CHAPTER FOURTEEN — INFINITE ZOO

"Let's build something that stares back, and still knows it's beneath us."

The idea arrived mid-laughter.

Ren had just set their private moon spinning in a decagon spiral as a joke. Yui giggled as its tides distorted the light, painting dancing shadows across the estate's arboretum floor.

Then she blinked once. "Let's collect them."

Ren looked at her. "Animals?"

"No," she said softly. "The lost ones. The ones that never existed here. The creatures that might have been, but didn't make it."

He smiled. "A multiversal bestiary?"

Yui nodded, already standing. "Let's make them pretty."

Section I: Architecting the Impossible

They began with the Paradox Cradle—a dimensional well of untethered probability folded into a dome made of uncollapsed time.

Inside, quantum vacuums churned through dying timelines. Millions of extinct, impossible, or abandoned evolutionary branches were yanked into containment:

A crystal-bodied fox with wings made of folded air.

A reptilian leviathan with skin that reflected emotions instead of light.

A bipedal deer that spoke only in dream-echoes of civilizations that had never existed.

Each was scanned, indexed, and transferred into enclosures constructed from perception fields—cages made not of bars, but of understanding.

If a creature couldn't be perceived, it couldn't escape.

"We don't need to lock them," Ren said. "They already know."

"Know what?" Yui asked, smiling.

He didn't answer. She already knew.

Section II: A Tour for Two

The Zoo was infinite in dimension, but fit neatly within their estate's south garden—a reality fold trick Ren called "pocketing."

They strolled side by side.

In the First Hall, creatures of chaos whimpered from inside loops of fractal space. One tried to mimic Yui's walk. It failed and collapsed into ink.

Yui tilted her head. "It tried to be me."

Ren touched her wrist. "Poor thing."

In the Second Chamber, a pack of winged wolves lined up in geometric formation and howled the twins' names in every extinct language.

They did not bark. They prayed.

In the Vault of Beasts, they passed a dragon that grew smaller the closer one looked at it. Yui whispered to it kindly. It shattered into glass feathers.

Section III: Naming and Grading

Each creature received a name—one created from the Evergrace language, recorded in the Library of Irrelevance.

Yui's grading system was simple:

S+ if it looked at Ren and bowed.

A if it ignored her entirely.

F if it imitated human affection.

Ren created a special column for creatures that stared at Yui and wept.

"Those are the wisest," he said.

Yui giggled. "They understand instinct."

Some creatures evolved instantly just to impress them. Some tried to rebel. One attempted telepathic seduction. Yui kissed its forehead before deleting it atom by atom.

"Next."

Section IV: The Leviathan

On the 7th day of collection, they found it.

A massive, whale-like serpent—unmapped, unaffiliated to any timeline, untraceable in its genetics. Its mind was a perfect mirror of a dead universe. It had never been born, and yet it wept.

Yui stared at it for seventeen minutes, unmoving.

Ren didn't interrupt.

Finally, she whispered, "This one's beautiful."

She stepped forward, laid her palm against its skin. It shimmered with her presence, then coiled into a sleeping spiral, pulsing slowly with warmth.

Ren made no jokes. He simply saved a copy.

"Do you want to keep it?" he asked.

Yui's voice was soft. "Maybe."

Section V: The Night Enclosure

That evening, the twins dined in the Night Enclosure—a glass dome surrounded by floating jellyfish the size of suns, harvested from dreamrealms. The meal was molecular, the light soft.

Yui lay across Ren's lap, watching her Leviathan curl around the garden's floating rivers.

"It's not like the others," she whispered.

"I know," Ren said.

Yui looked up at him, eyes distant. "Would you still like it if it reminded you of me?"

He smiled. "Only if it failed."

Yui kissed his wrist. "Good."

Section VI: Summary of the Infinite

At week's end:

4,208 unique beings had been catalogued.

728 had been erased for insolence.

1 had been named "Not-Yui."

1 had been kept.

The rest remained, beautiful and unworthy, arranged across an infinite plane of invisible cages, existing only because the twins permitted it.

As Ren drifted to sleep in their sun-gilded observation chamber, Yui held a small replica of her Leviathan in her hands—a soft, glowing construct.

She whispered to it: "You're mine now."

And then, after a pause:

"But you're not him."

[TO BE CONTINUED IN CHAPTER FIFTEEN — Tears in a Crystal]