Chapter 54: The Last Equation** **Part I: God's Whiteboard

The chalkboard walls breathed.

Lin Shen stood in the cathedral's pulsating ventricle, silvered eye tracking equations that swam across fungal membranes like suicidal eels. The Mycelium Communion's final sermon was being written in Vorath's own blood—a luminous mercury fluid that *remembered* being human.

"Observe the liturgy of collapse," murmured the child-Vorath. Her bare feet left bioluminescent footprints on equations that smelled of burnt algebra. "We're solving for humanity's asymptote."

Lin Shen's entropy core vibrated in his chest as he read the unfolding proofs:

**Gravitational Dirge**

*∇⋅ψ = 10^9 tears*

*(Where ψ represents orphaned spacetime curvature)*

**Chronological Obituary**

*t = Σ regret^n

(n approaching infinity)*

**Homo sapiens' Final Term**

*H(u) = ∫ despair dΩ

(Integrated across all causally-connected realities)*

A spore-cloud burst from the ceiling, momentarily forming Mei-ling's face. Her laugh lines were rendered in supernova calculus.

"Her mirth contains the error term," the child-Vorath said, catching a falling variable that squirmed like a gutted starfish. "The solution requires *negative* divinity. Care to attempt it?"

Lin Shen pressed his palm against an unsolved region of wall. The mycelium shrieked as his silvered flesh began rewriting reality:

1. **First Stroke**: He drew Mei-ling's dimple as a Möbius strip

2. **Second Stroke**: Ghosthand's last code commit became a Barnsley fern

3. **Final Curvature**: The chrysalis' DNA rewritten as a Grothendieck topology

The equations fought back.

Fungal hyphae erupted from the chalkboard, piercing his forearm to extract mathematical trauma:

▼ Age 8: Failing to save a butterfly from entropy decay

▼ Surgery Day: The smell of his own DNA being rewritten

▼ Last week: Crushing Bai Ye's "good timeline" crystal

"Stop *humanizing* the numbers," the child-Vorath chided, licking mercury from her fingertips. "This is pure topology now. Your grief is...unprofessional."

A sudden scream Doppler-shifted through the cathedral. Lin Shen's silvered eye zoomed to a distant membrane where Bai Ye's photon arm was carving SOS in non-Euclidean geometry. The message decomposed before he could parse it, consumed by Vorath's growing proof of:

**Theorem 137.441**

*All sentient life is a rounding error in God's spreadsheet.*

The child-Vorath pressed a shard of broken pulsar into his palm. Its edges cut through eleven dimensions simultaneously.

"Last variable," she whispered. "Insert your soul here."

The chalkboard awaited.

Somewhere in the fungal network, a clock struck thirteen.