The cathedral was alive in the worst way.
Fungal spires arched like ossified prayers, their caps weeping bioluminescent hymns onto the floor below. Chu Feng traced a finger through the glowing sludge, the Bloodvine Seed in his chest throbbing in time to the dirge vibrating through the walls. This wasn't architecture—it was a corpse mid-transformation, stone and flesh locked in a grotesque waltz of decay and rebirth.
Ling'er stood beside him, her phoenix core dimmed to a smoldering wick. She'd been fading since the Conservatory, her edges blurring like ink left in the rain. When she spoke, spores drifted from her lips.
"Host 722's purgatory," she said, nodding to the altar. "He tried to grow a god from guilt and wheat."
The Sundial of Regrets dominated the chancel—a nightmare of rust and porcelain. Its gnomon was a farmer's scythe plunged through the chest of a child's doll, the blade crusted with centuries of crystallized tears. Shadows pooled around it thick as tar, whispering in the voice of a girl long dead: Papa, why does the rain burn?
Chu Feng's Bloodvine roots squirmed beneath his skin. Since bonding with the fungal gospel, his veins glowed with alien scripture, his pulse a syncopated rhythm of psalms and curses. "Let's give the bastard a proper funeral."
The cathedral inhaled.
Host 722 manifested not as a man, but as an agricultural apocalypse—a towering amalgam of withered wheat stalks and exposed ribs, psalmbooks blooming from his eye sockets like carnivorous flowers. His voice was a thresher's roar.
"YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW."
The floor erupted. Rotten grain cascaded like shrapnel as Chu Feng dove behind a pew fossilized in mid-splinter. Ling'er's phoenix flames sputtered, their light revealing the truth beneath the illusion—the pews were rib cages fused with ploughshares, the stained glass a mosaic of screaming harvesters.
"The Sundial!" Ling'er shouted, her body dissolving into spores as she phased through a fungal column. "Break its connection to the mycelium!"
Chu Feng lunged, Bloodvine tendrils erupting from his palms to grapple with thrashing wheatstalks. The psalms carved into his bones ignited—blessed are the fractured, for they shall be repurposed—and the fungal rot turned ally, devouring Host 722's holy wrath.
But the cathedral fought smarter.
It showed him Mei.
The vision struck like a scythe to the spine.
Suddenly he was both Chu Feng and Host 722, kneeling in a barn that smelled of blood and lavender soap. The girl at his feet was dying, her wound a grotesque mouth chanting the System's liturgy. Two choices glowed like brandings:
Let her blood fertilize the fields.
Let her live and starve a nation.
Chu Feng's hands moved before his mind caught up—a third option written in mycelium and defiance. He tore open his own chest, let the Bloodvine Seed spill its symbiotic truth into Mei's wound. Wheat stalks burst from her flesh, petals unfurling where her eyes should be.
"Grow," he whispered through Host 722's rotting teeth. "Grow wrong."
The timeline shattered.
Reality reknit itself inside a memory not his own.
Ling'er knelt in a field of dying stars, cradling Xia's lifeless body. The clone-girl's veins pulsed with Fang Kun's failed experiments, her last breath stillborn in her throat. Chu Feng tried to scream a warning, but his voice was roots and rot.
He watched helplessly as Ling'er plunged a burning feather into her own phoenix core.
"Take my fire," she begged the corpse. "Take my name."
Xia awoke screaming.
Ling'er began to unravel.
The cathedral trembled as Chu Feng wrenched free of the vision. Host 722 loomed, psalmbooks peeling into shrapnel.
"You're too late," the harvest-saint rasped. "She's already gone."
But Chu Feng saw the truth now—the Sundial wasn't a tool. It was a wound, Host 722's endless penance made manifest. Every rotation carved deeper into the fabric of should have been.
He let the Bloodvine consume him.
Thorns burst from his pores, fungal scripture blazing as he tore into Host 722's wheat-stalk heart. Psalmodies collided—agricultural hymns vs. heretical growth—until the saint's final cry shook loose the Sundial's blade.
The doll crumbled.
In its place lay a shard of fractured time.
Ling'er found him hours later, the Sundial Shard embedded in his palm like a cursed stigmata.
"What did it cost?" she asked, her voice echoing from three directions.
He didn't answer. Couldn't. The memory was already gone—Jiang Yue's smile as she braided his hair, the monsoon rain outside their hut, the lullaby she'd hummed to drown the System's whispers.
All he remembered now was the absence.
Xia emerged from the fungal shadows, her new eyes gleaming with borrowed starlight. "It's done then?"
Ling'er's fading hand brushed the Sundial Shard. "No. It's just begun."
Above them, the cathedral's ribs creaked, dissolving into sporefall. Where Host 722's altar once stood, a single stalk of wheat pushed through the rot—its head heavy with blackened grain.
Chu Feng's Bloodvine hissed a warning.
Some seeds shouldn't be sown.