The Void wasn't black.
It had no color at all.
Chen Mo lowered his head and looked at his hands.
He could see them.
But he had no idea where the light was coming from.
“Stop looking.”
Chen Mo from his previous life—or rather, Courier No. 7—was sitting cross-legged in the void.
His golden courier uniform was spotless, and the character “7” on his chest glimmered faintly.
“There’s no light here, and no darkness.”
“There’s only ‘what hasn’t happened yet.’”
Chen Mo frowned.
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” Courier No. 7 said, snapping his fingers, “that this is the crack between the doors.”
“When the bronze door closed, you wedged yourself inside it.”
Chen Mo remembered that final flash of white light.
He really had thrown the fragment toward the crack in the door.
“So right now, I’m…”
“Barely alive, I guess.”
Courier No. 7 shrugged.
“Your body is unconscious in the Mortal Realm, while your soul is drifting in the crack.”
“If you’re lucky, Meng Po will fish you out.”
“If you’re unlucky…”
He paused.
“You’ll turn into someone like me.”
Chen Mo looked him over.
“What are you now?”
“A remnant soul.”
Courier No. 7 smiled as though it were nothing worth mentioning.
“Back then, seven people closed the door. I was in charge of covering the rear.”
“The instant the door shut, half my soul was severed.”
“One half entered the cycle of reincarnation and became you.”
“The other half stayed here and became me.”
Chen Mo’s heart sank.
“So you’ve been here this whole time?”
“Three hundred years.”
Courier No. 7 held up three fingers.
“Three hundred years. No one to talk to, no light, no time.”
“Only when the crack in the door opened once in a while could I see the excitement outside.”
His tone was calm.
So calm that it sent a chill through Chen Mo’s heart.
“What that ghost runner said was true?”
Chen Mo asked.
“Back then… were we trying to steal something?”
Courier No. 7 was silent for a while.
Then he smiled.
“He was half right.”
“We did bring something out from behind the door.”
“But we didn’t steal it.”
Courier No. 7 stood up.
A scene suddenly appeared in the Void.
A massive city.
There were no buildings in it.
Only countless floating doors.
Every door opened onto a different world.
Behind some doors was a sea of fire.
Behind others was a glacier.
And behind still others was an endless starry sky.
“What’s behind those doors isn’t some homeland.”
Courier No. 7’s voice changed.
It grew heavy.
“It’s a prison.”
“It holds the things Heavenly Dao cannot tolerate.”
The scene zoomed in.
Chen Mo saw them.
Countless figures were locked behind those doors.
Some had three heads and six arms.
Some had no facial features.
And some…
Were simply masses of black mist constantly changing shape.
“They aren’t gods, and they aren’t demons.”
Courier No. 7 spoke.
“They’re ‘errors.’”
“Bugs generated as Heavenly Dao operates.”
“They should have been deleted, but couldn’t be, so they could only be locked away.”
Chen Mo swallowed.
“Then the thing we brought out…”
“Was a key.”
Courier No. 7 turned to look at him.
“A key capable of fully opening every door.”
“Back then, the seven of us thought that if we controlled the key, we could control those ‘errors.’”
“We could become the new Heavenly Dao.”
“So we established Three Realms Express.”
“We used reincarnation as the logistics network and causality as the delivery slips.”
“We turned the entire Three Realms…”
Courier No. 7 gave a bitter smile.
“Into our warehouse.”
Chen Mo’s head buzzed.
“Then why did you close the door?”
“Because we discovered that we were wrong.”
Courier No. 7 lowered his voice.
“Those ‘errors’ weren’t prisoners.”
“They were…”
“They were what?”
“They were the remains of the previous Heavenly Dao.”
A muffled thunderclap rang out in the Void.
It wasn’t real thunder.
It was the tremor of some rule being disturbed.
Courier No. 7’s expression changed.
“Oh no.”
“We’ve said too much.”
“They’re listening.”
Chen Mo whipped around.
Something was approaching from the depths of the Void.
Not one thing.
Countless things.
They had no form.
Only pairs of eyes.
Golden, blood-red, and ghastly white.
They drifted up and down in the darkness.
“Run!”
Courier No. 7 grabbed Chen Mo by the wrist.
“I’m sending you back!”
“How?”
“With this!”
Courier No. 7 pulled something from inside his robes.
It was a delivery slip.
Yellowed, battered, and burned along the edges.
The recipient line read:
“Chen Mo, Mortal Realm, Yellow Springs Station Ruins.”
The sender line read:
“Courier No. 7, Door Crack, Void.”
“What is this…”
“A karmic delivery slip.”
Courier No. 7 slapped the slip against Chen Mo’s chest.
“As long as you accept delivery, you’ll be ‘sent’ back.”
“But it has a side effect.”
Chen Mo lowered his head and looked at the delivery slip.
“What side effect?”
“You’ll forget everything you heard here.”
Courier No. 7 stared into his eyes.
“Not the kind of forgetting caused by Meng Po’s Soup.”
“It’s erasure at the level of the rules.”
“You’ll remember meeting me.”
“But you won’t remember anything I said.”
Chen Mo froze.
“Then I came here for nothing?”
“Not for nothing.”
Courier No. 7 smiled.
He reached out and tapped Chen Mo once on the forehead.
A chill seeped into Chen Mo’s mind.
“This is a ‘seed.’”
“When the time is right, it’ll sprout on its own.”
“And then…”
“You’ll remember everything.”
The eyes in the distance were drawing closer and closer.
The invisible pressure made it hard for Chen Mo to breathe.
“Sign it! Hurry!”
Courier No. 7 urged him on.
“Use your name!”
“Chen Mo?”
“No!”
A trace of madness flashed in Courier No. 7’s eyes.
“Use your true name!”
“Use the name engraved on the Three-Lives Stone!”
Chen Mo’s mind thundered.
He didn’t know how he did it.
But at that moment,
his hand automatically closed around the pen.
On the delivery slip,
he wrote two characters—
“Guiyi.”
The instant the pen left the paper,
the entire Void exploded.
Chen Mo felt himself forced into a narrow passage.
Spinning wildly.
Plummeting.
And then—
“Boom!”
He opened his eyes.
He saw a ceiling.
A drab wooden ceiling covered in cracks.
“You’re awake?”
Big Bro One’s face appeared in his field of vision.
His face was bruised and swollen.
But he was still alive.
“You were unconscious for three days.”
Big Bro One handed him a bowl of water.
“Meng Po said that if you didn’t wake up, she was going to force-feed you the real Meng Po’s Soup.”
Chen Mo propped himself up and sat.
His whole body felt as though it had been run over by a truck.
He lowered his head and looked at his hands.
His palms were empty.
There was nothing there.
“I…”
“What happened?”
Chen Mo frowned.
He remembered meeting Courier No. 7.
He remembered the Void.
He remembered those eyes.
But what Courier No. 7 had said…
It really was like someone had erased it with a rubber.
Only a vague outline remained.
Only two characters were still clearly carved deep in his mind—
Guiyi.
“Nothing.”
Chen Mo took the bowl of water.
“Big Bro One.”
“Yeah?”
“Have you ever heard…”
He paused.
“The name ‘Guiyi’?”
Big Bro One’s expression instantly froze.
The bowl slipped from his hand.
“Clang!”
It shattered into pieces.
“You…”
Big Bro One’s voice trembled.
“How do you know that name?”
Before Chen Mo could answer,
a system notification suddenly popped up—
[Emergency Notice!] [Change detected in host soul imprint!] [New imprint name: Guiyi.] [Permission level: ???] [System unable to identify. Reporting to headquarters…] [Report failed.] [No response from headquarters.] [Repeat: No response from headquarters.]
At the same time,
in the depths of the Yellow Springs Station Ruins,
the bronze door that had already disappeared—
in a place no one could see,
within the crack of the door,
a drop of black liquid slowly seeped out.
The liquid fell to the ground. It transformed into a single character—
“7”