Chukwudi did not fall when they took him.
He unraveled.
The world thinned around his body as iron sigils snapped shut, not around flesh, but around meaning. His name dimmed. His shadow detached itself and was pinned to the ground with a spike of white-hot scripture. Every step they dragged him forward felt like a sentence being erased.
The Continuum moved with efficiency, not cruelty.
That was worse.
Adaeze's scream followed them for miles—a sound so vast it warped the horizon. Trees bent inward. Rivers recoiled from their banks. The Snake Mother surged fully at last, coils of ash and fire tearing through the land behind them.
But the Correction rose to meet her.
And where they collided, nothing lived afterward.
They brought Chukwudi to a place that should not exist.
A city without prayers.
No shrines.
No ancestral markers.
No sacred trees.
Only towers grown from compressed stone and god-bone, their foundations sunk deep into dead land where the earth no longer dreamed. The air was sharp, metallic, stripped of scent and memory.
"This is Ife-Nkewa," the tall man said as they crossed the threshold. "The First Godless City."
Chukwudi tried to listen.
The earth did not answer.
They suspended him in a chamber carved from black rock veined with glowing runes—mathematics etched in blood, logic sharpened into blades. Tubes pierced the space around him, not touching his body, but siphoning reactions—his effect on reality itself.
Observers watched from behind glass.
Scholars. Engineers. Former priests with their mouths sewn shut and scripture burned into their palms.
"Subject does not emit divinity," one murmured.
"But destabilizes divine presence," another replied.
"A walking severance," a third whispered reverently.
Chukwudi closed his eyes.
He remembered his mother's voice, low and distant.
If they ever stop fearing you, run.
They tested him.
Not with pain at first.
With absence.
They introduced minor alụsị fragments into the chamber—nameless spirits, drained and broken. Each time, the spirits flickered violently near him, screaming without sound before collapsing into inert matter.
The scholars gasped.
"He doesn't kill gods," one said. "He invalidates them."
They smiled.
The pain came later.
They forced him to watch.
A city square below the chamber—open, clean, efficient. At its center, a restrained alụsị, barely conscious, its form stretched thin and pale.
A crowd gathered.
Not to worship.
To observe.
The god was activated, its remaining bond to land stimulated artificially. The ground trembled weakly.
Then a machine descended.
It pierced the god's core and extracted its essence into a reservoir that powered the city lights.
The alụsị screamed.
No one answered.
Chukwudi screamed too.
Inside.
Obinna felt it from miles away.
The boy collapsed among the fleeing cursed children, clutching his chest as blood streamed from his nose.
"He's being taken apart," Obinna sobbed. "Not his body. His place."
Adaeze rose from the wasteland where gods and corrections had clashed.
She was no longer entirely the Snake Mother.
She was something sharpened by loss.
"They will not keep him," she hissed, eyes burning with ancient fire. "Not while I still remember how to end worlds."
Idemili appeared beside her, wounded, her river-form fractured.
"If you attack now," the goddess warned, "the city will detonate its god-reserves. The land will die."
Adaeze smiled—terrible, resolved.
"Then I will teach them fear again."
Back in the chamber, the tall man approached Chukwudi.
"You are suffering," he said gently. "That is regrettable. But necessary."
Chukwudi opened his eyes.
"You're afraid," he said hoarsely.
The man chuckled. "Of gods? No."
"Of being wrong," Chukwudi continued. "You replaced belief with certainty. And certainty with control."
The man's smile faltered—just slightly.
"You are the last uncertainty," he said. "Once we understand you, the world will stabilize."
Chukwudi felt something shift inside him.
A fracture.
Not of power.
Of identity.
"If you finish studying me," he whispered, "there will be nothing left to stop what's coming."
The man leaned closer.
"That," he replied, "is a hypothesis we are willing to test."
The lights flickered.
Once.
Twice.
Deep beneath the city, the Correction stirred violently.
And far beyond the walls, Adaeze raised her head and called every serpent that had ever remembered blood.
The city of silence stood tall.
For now.