Chapter 40: Chapter 40: The Dawn, The Voice, and the Arbiter’s Gaze

The iron hammer remained poised in the grey light, a heavy extension of Lin Yue’s arm. The first nail had already bitten deep into the bottom-right corner of the coffin, and the reverberations of that strike still hummed through the floorboards.

The entity inside did not stop screaming. The sound had shifted from a roar of rage to a piercing, jagged frequency that seemed to peel the skin from the survivors’ nerves.

"You think you’ve won!" the voice shrieked, the multi-layered tones now vibrating in a discordant, manic harmony. "You think a few pieces of void-iron can hold back what I am? Lin Yue! Look at me! Look into the box and see the face of the only thing in this wretched system that actually loves you!"

Lin Yue did not look. He didn’t even blink. His gaze remained fixed on the top-left corner of the lid.

He reached for the second nail.

"Lin Yue, stop for a second!" Chen Hao wailed, his voice cracking. He was curled in a fetal position on the ash-covered floor, his fingers digging into the wood. "Can’t you hear it? It’s begging! It’s not a monster, it’s... it’s someone! We can’t just nail them shut! We’re murderers! We’re murdering someone!"

"Shut up, Chen Hao!" Xu Ning snapped, though her own voice was a thin, trembling wire. She was staring at Lin Yue, her eyes wide and glazed, reflecting a mixture of terror and a strange, desperate hope. "He’s the only one who knows what he’s doing. If he stops, we all die. We all become part of this... this funeral."

"But the voice!" Chen Hao sobbed. "It knows him! It knows his life! How can we just ignore that?"

Lin Yue ignored them both. To him, Chen Hao’s sobbing was merely another layer of the instance’s auditory noise. He positioned the second nail—the ’start’ that finds the ’end’—precisely in the top-left corner.

"I can give you everything, Lin Yue," the voice whispered, the tone suddenly shifting. The rage vanished, replaced by a tenderness so profound it felt predatory. It sounded like a mother’s lullaby, a lover’s secret. "I can tell you why you were born into that coldness. I can tell you who left you in those hallways. I can give you the memories the world stole from you. Just pull the nail out. Just lift the lid a fraction. Let me see your eyes, and I will give you back your soul."

The hammer descended.

Thud

The second nail entered the wood with a sickening, wet sound. The coffin bucked violently, throwing a spray of black, oily liquid across the floor. The liquid didn’t flow; it writhed, pulsing like a living vein.

"You heartless... empty... shell!" the entity screamed, the voice now sounding like a thousand glass mirrors shattering at once. "You are more of a corpse than I am! Do you think this detachment makes you strong? It makes you a void! You are nothing! A blank space in the shape of a man!"

He Rong, who had been watching Lin Yue with an intensity that bordered on hunger, stepped closer. Her breathing was shallow, her eyes tracing the line of Lin Yue’s jaw, the stillness of his shoulders.

"Is it true?" she murmured, her voice a silk thread of fascination. "Are you really that empty, Lin Yue? Or are you just so terrified of feeling something that you’ve turned yourself into a machine? Tell me. Just one word. Tell me you can hear it. Tell me you feel the pull."

Lin Yue didn’t answer. He didn’t look at it. He didn’t acknowledge its existence.

He moved to the sides. The third nail. The ’breath.’

As he positioned the spike on the right side of the lid, the environment began to distort. The funeral hall, which had felt like a solid, oppressive weight, started to tremble. The oil lamps, which had been flickering in the grey dawn, suddenly extinguished all at once, though the room remained illuminated by a sickly, sourceless light.

The incense smoke, which had been swirling in thick, suffocating clouds, suddenly froze. It hung in the air like shattered glass, motionless and sharp.

"Stop!" the voice from the coffin pleaded, now sounding like a frightened child, small and fragile. "Please... it’s getting cold. The darkness is coming back. Lin Yue, please... I’m so scared. Don’t leave me here. I’ll do anything. I’ll tell you the secret of the Flow. I’ll tell you how to get out of this nightmare for good. Just stop the hammer. Just for one second. Please."

"Lin Yue!" Xu Ning cried out, her hand reaching toward him, though she didn’t dare touch him. "Maybe it’s telling the truth! If it knows the way out—"

"It’s a lie!" He Rong hissed, though she didn’t move to stop him. She seemed captivated by the scene, her eyes shimmering with a dark curiosity. "Look at him, Xu Ning. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about the way out, or the truth, or the child’s voice. He only cares about the sequence. Isn’t it beautiful? The absolute purity of his indifference."

Lin Yue’s mind was a cold, analytical engine.

The hammer fell.

Thud

The third nail sank in. The entity let out a sound that wasn’t a scream, but a guttural, choking gasp, as if the nail had been driven through a lung.

The hall shuddered again, more violently this time. The fifty silent mourners, who had been frozen in their mimicry, began to change. One by one, they stopped breathing. Their chests ceased to rise and fall. Their expressions, already blank, became utterly void. They weren’t dead; they were simply off. Like puppets whose strings had been cut simultaneously.

Lin Yue moved to the left side. The fourth nail. The ’sight.’

"You think you’re surviving," the voice hissed, the tenderness gone, replaced by a cold, cosmic irony. "You think the System is testing you. You think the Arbiter is watching you because you’re special. How pathetic. You’re not a player, Lin Yue. You’re a specimen. A curiosity. A glitch that hasn’t been patched yet."

The voice began to laugh—a dry, rattling sound that seemed to come from every corner of the room.

"The Flow isn’t a game. It’s not a trial. It’s a digestive system. And you... you’re just the piece of gristle that’s too tough to swallow. But eventually, everything is broken down. Everything is absorbed. You think you’re escaping this funeral? You’re just moving to a larger one."

Lin Yue ignored the philosophy of the void. He ignored the laughter. He ignored the way the black liquid was now boiling, foaming up around the edges of the coffin in an attempt to swallow his boots.

He drove the fourth nail home.

Thud

The ’breath’ was bound. The ’sight’ was blinded.

The oppressive presence inside the coffin surged. It was no longer a voice; it was a mental assault. A tidal wave of raw, unfiltered emotion crashed into Lin Yue’s mind—grief, longing, hatred, and an agonizing sense of loneliness. It was a psychic scream that demanded recognition. It demanded that he feel.

Beside him, Chen Hao screamed and collapsed, his eyes rolling back into his head. Xu Ning fell to her knees, clutching her temples, her face contorted in a silent sob. Even He Rong staggered, her composure finally shattering as she gasped for air, her eyes wide with a sudden, inexplicable terror.

Lin Yue stood in the center of the storm.

The assault hit him, but there was nothing for it to latch onto. He had spent his entire life building a fortress of detachment. The grief found no echo; the longing found no void; the hatred found no spark. He was a mirror reflecting a storm, untouched by the rain.

He reached for the final nail. The heart.

The entity inside the coffin unleashed its final, most desperate gambit. The voice shifted one last time, becoming a perfect mirror of Lin Yue’s own voice—his own tone, his own cadence, his own detached inflection.

"Lin Yue," the voice said, sounding exactly like him. "The Flow is lying to you. The Arbiter is lying to you. The coffin was never the real prison. Look around you. Look at the hall. Look at the players. This isn’t the instance. You are the instance. You are the one being sealed."

For a fraction of a second, the logic of the statement flickered in Lin Yue’s mind. It was a sophisticated paradox, designed to create a moment of hesitation, a single crack in the armor of his certainty.

Lin Yue didn’t hesitate.

He didn’t ask for clarification. He didn’t wonder if the voice was right. He didn’t care if he was the prison or the prisoner.

He positioned the final nail in the exact center of the lid.

He raised the hammer.

"LIN YUE!" the entity shrieked, the voice now a cacophony of every player who had died in the instance, a chorus of the erased. "DON’T DO IT! IF YOU STRIKE THIS NAIL, YOU WILL NEVER—"

The hammer descended with the full weight of Lin Yue’s resolve.

CRACK

The sound was not a thud. It was a definitive, bone-shattering snap that echoed through the dimensions.

The moment the last nail entered the wood, the world stopped.

Every whisper ceased instantly. Every supernatural sound—the weeping, the scratching, the boiling liquid—vanished into a vacuum of absolute silence.

Madam Luo’s endless weeping stopped mid-sob. Her mouth remained open, a hollow O of grief, but no sound emerged.

Uncle Ren froze. His bloodless smile remained etched on his face, but his eyes went completely blank.

Master Qiu froze. Little Sheng froze.

Every single silent mourner in the hall became a statue. Their expressions weren’t peaceful. They weren’t relieved. They were simply blank. As though their purpose had ended, and the script they were following had suddenly run out of pages.

The silence lasted for three heartbeats.

Then, the funeral hall began to dissolve.

It didn’t happen violently. It happened with a quiet, terrifying elegance. The heavy white funeral cloths hanging from the beams began to unravel, not into threads, but into millions of tiny, shimmering particles of light.

The thick incense smoke, frozen like glass, suddenly shattered. The fragments drifted upward, dissolving into the air like salt in water.

The massive wooden pillars of the mourning hall began to flake away, the wood turning into floating fragments of grey ash that vanished before they could hit the floor. The structure of the room was losing its coherence, the walls bleeding into a pale, featureless void.

The mourners were next.

The fifty-odd figures began to disintegrate from the feet up. They didn’t struggle. They didn’t scream. They simply faded away, their blank faces the last thing to vanish, as if they were being erased by an invisible eraser.

Uncle Ren, Master Qiu, and Little Sheng faded with the same passive indifference. They were not people; they were functions of the instance, and the function was now complete. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

Lin Yue stood still, watching the world vanish.

He looked at the other survivors.

Xu Ning was still on her knees. She was physically intact, but her eyes were vacant. She was staring at a point in space that no longer existed, her mind clearly fractured by the final mental assault. She didn’t notice the walls disappearing around her.

Chen Hao was a shell. He lay on the floor, his eyes open and empty, his breathing shallow and mechanical. He looked disconnected from his own body, as if the "him" that had entered the instance had been hollowed out, leaving only a breathing husk.

He Rong was the only one who still looked at Lin Yue.

She was fading now, her legs already turning into motes of light. She didn’t look afraid. She looked... enlightened. There was a tragic, twisted smile on her lips as she stared at him.

"I see now," she whispered, her voice sounding distant, as if she were speaking from the bottom of a well. "I never truly understood you, did I? I thought you were just hiding. But there’s nothing to hide, is there? You really are... just a void."

She reached out a hand, but her fingers dissolved into light before she could touch him. She vanished with a final, lingering look of obsession, as though she were trying to memorize the shape of his emptiness.

Zhao Ming, who had been silent to the very end, gave Lin Yue one final, unsettling look. It wasn’t a look of fear or hatred, but a look of recognition. A knowing, predatory glint in his eyes that suggested he knew something Lin Yue didn’t.

Then, he too faded into the light.

The surviving players—those who had physically survived the trials—were not escaping. They were being absorbed into the conclusion of the instance. Whether they were returning to the Game Hall or being erased as defective remnants, Lin Yue didn’t know. He only knew that they were gone.

Eventually, the last fragment of the mourning hall vanished.

The coffin, the nails, the ash, and the blood were all gone.

Lin Yue was left standing alone.

But he was not in the Game Hall.

He found himself suspended in an endless, shimmering void. There was no floor, no ceiling, and no horizon. The space was composed of drifting streams of fractured code, cascading waterfalls of shimmering data, and countless floating fragments of information that flickered in and out of existence.

It was a cathedral of information, vast and incomprehensible. It felt as though he were standing inside the brain of a god—or the motherboard of a universe.

This was the first time Lin Yue had seen the "skeleton" of the Flow. He realized then that the instances were merely small, curated bubbles floating in this infinite sea of data. The horror was not the instances themselves, but the scale of the machinery that created them.

Then, a figure began to materialize.

The data streams parted, swirling around a central point of absolute gravity. A figure coalesced from the shimmering light, stepping out of the code as if stepping through a doorway.

Gu Yanchen.

The Arbiter stood before him, his presence fundamentally different from anything Lin Yue had encountered within the instance. He wasn’t ghostly, and he wasn’t monstrous. He didn’t possess the distorted quality of the NPCs.

He was simply absolute.

He wore his usual attire, his posture precise and effortless. He didn’t radiate heat or cold; he radiated authority. He felt like a fundamental law of physics given human form—something that could not be argued with, questioned, or defied.

Gu Yanchen did not speak.

He didn’t offer congratulations. He didn’t explain the nature of the void. He didn’t rescue Lin Yue or tell him he had passed the trial.

He simply stood there watching him.

Lin Yue looked back at him. For the first time since they had met, Lin Yue noticed a deviation.

Gu Yanchen’s gaze was usually a mirror—cold, indifferent, and reflective of nothing. But now, there was a subtle shift. The Arbiter’s eyes were narrowed slightly, his focus intense.

There was interest.

There was curiosity.

There was a quiet, analytical assessment that felt almost like a touch.

Gu Yanchen was studying him, not as a player to be managed or an anomaly to be erased, but as something unusual. Something that had defied the predicted outcome.

Lin Yue felt a strange, unfamiliar sensation ripple through him. It wasn’t attraction, and it wasn’t trust. It wasn’t even the fear he felt toward the entities in the coffin.

It was recognition.

It was the feeling of looking at someone who should not exist, and realizing that you, too, are an impossibility.

They stood in the silence of the data-void, two anomalies staring at one another. One was a man who had mastered the art of feeling nothing; the other was a being who had been stripped of everything human.

The tension between them was quiet and suffocating. It was the tension of two predators recognizing each other’s scent, or perhaps two ghosts recognizing the same graveyard.

Gu Yanchen’s gaze didn’t waver. He seemed to be searching for something in Lin Yue—a crack, a flicker of emotion, a sign of instability. But he found nothing. He found only the same mirrored void that he himself possessed.

For a long, suspended moment, the void around them seemed to pulse in time with their shared silence.

Then, the shimmering data began to shift.

A powerful, irresistible pull began to tug at Lin Yue’s essence. The transition was beginning. The System was dragging him back to the Game Hall, pulling him out of the "backstage" of the Flow and returning him to the role of a player.

Gu Yanchen did not follow. He did not reach out to stop him.

He simply continued to watch.

As the void began to fracture and the light of the transition blinded him, Lin Yue felt the Arbiter’s gaze lingering on him, an invisible mark that felt more permanent than any ritual nail.

As the consciousness of the Game Hall began to rush back—the sounds of other players, the coldness of the waiting area, the sterile air—a final realization settled over Lin Yue.

He thought of the coffin. He thought of the voice that had claimed to love him. He thought of the players who had vanished into light, their minds shattered.

By the end of the funeral, no one remembers who died first.

No one remembers who truly entered the coffin.

And no one knows who actually died.

Lin Yue closed his eyes as the light consumed him, the silence of the Arbiter still echoing in his mind.