There are no stars in Erso's night, only the sound of bones.
Ya Lie curled up at the bottom of the bone well, the damp and cold mud sticking to his naked back like a layer of fetal membrane. He hadn't blinked for three days and three nights. The well wall was embedded with skulls that had been gnawed clean, like the incomplete altars of some gods, row after row, mocking and silent. The lightless underground world grew in a blunt way, slowly, heavily, but never stopped - every breath seemed too luxurious.
The dumb ones are not allowed to cry out in pain, they are only allowed to die.
Ya Lie had long been accustomed to it. In the Bone Abyss, the first lesson was to hide your tongue, the organ that would expose your "aliveness" - it used to be a bridge of sound, but now it was just a keyhole to death. The last time he heard someone speak was half a year ago. It was a cranial noble who was sent for experimentation, mumbling his native language and prayers. His tongue was pulled out and thrown to the dog soul to eat. The dog soul had no teeth, so it could only use the gushing bone spurs to pierce the tongue, drag it into the stomach like a suture, and digest it along with the prayers.
Ya Lie never made a sound. He knew how to survive.
But tonight was different. Tonight he felt cold, not because the well water was soaking his bones, but because his spine was... "moving".
It wasn't a twitch, it wasn't a pain, it wasn't the familiar abyssal symptoms of malformation, but a feeling of squeezing and splitting embedded in the bone marrow. It was as if a non-existent spine was crawling upward from his coccyx - like a fetus in reverse, cruelly pushing other joints aside to make way for it. Ya Lie heard the sound of snapping and cracking , which was not an illusion or hallucination, but his own body peeling itself apart .
"The thirteenth vertebra..."
He didn't know whose voice it was. The sound didn't come in through his ears, but came out from between his teeth, bypassed his eyeballs, slid across his brain membrane, and scratched the membrane at his nerve endings like fingernails scratching glass.
It wasn't pain, but pleasure. It was the kind of ancient pleasure that went against human experience, like finally being able to open your eyes and look directly at the sun, even if your pupils melted.
He lowered his head, and his fingertips trembled as he traced his spine. His back - which had been flat for many years and was called "the shame of bonelessness" by everyone - now looked like a growing snake, bulging, cracking, and engraving a symbol, bone engraved in bone, with lines like branches, and like some kind of text, a kind of bone text that had never existed in the world.
Ya Lie remembered what the bone masters had said: "Everyone's bone patterns are inherited from their maternal bloodline and cannot be changed unless you can swallow the spine of a god."
But he was not a noble. Even his name was taken from the bones that crawled out of the cesspool. He had no maternal line, no lines, not even a bone print. He should have died long ago, thrown into the soul-crushing furnace, burned with other inferiors, and turned into ash to be sent to the Cangming nobles as tea.
But this thirteenth vertebra told him that he was still alive, and not only alive, but also that he was not born to belong to any level of the cranial world .
"Ray..." The voice sounded again, this time closer, as if it came from the roots of his own teeth, "You finally woke up."
He closed his eyes, but saw a woman. Not a face, but a spine full of holes, floating on a throne made of baby bones. She had no eyes, but she stared at him; she had no mouth, but she was talking. Her existence itself was the corpse of words .
"Devour them all," she said.
"Use their bones to build yourself."
At that moment, Yalie suddenly opened his eyes and found light above the well.
It was not a torch, nor a ritual call. It was a cracked sky , a beam of light that was too bright for the naked eye to bear, that went straight through the wall of the well and shone on his back. His bones made a strange low hum in the light, as if they were crying, or laughing.
There were two people standing at the mouth of the well, wearing Cangming's bone-redeeming robes. Under the robes, one of them held a bone-cutting hook, and the other held a golden bowl with several spinal fragments with names embedded in them floating in the bowl.
"Finally found it."
"Number thirteen: Pseudo-bone Crow Crack. Please prepare for the Broken Back Ceremony."
Ya Lie did not move. He could feel the bones on his back slowly being pulled out, as if he was about to bite back at the two redeemers who came to take his bones.
He smiled, for the first time, like a child who had eaten the candy from the heart of God .
"You guys, want to take the bones?"
"It's too late."
When he moved, the bones swung out like a whip.
Crack! The bone hook broke. Blood splattered on the golden bowl.
Crow Lie jumped up from the bottom of the well, like a fang spit out by hell, facing the light, and tearing the first crack of his own .
The blood had already coagulated into bones before it even hit the ground.
The bone blade in Ya Lie's hand, extending from his back, was still ticking, as if it was not a bone, but a sentence that had not been cut yet. The redeemers fell down, one with his throat pierced, his neck bone shattered into five petals in the air, splashing swirling silver blood; the other was not dead, and knelt at the wellhead, looking at the "tail ridge" behind Ya Lie in horror, his pupils blooming like rotten flowers.
"You...you are not Bone Mute..."
"I am not what you think I am." Ya Lie's voice was low. He didn't know where these words came from. They came as naturally as the bones growing from his back. He himself was listening, just like a bystander listening to another "him" in his body speaking.
The bone blade slowly retracted and merged into his back. His skin was stitched again, leaving no trace of blood. He stood at the mouth of the well, breathing the air he had never had underground. It was not fresh, but a command for circulation . The wind was moving, which meant that space was beginning to respond to him. This was the world of the living , no longer a dead clay figure in the abyss.
He looked ahead. The long street was as narrow as an intestine. On the gray-black stone slabs, there were crushed eyeballs. This was not a metaphor - in the Middle Skull Thorn Cave, many people's eyes were used to exchange memories. Crow Crack walked over those broken pupils, but his mind kept flashing images that did not belong to him: a baby girl's sternum was cut out on the operating table, a noble cut his right rib at night and swallowed his bone marrow, and a bone crown in a white robe stood in the wind and whispered: "Pure blood will rot, only bones will last forever."
These were not hallucinations. They were memories. They were the remnants of the bone prints of the two people he had just killed .
Each bone was the remains of a living soul. He finally understood why the soul redeemer never touched bones with gloves on, because bones were a medium for echoes . Now, he was the one who could hear the language of bones .
"Raven Rift… you are beginning to chew the world." Her voice came again, the faceless bone goddess, seeping into his brain like dripping water.
But Ya Lie didn't respond. He walked into the half-closed gear door at the street corner - a bone machine shop half-buried under a thorn structure. Behind the door was a white mist, and the mixed corrosive smell of medicine, steam, and cooling bone liquid was nauseating. The "bone sewing masters" in the shop wore metal masks and disassembled corpses one by one on the huge bone-breaking table - but they were not performing surgery, they were "matching bones".
"The three lines on the left ulna correspond to the illusion type. The second section of the ribs is attached with the element of sad memory."
"He is not enough. We need a full section of the right ankle bone to awaken 'Bite Shadow'."
Ya Lie stood by the door, looking at the body of the boy whose chest had just been cut open - blood slid down from the open ribs like honey flowing out of a spider web. He recognized the boy, who had snatched food from him in the abyss and bit his palm.
Now, his bones are used as puzzle pieces, and what is pieced together is not resurrection - but a weapon, a slave spirit, or some kind of cybernetic phantom body .
"Are you here to collect bones?" A bone-suturing technician came over, his body covered in ashes, and the needle in his hand was half as long as his arm.
"I'll return the bones." Ya Lie took out the broken spine of the Soul Redeemer and threw it into the bone slot. The spine actually jumped up by itself, swimming in the air like a spinal snake.
The bone seamer's eyes changed, as if he saw a sacrifice on the altar suddenly open its eyes. He trembled and said, "This is not... an ordinary bone... You, you peeled off the bone pattern of the Bone Crowner?"
"He is not the Crowner. But his bones remember the Crowner's totem." Ya Lie approached, "I need a bone tool that can seal multiple memories and not collapse."
The bone-stitcher pondered for a moment, turned around, opened a secret cabinet, and took out a "bone box" made of seven kinds of bones, which was engraved with the seal of the deceased's words .
"This is a 'relic', dug out from an underground altar where thirty-seven royal bones were buried. All the memories engraved in it cannot be read by other bone speakers."
Ya Lie took the bone box and inserted the spine into the box without any error. The bone box made a low humming sound like a baby's heartbeat. He heard the last words of the deceased:
"Please...please tell her that I haven't forgotten..."
——The voice was cut off, and the memory was sealed. Ya Lie was stunned, and a picture suddenly popped up in his mind: a girl's finger gently pressed on the tip of his tongue, and said with a smile: "The first word you say in the future must be given to me."
He thought of her. The only little girl who had never bitten him in the abyss . The only one who had ever said "I believe in you".
But is she dead? No, she should also be sent to the skull, as a "bone redeeming girl", and carved into a bone flute to be sacrificed to the Zenith Temple.
"I want to go up." Yalie murmured.
The bone stitcher smiled bitterly: "Are you crazy? You know that only the bone crown can use the 'spinal channel'..."
"I will be." Yalie raised his head and put away the bone box. The thirteenth vertebra on his back was moving again, and a new pattern was faintly forming - it was an open eye totem, and the pupil was opening.
The bone seamstress took a step back. The bone pattern seemed to be staring at him.
"What are you?"
"Me?" Crow's eyes pierced through the mist and looked towards the upper altar in the distance where bells were ringing, like a winter bird looking at the morning light that had burned all the trees.
"I am the god you haven't invented yet."
The moment he walked out of the Machine Bone Workshop, the entire Thorn Cave seemed to hold its breath. The mist rolled behind his shoulders, enveloping the lingering sound, like embers around a blade, still whispering. Ya Lie's steps were steady, and every step was like a hammer hitting the ground, as if to crush this rotten world into a crack that went straight to the sky.
No one has ever dared to say the word "go up" seriously.
It was a tower, a prison, a convulsion of the gods—not a realm they should touch, but a place where their bodies should be sent .
But now, an abandoned person who had climbed out of the bottom of the well was walking barefoot on cracked bricks towards the shadowy altar.
He had no cape, no protective crest, and no official order. The only "proof" on him was the strange dark pattern emerging on the thirteenth vertebra. The symbol grew with burning pain, each one like a flint engraved in the bone marrow, blood flowing through it, but not a single drop of blood dripped out. His body temperature rose sharply, his finger bones trembled, and his internal organs seemed to be burning themselves -
He is mutating .
No longer a human being, nor one of the old nobles chasing after bloodline and power.
Walking through the "Skull Skull Street", he caught a glimpse of a law enforcer smashing the head of a tax evader. The memory liquid inside was scattered and was caught by a beggar boy next to him in a copper cup, and then poured into a well for others to pay to drink. The liquid slipped from his fingers, mixed with murmurs and groans, and still carried the remnants of the dead man's dreams.
Ya Lie watched coldly, his steps never stopping. His presence disturbed the entire city. The lights on the street corners went out one by one, and an ancient frequency echoed silently. Several guards appeared from the dark alley, with seven chains made of pharyngeal organs hanging on their chests - the "Silent Voice" team, specializing in hunting those who speak, without words, only relying on frequency vibrations and killing orders.
As soon as he stepped into the entrance to the stairs, they surrounded him.
"The thing behind you is not registered. Who are you? Where did that thing come from?" The leader's throat had been cut off, and his voice was replaced by mist. His words were like wind passing through a copper tube, vague and harsh.
Ya Lie was speechless, and slowly took out a fragment from his robe - a hard block engraved with runes, oozing with silver blood. It was the mark of a certain spirit master he had cut off, with a high-level sacrificial text.
"You actually - you actually killed him..." The leader's expression changed drastically, and a subtle wave emanated from his body, trying to disrupt Crow's neural chain with audio.
But he did not move.
On the back, the floating dark pattern suddenly reversed, like a countercurrent seal.
An invisible shock surged out.
The leader's pupils collapsed in an instant, he knelt on the ground with his head in his hands, blood oozing from his ears, the muscles on his cheeks twisted like broken strings, and the root of his tongue turned into powder, spraying out mixed with saliva.
Before the other six people could react, Ya Lie had already raised his hand, and the extended object was thrown out like a chain - with three clicks, the throats of three people were broken, and the other three were directly nailed into the wall, turning into a silent warning.
He continued to move forward.
The thing wrapped around his arm automatically folded and stuck back to his spine. He never looked back.
At this moment, a deep sound came from the sky.
Neither thunder nor bell—it is a signal from the depths of the world.
"Seven sounds... the altar is cracked..." The vendor on the roadside curled up, with unsold medicine hanging from the corner of his mouth, and whispered tremblingly, "The one above... is bleeding."
Crow paused. He knew what that meant.
The high-level priest...is dead.
The bells rang one after another, turning into echoes in his heart.
In the distance, the huge "stairs" that were as big as a mountain gate slowly opened. It was the door to the top of power, which had never been opened for people at the bottom - but now it seemed to be waiting for some kind of existence to approach.
The guard at the door whispered, "Name?"
The crow did not answer.
The dark pattern behind the shoulder floated, the symbol jumped violently, and with a deep sound, the carving on the side of the door lit up by itself.
The guardian's expression changed drastically, and he immediately knelt down: "The thirteenth order... the master of the pattern has appeared, and his inscription is: Lisi."
He did not respond, but stepped into the passage made of thousands of vertebrae, as if he was walking into a spiral made up of the dreams of the dead.
He went up all the way, and every step he took, memories seeped out from the cracks in the wall, trying to probe, assimilate, or devour him. Those scenes - him gnawing on dead skin in his childhood, him curled up in the low temperature but not dying, him being abandoned in his dreams, her blocking bites for others in the pool of blood...
she.
The only person who had never hurt him.
That little finger that had been on his tongue, saying, "Give me the first word you say."
He almost turned around, but didn't.
The sky gradually became brighter, not with firelight, but with a silvery-white light emerging from the air, like a blade that split the shape of a god in his eyes.
He climbed up to the broken temple.
He was once an abandoned child, a beast prisoner, and a mute disciple - but now he has become the only person in this unbalanced world who can tear apart the words of the old gods.