Phong did not sleep again after telling Alex about the dream.
He tried, because tomorrow's elimination stage did not care whether a man with double irises and a slit throat had visited him in a place the system refused to acknowledge. He tried because Alex needed rest, and when she stayed awake listening to him speak in a low voice about Vũ Vân Lôi, Night Kings, Imperial Saints, and the old cultivation road buried beneath the level system, Phong felt a familiar guilt creep into his chest. He tried because the Tannenbaum clubhouse bed was comfortable in the aggressively expensive way rich people had perfected, and because Little Fireball was still asleep in his hoodie on a chair, round and peaceful as if the universe had not been whispering disaster into his dreams.
But his eyes kept opening.
Alex eventually made him stop pretending. She shifted closer, placed one hand over his heart, and told him, "Check everything again."
Phong looked down at her.
"I already checked my status."
"Then check the parts you forgot because you were scared."
That was unfairly accurate.
He had checked level, class, title, skills, stats, inventory, plant permissions, and every visible menu the system allowed him to open. He had found nothing. Lv1 farmer, production class, and still barred from EXP in the way Production classes were barred unless some rule unlocked otherwise. Still the same man, at least according to the system, which was exactly what Vũ Vân Lôi had warned him not to trust fully.
Do not mistake the system's silence for absence.
Phong sat up and opened his interface again.
The blue-white glow washed across the dark room. Alex sat beside him, hair loose, eyes alert despite the late hour. Outside the window, surface New York remained asleep beneath lights and ordinary weather, ignorant of the fact that the dungeon's deeper history had just become another knife on Team Nemean's table.
Phong went menu by menu.
Nothing.
Then he reached the quest tab.
He almost skipped it.
That was the funny part, if anything about it could be funny. Phong did not check quests often because his quest menu had been a joke for nearly three years. One single quest, received at the beginning of everything, had sat there like a forgotten receipt from fate.
[Quest: Plant 10 Potatoes in the Dungeon]
It remained at the top of the menu.
Completed. Quiet, and absurdly humble.
The quest that had started as a ridiculous assignment from a system that apparently believed potatoes were a reasonable gateway to existential warfare still sat there, marked finished and undramatic. Phong stared at it for a moment, and for reasons he could not explain, the sight steadied him more than any heroic title would have. Before Night Kings, before bīng, before Pillars and Yuè and a lime-oak road across floors, there had been ten potatoes and a man too stubborn to die.
Then he saw the second quest.
It had arrived sometime earlier.
No notification had rung, or any system chime had announced it. The new line simply sat below the potato quest as if it had always belonged there, waiting for him to notice.
Phong's fingers went cold.
Alex leaned closer.
"What is it?"
"I don't know."
He opened it.
The first thing he noticed was the quest giver's name was gibberish.
[Quest Giver: &?>@(#*]
Phong stared at the symbols until his eyes hurt.
They did not translate them, unlike what it did to messages sent through it or languages spoken within it. The dungeon did not correct them. The system did not explain. It was a broken string of meaning, a place where a name should have been but could not be shown. This might be an off-world language, too bizarre even for the dungeon standard.
Phong thought immediately of Vũ Vân Lôi trying to say something else after giving his name, only for the invisible wall between them to crush the meaning before it reached him.
He read the quest text.
[Consider this something extra to mark our farewell, Phong. There is but one way to truly kill the Pillars and those who have reached the realm of Imperial Saints. Go look for the Four Banes. Do it fast, else the other civilizations might come out of hibernation along with the Night Kings and claim them first.]
Phong did not move.
The words did not become less horrifying when read a second time. They became worse, because the second reading removed the mercy of surprise. There was but one way to kill Pillars. Imperial Saints could be killed. The Four Banes existed, whatever those were. Other civilizations were in hibernation. They might wake alongside the Night Kings. They might claim the weapons first.
Alex read over his shoulder.
Her expression lost every softness sleep had left in it.
"Phong."
"I know."
"We have to tell the team."
"I know."
Neither of them said what both of them were thinking.
The Pillars had become facts of the world, forces beyond comprehension, disasters with names to be revered or worshiped, depending who you ask and which religion they followed. Bai Hu had chosen Alex and shaped her title. The Sky Emperor had stolen the world's nuclear weapons, given humanity a dragon tooth in the ancient past, and casually summoned sacred treasures while refusing to answer whether Nezha was coming back. Mr. Zero ran the diver app and announced legacy boss kills to the entire planet. Em had nearly turned the third floor into ash through a clash involving The Monstrous Phoenix. Hyeonmu had summoned Phong to the tenth.
The idea that something existed specifically to kill them should have been reassuring.
It was not.
It meant the board was older, wider, and bloodier than they knew.
Morning came too quickly.
Team Nemean gathered in the shielded private room Emma had prepared the day before, the same room where they had discussed keeping the Bronx Musketeers close because suspicious allies were sometimes safer than unknown spies. The room's anti-scrying hum settled around them again, a low expensive vibration that made the air feel sealed away from the rest of the clubhouse.
Emma arrived with a tablet and tea. Dominic arrived with Janet, both looking like people who had slept but not enough. Joanne came in wearing the Celestial Skeletal headpiece hidden beneath her hair, and the way her eyes tracked two things at once still made Jake lean away from her every few minutes. Jack, Séline, Camille, and Alexei took their seats without fuss.
Rico appeared under the table with coffee, was removed by Dominic, then returned through a vent with a second coffee and an expression of professional innocence.
Phong told them everything.
He started with the dream because the quest made no sense without it. He described the Vietnamese voice calling him closer than before, the darkness with texture, the man with double irises in both eyes, the prayer beads of eighteen polished wooden beads, the black dog with three eyes and too many teeth, and the slit throat with something wriggling inside.
He repeated the name Vũ Vân Lôi, and how he knew the man had tried to say something more but was blocked by the same force that kept them inches apart and impossibly distant. He told them how Lôi defined the Night Kings as those who failed to become emperors and sold their souls for more chances, how he laughed off Phong's fear that the Sky Emperor might be one of them, and how he revealed the older cultivation path buried beneath the dungeon's level system.
Đăng Tôn - Chân Vương - Thánh Hoàng - Đại Đế.
Announcement of Sovereignty - True King - Imperial Saint - Emperor.
By the time Phong said that the Pillars were apparently Imperial Saints, nobody interrupted him. Joanne had stopped sipping coffee. Jake's face had lost color. Emma's fingers had gone still over her tablet. Alex watched Phong rather than the room, as if monitoring whether the telling itself hurt him. Dominic's expression grew darker with every stage named, not from disbelief, but from the terrible recognition of patterns connecting too cleanly.
Then Phong opened the quest menu and projected the new quest.
The gibberish giver name appeared first.
&?>@(#*
Rico leaned forward. "That name needs coffee."
Nobody laughed. Phong showed the quest text. The room went silent enough that the anti-scrying hum became loud.
Dominic was the first to speak.
"That matches Yuan Zheng Zi's words."
Everyone turned toward him.
He frowned, searching memory through exhaustion and battle noise. "During the fight, before the second phase, he rambled about the Road of Imperial Ascension. He asked why the True King did not seal himself for a second chance, why he accepted death. At the time, I thought it was just boss madness."
"It was boss madness," Joanne said quietly. "But you said that doesn't mean it was random?"
Dominic nodded. "Exactly. The True King refusing a second chance to become Emperor sounds too close to what Lôi said about Night Kings. Failed emperors selling themselves for more chances. Yuan Zheng Zi had lost his mind, but he was circling the same truth."
Emma finally moved, typing quickly. "This implies the term Emperor is not symbolic. It is a cultivation rank, an era-limited achievement, and possibly tied to floor bosses, Night Kings, and why certain ancient figures made catastrophic choices."
"Also," Jake added, voice strained, "apparently there are Four Banes that can kill Pillars, and other civilizations might wake up and steal them first. I just want to put that on the table as something I hate."
Alex crossed her arms. "It also means someone wanted Phong to know."
Emma's eyes flicked to the gibberish name. "Or something could only tell Phong through a broken channel."
Phong looked at the quest again.
He wanted the words to become less heavy—they did not.
"We need Selena," he said.
Emma's expression shifted at once into logistical motion. "I will contact her."
Selena came as soon as she could.
That meant nearly an hour later, because she had not met with them since the group draw and had been drowning in her own crisis after the revelation involving Professor Ulrich. She arrived at the Tannenbaum clubhouse with Vanessa beside her, both of them carrying the exhaustion of people who had been forced to update too many categories of reality in too short a time.
Selena's hair was tied back messily, her eyes too alert, and the moment she entered the shielded room, she looked at Phong with the expression of someone who already knew this would make her day worse.
"I was told this was urgent," Selena said.
Phong winced. "Yes."
Vanessa, standing just behind her, looked at Team Nemean's faces and muttered, "That is not the expression of one urgent thing."
"No," Emma said. "It is several."
Selena sat.
Then Team Nemean told her.
They began with Alexis Valantris because that was the oldest unshared disaster in the chain. Alex woke the Messenger Stone found in the ruin where Yeak had been held up, and the projection of Alexis came to life. The commander of the Human Federation, the woman who looked like an older version of Alex and warned that if the message was being seen, she was dead.
Dominic added the part about the Night Kings, entities not native to the dungeon that recovered once humanity advanced enough. Séline quietly mentioned remembering Cà Rồng's race as "human". Kdiê's presence in the recording remained ominous. Her third eye, body-snatcher spiders treated like her creations, level 101, and the system skipping 100 for everyone except Alexis were quickly understood.
Selena's face had already gone blank by then.
Then Alex showed her bīng.
The cracked copy of the Secret of Weapons appeared above her palm, shifting through meanings of weapon, soldier, blade, command, and war. Selena stared at it as if someone had opened a hole in academia and shoved a nuke through it.
Emma continued because mercy had apparently been cancelled. She summarized Zhen Wu Pavilion, the True King of Heavenly Martial, the Road of Imperial Ascension, the first Emperor of Humanity, the Ballad of Blades, Yuan Zheng Zi's boss fight, his rambling about second chances, and the Celestial Skeletal head piece that now allowed Joanne to split mana flow and use two different skills at once. Joanne gave a small wave when her name came up, then stopped when Selena did not react.
Finally, Phong told her about Vũ Vân Lôi.
The dream, the double irises, the slit throat, and the old cultivation path. The Pillars being Imperial Saints. The Night Kings being failed emperors who sold their souls for more chances. The quest from a gibberish sender telling him to find the Four Banes before other civilizations woke with the Night Kings and claimed them first.
Selena did not speak. Her eyes were open. Her breathing was shallow. Her mind appeared to have left the clubhouse in search of a quieter universe.
Vanessa moved first, placing both hands on Selena's shoulders when Selena started to tilt sideways in her chair.
"Selena?"
Selena's mouth opened.
Nothing came out.
Rico sipped his coffee.
"Great," he said. "We fried her CPU."
Vanessa glared at him.
Rico, immune to most reasonable social signals, turned to his left. "This, Bruno and Nyx, is why caffeine is important. When lore attacks the brain, coffee forms defensive—"
He stopped.
He looked left— then right.
Bruno and Nyx were not there.
The dog and cat had not come to the surface. They had stayed inside the dungeon to gain more levels under the surveillance of Yuè's allies, which Phong had approved, because apparently the dungeon had entered an arm race since the Sky Emperor decided that giving humanity 4 years to prepare was too generous. And so, Phong found it would be better if Nyx and Bruno could protect themselves well in case him or the team were not there for them.
Rico realized this too late.
His ears drooped. His coffee lowered.
"My students," he whispered.
Jake looked over. "They are not your students."
"It was my idea to bring them to camp."
"They outgrow that like a year ago."
"Nonsense."
Rico flopped onto the floor and began wailing.
He rolled dramatically across the carpet, paws clutching at nothing, tail lashing as if betrayed by the architecture itself. His coffee, naturally, was safely put upright on the table beforehand, which told everyone that the raccoon just wanted to be a drama queen rather than being serious.
"Denied of raccoon lecture! Robbed of racoon pedagogy! Bruno, Nyx, lost to ignorance! Who will teach them the sacred bean? Who will guide them through the dark roast path?"
Joanne stared. "Is he doing a bit or having an episode?"
Phong watched Rico squirm under the table, knock into Dominic's boot, and continue rolling toward Emma's chair like a furry tragedy. "Yes."
They both knew it was a joke. Yet, Rico's absurdity did what several world-ending revelations had failed to do.
Selena blinked. Her eyes refocused. She looked down at Rico, who had now draped himself across the carpet like a raccoon martyr.
"What," she said very carefully, "is wrong with him?"
"Caffeine philosophy," Phong said.
"That is not a field."
"Do not tell him that."
Rico lifted his head. "It is interdisciplinary."
Selena stared at him for another second, and somehow, against all logic, that seemed to finish rebooting her mind. She inhaled sharply, pressed both hands to her face, and held them there while Vanessa kept a steadying grip on her shoulders.
When Selena lowered her hands, her expression had changed.
The shock remained. Of course it did. No rational person received a compressed history of dead civilizations, ancient cultivation ranks, Night Kings, a Human Federation commander from another world, a copy of one of the Nine Secrets, and a quest about killing Pillars without suffering some form of intellectual concussion. But beneath the shock, structure had returned. Selena's scholar instincts had found the wreckage and begun sorting pieces into piles.
She stood.
A little too quickly this time, but Vanessa caught her elbow.
Selena did not look embarrassed. She looked at Emma instead.
"Get me a room."
Emma nodded immediately. "You can use the eastern study. It is shielded, private, and has three screens."
"Not enough screens."
"I can have more brought in."
"Whiteboards."
"Yes."
"Paper. Physical paper. Pens that do not connect to anything. Printed maps of all known ruins if possible, but I doubt you'd bring something like that to the surface. Copies of every transcript you have, including Alexis Valantris's message, the Messenger Stone description, the Yuan Zheng Zi encounter notes, Phong's quest text, and every known reference to the Nine Secrets."
Emma was already typing. "Done."
Selena looked at Phong.
"And you. Write the dream down in Vietnamese and English. Every word you remember. Do not summarize. Do not clean it up. If you are unsure whether a phrase was exact, mark it."
Phong nodded.
"Okay."
Selena pointed at Rico without looking away from Phong. "And keep him away from my room unless he brings coffee and says nothing."
Rico sat up instantly. "I accept this sacred mission."
"You will not speak."
He opened his mouth.
Selena's stare sharpened.
Rico slowly closed it and saluted with his coffee cup.
Then Selena left the room with Vanessa beside her, moving with the stiff urgency of someone who had been overwhelmed past panic and arrived at work instead. Emma followed long enough to direct staff and lock down access. The rest of Team Nemean remained in the shielded room, surrounded by the aftertaste of too much revelation and one raccoon's dramatic recovery from an audience shortage.
Dominic leaned back in his chair and exhaled.
"Well," he said, "that went better than expected."
Joanne looked at him. "She froze like a crashed laptop."
"She recovered."
"Because Rico had a floor tantrum."
Jake raised a finger. "To be fair, that would reset many brains."
Phong looked at the quest menu still open before him.
[Go look for the Four Banes. Do it fast.]
The words waited without urgency because the system did not need urgency to be cruel. Somewhere in the dungeon, hibernating civilizations might be stirring. Somewhere beyond floors and ruins, Night Kings recovered when humanity rose high enough to interest them. Somewhere in the old buried road beneath classes and levels, the word Emperor waited like a summit and a grave.
Alex's hand found his under the table.
Phong closed the quest menu.
Tomorrow, they had to fight in a tournament built by elites who still thought cameras and brackets could frame the future. Tonight, Selena locked herself in a room to turn impossible lore into usable knowledge, Emma rearranged security, Rico prepared coffee in solemn silence for perhaps the first time in his life, and Team Nemean sat with the knowledge that the visible game had always been the smallest one.
Phong squeezed Alex's hand once.
He still did not know what Vũ Vân Lôi had returned to him.
But the quest was real.
The warning was real.
And somewhere in the silence beneath the system, something that had originally belonged to him waited for the day it would save him. For now, that was enough world shattering revelation.