation. Its stone head snapped down from the sky to look directly at me. Its raised arm pivoted, a finger now pointing at my chest. The movement was silent, swift, and utterly horrifying. What happened next was what I expected but also unexpected. There was a hole in my chest, and beside me that same figure stood. His finger went through my chest.

  The pain was immense, giving me the sensation of a gunshot. The pain was a frost fire burning my chest yet cooling my entire body. Each heartbeat increases the pain further. I could feel that sensation, the vibration of my lungs, and Blood flowing like a river through my chest. My face, flabbergasted I could not response immediately, then, with some steps back, I maintained the distance, and his hand was still standing motionless, his hand at the exact same angle as before.then another soul-tearing realization hit me.

  "I.... I'm not dying. What is wrong with why am I still here? Why didn't I die?" There was an unanswered question. I clenched my chest feeling all the pain. I looked at the figure again, his hollow eyes staring at my soul. Those eyes meant nothing but just instinct. A new rule crystalized in my mind, colder than the glass beneath me.

  World 1 was peace, World 2 was a game of tag, but what is World 3.... A silent hunt?

  The wrong sound, the wrong movement, would it turn me to petrified wood? Would I become another frozen listener in this silent, humming gallery? This time it was different. I couldn't die if any of these beings attacked me.

  I had to suffer this pain. My breathing was heavy with the weight of insufferable pain, but standing here without purpose was so foolish that things could get aggressive once again. The cold clarity settled down. I looked at the ribbon, at the silver 叁. I had refused to be the Collector's Art. Now, I had to learn how to be a ghost in a world that turned the exhibits into statues. I had to move. But more than that, I had to become inaudible, invisible, irrelevant. I had to walk through World 3 without letting it listen to me.

  I took a long silent breath, and focused on the weight of my feet, and began to move with more caution than before. My legs were feeling wobbly from the pain. My hands were filled with crimson blood. I knew that the only way to stop the suffering was to ascend to World 4.

  "Damn it, how long do I have to keep hiding? Should I die again ?" I thought of using the same tactics as before, but this time I thought, "It doesn't matter how many times I die, but the next world is not going to be soothing." Ascending to the next world means reaching for another horror. Certainly more terrifying. I moved further slowly, forgetting the pain and reaching for an isolated place.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  I saw a lamp standing tall there. My gaze shifted to a tree and I saw something staring at a bird…the bird was black like a moonless night, its eyes glowed purple, its wings were made of feathers but not only feathers, it was decorated as if it were someone's pet. The bird was humming a tune that was audible and stopping the silence from coming. On the ground beneath it, there was a figure: an impossibly lean man wearing black clothes and a very silly-looking cap that had five corners and a long tip. My gaze looked upon his hands…there were no hands. I thought that was the only awkward thing, but then he looked at me, with a long grin, his nose half broken. "What in the horror have I fallen into?" I thought, and I moved away quickly.

  I was trying to find a way to ascend. I looked into a low archway of bulbous stone, my back was against a cold, vibrating membrane. I needed a good plan, not just panic. As my eyes adjusted, I saw it. Not carved, but condensed like frost on glass, on the amber pane of a nearby window. Words, in a graceful, desperate hand.

  “The Conductor hears but does not listen. His bird sings the only true note. To move forward, you must first create silence. Then move to the well in the south. There, you will find the well and your next step. Lin.” A name. A person. Someone who had been here, understood this, and left a message for whoever came next. The script was fresh, the condensation still beading. I reached out, not to touch the words, but to feel the surrounding air.

  The condensation wasn't water. It was a byproduct of silenced resonance, tiny droplets of null-frequency beading on the amber. As my shadow fell over the script, the humming in the membrane behind me changed pitch, flattening into a warning drone. This wasn't just a note. It was a tripwire. Lin hadn't just left a message; she'd left it in a place that would alert anyone, or anything, they are still human and attuned to reading it. I was now on a clock. I memorized the words in two heartbeats.

  The Conductor hears but does not listen...

  "This indeed sounds weird. What does she mean by this?”

  My eyes scanned the rest of the pane. In the very corner, almost invisible, was a second, smaller mark: a star, identical to the one on the locket in my pocket and the box from the shop. She’d been here. She’d seen the same connections. And she’d marked this as a verified truth. She couldn’t be long gone. The clue was a paradox. Create silence? There was another chosen one and, from my guess, she would be here for a long time. And then I thought of the words, in a world that was all hum? My eyes drifted back to the intersection, to the grinning Conductor and his adorned Bird.

  The bird’s purple eyes pulsed in time with the deepest layer of the hum. It wasn’t a pet. It was a live tuning fork, the source of the local frequency. The Conductor wasn’t its master. He was its custodian, ensuring its note remained pure. To create silence, you must first steal the song. The logic of this absurd place clicked into place, cold and sharp. I needed that bird. I waited, becoming part of the architecture, until the Conductor’s gaze, hollow and distracted, wandered toward a dissonant ripple in the distant hum. I moved behind the conductor who was staring at a scarecrow, a weird-looking doll almost alive. He had the same wide grin filled with false emotions. My neck tilted upward and there, the bird was still humming the same monotonous song.

  I quickly took the bird. An unexpected thought crossed my mind, and the bird seemed reluctant to leave. It was caught in my grasp now the soft airy flesh was comfortable in my hand. In my grasp, the bird made a soft chirping sound, pure, clear and flat vibrated my marrow bone. A song that was the most beautiful, yet the most terrible sound I’d ever heard.

  The bird didn't struggle. It's beautiful purple eyes stared deeper at my soul, and in them, there was no fear of prey. There was a glimpse of sad, exaggerated twinkles. It was a sacred object, and I was a defiler. My hands trembled. Lin's clue demanded silence. This was the only way. The silencing effect from the note was immediate.

  The Silent Listeners at the edge of the plaza didn’t react. They simply… calmed, their stony postures easing as if soothed. The wrong sound, the wrong movement, would it turn me to petrified wood? Would I become another frozen listener in this silent, humming gallery? This time it was different. I couldn't die if any of these beings attacked me.

  The Conductor went preternaturally still. Then, he turned. Not his body, but his head, rotating farther than any joint should allow, the long grin fixed on me.

  Lin’s clue said create silence. But how could I silence a bird? So I had to do the only permanent thing. But I did hesitate to kill an innocent bird whose only responsibilities were to create sound in silence to make the world alive.

  With deep hesitation, I twisted its neck. It made no sound. But the effect was instantaneous and violent. The perfect note shattered. Not into noise, but into a vacuum of sensation. A sphere of absolute, deafening void erupted from the dead bird in my hands. The Silent Listeners convulsed. Cracks webbed across their stone forms. And the Conductor… unmade.

  The Conductor didn't scream. The world screamed for him. The petrified wood of the nearby buildings scattered with reports like gunshots. The glass path beneath me shattered, each producing a high pitched sound, while the echo of shattering glass resonated through the air.

  His form wasn't just revealed; it was born from the revelation of his disguise as a human. The silly cap was consumed by the two vortex-eyes opened on his face, and vortices that spun not light, but layers of grief of the undead: the whisper of a lost lullaby of this world, then the fading echo of a final scream, the immutable hum of a world whose heart had stilled.

  "THIEF!" the word did not hit my ears. It unfolded inside my skull, a concept stamped directly onto my consciousness."MURDERER. YOU HAVE BROKEN THE CHORD." It wasn’t angry. It was incomprehensibly bereft. I hadn’t just stolen its instrument; I had killed a fundamental piece of the world’s music.

  It moved toward me, not by walking, but by re-tuning the space between us. The ground harmonized into a wave that carried it forward. The dead bird in my hands crumbled into ash. I was defenseless. But I couldn't stay there with another move, I reached for the lamp and when it appeared. My hand closed around the lamp. It wasn't metal, but a solidified resin of hardened soundwaves, cold and strangely fuzzy.

  I didn't aim. I just flung it in the path of the advancing resonance-being. It didn't hit. When it crossed into the field of distorted space around the Conductor, it unraveled. The solid form blurred, stretching into a long, wailing note that was immediately shredded into dissonant fragments.

  It bought me two seconds. I turned and ran, not with human speed, but with the desperate, lung-burning propulsion of a creature being deleted from reality. I ran towards the south according to what Lin said. As I ran, the world was bleeding. The once-uniform hum was now a cacophony of dying frequencies. The amber windows wept viscous, slow-moving tears of solidifying resonance.

  The path to the south wasn't a street anymore; it was a scar making a way through the city, the ground softening under my feet into something like pitch, clinging to my shoes with every step I took forward. And the air itself felt thin, starved of its sustaining vibration. I wasn't just running from the Conductor. I was running through the death throes of a realm I had mortally wounded.

  Then I saw a well there. The well wasn't stone. It was a perfect cylinder of absolute silence. The surrounding air didn't hum; it was dead, void. Looking into it was like looking into a hole cut out of existence itself. There was no reflection, and no bottom, all it was just an infinite fall into quiet. Some words weren't carved on its rim; they were floating in the air just above the silent void like some projections. It was shimmering like the person who wrote them was fading. I had to lean into null-space just to read them, the absence of sound making my own heartbeat loud like thunder.

  “The Box, it’s… reacting to disruption... The Conductor is a symptom, not the source…find the hollow tree where the roots drink silence… Next thing you have to do yourself." The hollow tree. The image from my first moments here flashed—the twisted, petrified tree near the first Ji Tang that attacked me.

  Its roots had looked like they were burrowing into the glass, not for water, but for something else. Now I understand. They were siphoning the foundational silence the world tried to mask with its hum. It wasn't just a tree. It was a silence, well, an anchor point. And Lin was telling me to go to the epicenter of the very thing this world feared.

  I stood at the silent well, the crumbling note of the dead world in my ears, the ghostly words of a girl named Lin fading before my eyes. I had come here to escape, to ascend. Instead, I had become a catalyst for collapse. The Box, the ribbon, the Collector, the Conductor—they were all pieces of a system, and I was kicking apart its foundations. The hollow tree wasn't just the next step.

  It was a point of leverage. To silence a world of noise, you don't just break a speaker. You find the amplifier and rip out its power source. A shudder passed through the dead air. Not a sound, but a propagation of absence. He was coming. The Conductor. The guardian of a song I had murdered. And he wasn't coming to fight. He was coming to conduct my final, permanent rest in the void.

  I was going to move before. The Conductor-entity loomed over me, a standing wave of grief and fury, raising a limb that was now a blade of focus, I noticed instantly those hands were not his! He was going to erase me from the song permanently. I had the clue from Lin. I had a desperate, failing signal of words. And I had awakened the true heart of World 3’s horror. The song of the eternal void.