Wei Zhong arrived at Longshan Temple in a black sedan with no plates and no driver. The car pulled up, stopped, and the rear door opened. He stepped out the way a professor steps into a lecture hall, unhurried, already aware of everything he was about to address.
He was older than Lin Yu expected. Mid-fifties, silver hair cropped short, wire-rimmed glasses that looked like an affectation until you realized they weren't. His suit was dark grey, impeccably fitted, the kind of clothing that communicated wealth through the absence of any visible brand. He carried nothing. No briefcase, no device, no weapon.
Kai snapped to attention. Actual military attention, heels together, spine rigid. Lin Yu had never seen him do that for anyone.
"Commander Zhao." Wei Zhong's voice was mild. Pleasant. Like a librarian greeting a regular patron. "Thank you for the escort."
"Councillor Wei." Kai's voice was parade-ground crisp. "The assessment room is prepared as requested."
"That won't be necessary. I prefer natural settings for readings." Wei Zhong turned to Lin Yu and smiled. "You must be the error."
The words were delivered without malice. Without judgment. Like stating a taxonomy classification. Seal Zero: Error. Lin Yu felt his skin prickle anyway.
"Lin Yu," he said.
"I know." Wei Zhong removed his glasses and cleaned them with a cloth that appeared from somewhere in his jacket. "I know quite a lot about you, actually. History student at National Taiwan University. GPA three point seven, would have been higher if you hadn't spent your junior year arguing with your Tang Dynasty professor about historiographic methodology. Parents in Taichung, father teaches secondary school mathematics, mother manages a stationery shop. You were Awakened fourteen days ago and have since acquired three divine fragments through methods that should be impossible."
He put the glasses back on.
"But those are facts. Facts are the easy part. Shall we discuss the interesting part?"
They sat in the temple's inner courtyard. Weilin had been asked to leave. She'd gone without protest, but Lin Yu caught the look she gave him at the door. Be careful. Kai stood against the wall, technically present, functionally furniture.
Wei Zhong crossed his legs and studied Lin Yu the way a collector studies a painting, checking for authenticity.
"Seal Twenty-Seven," Wei Zhong said, tapping his own chest. "Wen Chang. God of Literature and Knowledge. Depth Three. My ability, in simple terms, is comprehensive reading. I can perceive the complete text of a person. Their history, their intentions, their capabilities, their karma alignment, their psychological architecture. Everything that makes you, you, written out for me like a book."
"That sounds like a violation of about twelve privacy laws."
"Sixteen, actually. The Council has exemptions." Wei Zhong leaned forward slightly. "May I?"
Lin Yu didn't really see how he could refuse. He nodded.
Wei Zhong's eyes changed. Not the color, but something behind them. A focus that went beyond visual perception into territory Lin Yu's soul sight recognized as divine-spectrum. The air between them thickened.
Seconds passed.
Wei Zhong's brow furrowed. His expression, which had been perfectly composed since arrival, developed a crack.
More seconds. The furrow deepened.
"Interesting," Wei Zhong said, and for the first time his voice carried something other than cultured control. He sounded unsettled. "I can read your surface layers without difficulty. Childhood memories, academic record, emotional patterns. Your fear is genuine, your confusion is real, your attachment to the shelter residents registers as sincere. All perfectly legible."
"But?"
"But Seal Zero itself is opaque." Wei Zhong removed his glasses again. This time his hand wasn't entirely steady. "I've read Depth Four Bearers. I've read individuals whose divine integration was so complete they'd nearly Ascended. Nothing has ever been illegible to me. Your seal is not hidden. It is actively encrypted. There is a layer of interference that is not divine in origin, not technological, not karmic. It predates the categorization system entirely."
He put his glasses on the table between them. The small gesture felt significant, like a swordsman laying down his weapon.
"Commander Zhao. A word."
Kai stepped forward. Wei Zhong spoke to him with the quiet precision of someone delivering a diagnosis they wished was different.
"Seal Zero is not a malfunction. It is not a mutation or a system error. It is a deliberate insertion into the divine framework by an entity, or process, that predates the seventy-two gods themselves. The encryption on the seal is architectural. It's built into the system's foundation layer. Whoever, or whatever, created Seal Zero had access to the system's source code."
Kai's composure held, but barely. "Your assessment for the Council?"
"My assessment is that we are dealing with one of two scenarios. Either Seal Zero is a weapon designed to disrupt the divine system from within, or it is a tool designed to repair it. The Council must determine which before the next Correction Tribulation forces the question."
He turned back to Lin Yu.
"I am authorized to offer you the following arrangement. You will accompany me to the Council's research facility near Mount Kunlun. The facility is located in what we classify as a Black Zone, a region of concentrated divine energy that allows deeper analysis than is possible in civilian territory. There, our specialists will conduct a complete examination of Seal Zero's architecture."
"And in exchange?"
"The Council will suspend your Correction Tribulation schedule. No more escalating threats. No more system-generated beasts hunting you through Taipei. Full protection under Council authority."
It sounded perfect. It sounded exactly like something designed to sound perfect.
"How long would this examination take?"
"That depends on what we find."
"That's not an answer."
Wei Zhong smiled again. Same mild expression, same librarian warmth. Except now Lin Yu knew what was behind it. A mind that could read people like open books, attached to an organization that viewed divine Bearers as assets to be understood and managed.
"You have twenty-four hours to decide. I'll be staying at the Grand Hyatt. Commander Zhao can provide the contact details." He stood, collected his glasses, and walked toward the courtyard exit. At the threshold, he paused. "One more thing. The Fragment Weaving technique you demonstrated yesterday at the construction site. I observed it remotely. It's remarkable work for someone with fourteen days of experience."
He left.
Fourteen days of experience. And the Council had been watching the construction site. Lin Yu looked at Kai.
"Did you know he was observing?"
Kai's jaw tightened. "No."
"But you're not surprised."
"The Council sees everything, Lin Yu. That's the point of the Council." Something in his tone suggested this was no longer something he said with comfort.
That evening, Weilin found Lin Yu on the temple roof. He'd been staring at the city for an hour, turning the offer over in his mind like a puzzle box.
"Don't go," she said.
"The Tribulation timer is at nineteen hours. Whatever's coming next is beyond Elite class. The Council can stop that."
"They don't want to protect you. They want to understand you." She sat next to him, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her Guanyin aura, the gentle pulse of Mercy energy that she kept carefully below eighty-eight these days. "And what they understand, they control. That's what organizations like the Council do. They find things they can't explain, and they study them until the mystery is gone, and then they file the results and move on. You'd be a research subject, not a person."
"And if I stay here, I'm a target."
"You're a target either way. At least here you have people who care whether you survive the targeting."
He looked at her. The green glow was dimmer than usual. She was rationing her healing, keeping her karma carefully in check. Being deliberately less good so she wouldn't die from goodness. There was something deeply broken about a system that punished compassion.
"You know what's funny?" he said. "I spent my whole degree studying dead gods. Now I'm living inside one of their stories, and I still can't tell who the hero is supposed to be."
She almost smiled. "Maybe that's the point. Maybe the system doesn't want heroes. It wants believers."
"Then it picked the wrong guy."
"Or exactly the right one."
He noticed something then. Wei Zhong's karma aura, which he'd read as calm scholarly blue during the meeting. From this distance, in the dark, with soul sight fully open, the aura had a second layer underneath. A thin strand of something that wasn't blue at all. Dark gold. Almost the same color as the system's own interface.
Lin Yu filed that away and said nothing. He was probably imagining it. Stress, exhaustion, fear. Reading too much into a color.
He was wrong about that. But he wouldn't know for another sixty chapters.
She didn't say anything else. She didn't need to.
Lin Yu lay back on the temple roof tiles and stared at the sky. The Correction Tribulation timer ticked down in his peripheral vision. 18:47:33. Eighteen hours and change until something terrible arrived. The Council's offer glittered like a trap baited with safety.
He closed his eyes.
And Seal #0 spoke.
Not words this time. Not the brief phrases it had offered before, cryptic and vanishing. This was an image, projected directly into his visual cortex with a clarity that made his actual eyesight feel blurry by comparison.
A door.
Deep underground. He could feel the weight of stone above it, kilometers of rock pressing down. The door was massive, carved from material that wasn't stone or metal but something older, something that absorbed light instead of reflecting it. Its surface was covered in symbols. Seventy-two of them, arranged in concentric circles, each one corresponding to a divine seal. He recognized some. Seal Twelve, Guanyin. Seal Thirty-One, Nezha. Seal Fifty-Five, Lei Gong.
All seventy-two. Every god in the system represented on a single door.
And in the center, a keyhole. Shaped like nothing he'd ever seen in any mythology textbook, any archaeological survey, any museum collection. A shape that was familiar anyway, in the way that your own heartbeat is familiar. You don't need to see it to know what it looks like.
The shape of Seal Zero.
The image dissolved. Lin Yu opened his eyes. The city lights blurred above him. His heart was hammering.
Somewhere deep in the earth, behind a door sealed with seventy-two divine locks, something was waiting. And the key was sitting in his chest, broken and encrypted and labelled ERROR.
Eighteen hours.
---
Next chapter: "The Second Tribulation" — The system doesn't send one beast this time. It sends thirty-four. And Wei Zhong watches the entire battle without lifting a finger.
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