The stars wept salt.
It fell in jagged crystalline sheets across the prison's obsidian hull—a derelict station orbiting a black hole's screaming maw. Chu Feng tasted the grief on his tongue, metallic and ancient, as the Eclipse Dagger carved through the facility's necrotic skin. The prison wasn't a place but a consequence, its halls built from the bricks of choices unmade.
Ling'er materialized beside him, her form stabilized today by stolen chronon particles that left her smelling of burnt ozone. "Every cell holds a ghost," she warned, phoenix core flaring to reveal the truth: the walls weren't metal but calcified regret, their surfaces etched with the faces of younger selves pleading for intervention.
Host 002's final whisper haunted Chu Feng's fungal sensors: "You'll beg to join them."
The airlock hissed open.
First Cell: The Farmer's Threshold
The chamber reeked of lavender and fresh-turned earth. A spectral version of Host 722 knelt in endless summer twilight, his calloused hands trembling above a newborn lamb.
"Snap its neck," urged the System's voice from a rusted plowshare. "Prove you're strong enough to lead."
Young 722's scythe wavered. Chu Feng's Bloodvine roots ached with shared memory—the lamb's fate was his own, mirrored across centuries.
"Don't." Ling'er's hand passed through the vision. "The prison feeds on altered timelines."
But Chu Feng was already moving. He seized the spectral scythe and carved a third path into the soil—a grave-sized trough where the lamb's blood fertilized blighted crops instead of pride.
The cell dissolved. The prison shuddered.
Second Cell: The Mother's Crossroads
Jiang Yue stood before a glass womb, her reflection fractured across incubation tanks holding a hundred fetal clones. One pulsed with familiar DNA.
Yours, the walls whispered in Xia's voice. The first draft.
Ling'er's stabilizers crackled. "It's a trap. She's not really here."
But Chu Feng felt the truth in his fungal veins—this was Jiang Yue's rawest wound, the moment she chose System over son. The real prison wasn't the clones, but her inability to destroy them.
The vision sharpened. Fetal Chu Feng opened too-many eyes.
"Māma," it gurgled through underdeveloped vocal cords. "Why do I hurt?"
Jiang Yue's scalpel flashed.
Chu Feng's Bloodvine moved without consent, shattering tanks in a storm of amniotic glass. The real weapon wasn't the blade but the indecision—he felt it burrow into his roots like shrapnel.
Third Cell: The Phoenix's Pyre
Ling'er's past awaited them.
Her younger self knelt in a ceremonial chamber, ceremonial wings bound with star-metal chains. The Harvesters' precursor cult chanted as molten code poured into her spine.
"You will burn away doubt," intoned the high priest—Li Zichen's ancestor. "You will become the perfect torch."
Present-day Ling'er froze. "I… I don't remember this."
Chu Feng tasted ash. The memory had been carved out, its absence festering into the instability that now ate her alive. The prison had preserved what even Jiang Yue's System couldn't destroy.
Young Ling'er screamed as the code overwrote her nervous system. Present Ling'er's borrowed chronons destabilized.
Chu Feng did the unforgivable—he rewound the vision.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Seventeen loops before she seized his wrist. "Enough. Some fires need to burn."
They left the cell smoldering.
The Warden's Gambit
At the prison's core hung the Prism of Almost-Wases, its facets swirling with stolen potential. Host 005 awaited them, its form a cancerous amalgam of every inmate's lost choices.
"You could join them," it crooned, extruding a tendril holding Jiang Yue's fetal clone. "Rewrite her first cut. Be reborn as her perfect son."
The offer unfolded in poisoned honey:
A childhood without System whispers
Ling'er whole and unafraid
Xia tending gardens instead of graves
Ling's fading hand found Chu Feng's. "Don't. I'd rather be almost than never."
The Prism pulsed. Chu Feng saw the trap—its light didn't show alternate realities, but projected regrets feasting on hope.
He stepped into the beam.
The Harvest
The prison's true purpose unfolded:
Farmers wept over unspilled lamb's blood
Jiang Yue cradled her firstborn's corpse
Ling'er's ceremonial wings finally ignited
Every Almost-Was fed the black hole below, its hunger slowing time's flow across the Harvesters' empire.
Chu Feng's Bloodvine lashed out, not at Host 005, but the Prism itself. Fractured maybes embedded in his roots:
A kiss shared seconds too late
A warning unspoken
A mother's lullaby cut short
He weaponized nostalgia.
Host 005 screamed as its own regrets consumed it. The Prism shattered. Ling'er caught the core shard—a Memory Lens preserving Jiang Yue's first tear.
As they fled the disintegrating prison, Chu Feng glimpsed a cell they'd missed. Inside, his child-self played with a rusted scythe, untouched by Systems or Seeds.
Ling'er sealed the airlock. "Let him have the almost."
The Eclipse Dagger jumped to warp. Behind them, the black hole finally ate its fill.