The bronze floor reeked of sulfur. By his forty-seventh heartbeat, Lu Zhao was certain this wasn't a dream.
Three hundred and two birdcage prisons hung suspended in the void, each inmate branded with an ouroboros sigil on their wrist. Above him, a man in a hospital gown had melted into an amber-like substance, dripping between the bars and solidifying into cuneiform tablets of The Epic of Gilgamesh.
"Cognitive restructuring protocol initiated."
The mechanical voice echoed, and in unison, they fell.
In the weightless plunge, Lu Zhao glimpsed fragments of madness—an astronaut cradling a Mayan crystal skull, a monk shrouded in floating Tibetan mantras, the office lady from the subway platform scribbling equations in blood to solve the Riemann hypothesis.
Then his feet hit sand.
The archways of the Colosseum slammed shut overhead. Weathered stone walls split open—a thousand bronze eyes blinking awake. Their searing light burned afterimages into Lu Zhao's retinas, each pupil flashing humanity's death scenes: lovers fossilized in Pompeii's ash, a wristwatch frozen at Hiroshima's ground zero, the last distress signal from the Mars colonies—
"Welcome to the Library of Babel."
A girl in a blood-red uniform stood atop the highest shrine, her schoolgirl skirt stained with stardust, thigh-high socks bandaged in Mayan numerals. The tanto she'd wielded on the subway was gone, replaced by a scepter inlaid with Dead Sea Scroll fragments.
"Ten minutes for questions." She scattered light particles into the void, where they coagulated into crimson rules:
『Traverse the Twelve Gates of Truth and retain your selfhood to prevail.』
A man in an Armani suit raised his hand. "What kind of b*llsh*t game is this? I demand to contact my embassy!" His Patek Philippe liquefied, the molten metal swallowed by the sand. Lu Zhao noticed the man's countdown now glowed 05:27—three hours shorter than the others.
"First question." The girl's scepter tapped the ground. A stele engraved with the Liar's Paradox erupted beneath him. "If a liar says, 'I am lying,' is the statement true?"
The financier loosened his Hermès tie. "A classic Greek logic trap. If he's truthful, then his admission of lying creates a contradiction. If he's lying, then he's actually telling the truth. Therefore, the proposition is neither true nor false—a third-category paradox."
The stele wept blood.
"Incorrect." Galaxies died in the girl's eyes. "The paradox is language's failure to reconcile itself."
The man's skull deformed, parchment from The Republic unfurling from his eye sockets. Lead type from Metaphysics bulged beneath his skin. When Nietzsche's proclamation—"God is dead"—pierced through his forehead, his head exploded into burning papyrus ash.
Screams ricocheted off the Colosseum walls.
Lu Zhao clutched his chest. Every survivor's countdown pulsed overhead. A white-coated doctor (03:15) carved Schrödinger's equation into her arm with a scalpel. A high school girl in a baseball cap grew a quantum rose from her palm, its petals solving the Yang-Mills existence gap.
"Second question." The scepter swung left. "If every plank of the Ship of Theseus is replaced, does it remain the same ship?"
A punk in studded leather tore open his jacket, revealing an ouroboros tattoo. "F*ck no! Like how my cells replace themselves every seven years, but I'm still your daddy!"
Bronze eyes bled.
The punk's body quantum-shifted—his earrings hitting the sand as ancient drachmae. "The answer," the girl licked her scepter, "is that the first replacement turned it into entropy's coffin."
Lu Zhao retreated to the walls, where the bronze eyes recorded each death. When the doctor was asked to "prove pain's existence," she stabbed her own heart. "C-fiber… activation… is… proof…"
Her countdown froze at 00:00.
Yet instead of blood, Klein-bottle crystals spilled from her wound. The girl nodded. "Approved."
Twelve gates materialized. Lu Zhao saw starlight bleeding through—the I Ching's hexagrams in Gate One, Gödel's incompleteness theorems swirling in Gate Two, Fermat's Last Theorem whispering from Gate Three—
"Your turn." The scepter pressed against Lu Zhao's spine. "Seventh query: How to prove infinity with finite observation?"
His ouroboros brand burned. Memories of subway ads flickered—dimensional foil collapsing reality. As the countdown's red seeped into his irises, he pointed at the financier's dissolving corpse.
"Proof is unnecessary. The moment you say 'universe,' you've built a prison of language."
The Colosseum quaked. Every bronze eye snapped shut.
The girl's scepter cracked. The quantum rose bloomed grotesquely. Lu Zhao's timer leaped +23:00, while the doctor's digits scrambled into ■■■■.
"Restructuring at 71%..." The void stammered. "Anomaly detected… Observer-class aptitude..."
By the last gate's dissolution, half the survivors were gone. The girl's uniform had morphed into a bloodied lab coat. She ripped open her ribs, revealing Oppenheimer crystals pulsing like a star. "Next phase—"
The Colosseum vanished.
A single colossal bronze eye dominated the sky—its iris reflecting not humanity, but a Shang dynasty priest writing code in oracle bone script. Three-thousand-year-old prayers echoed in Lu Zhao's skull:
"The black phoenix descended… and Shang was born… A god from the void… bestowed the ouroboros coin…"
(End of Chapter)