The sound of definition landing was quiet, just after the third watch.
The supply wagon from the border town stopped three paces outside the camp gate, as if touching an invisible boundary. The driver unloaded grain sacks with movements efficient as handling plague-tainted goods. When Gu Changfeng approached, the middle-aged supply officer was carefully winding rope around the empty cart's railings—wound too tight, knuckles pale.
"You always came inside for a bowl of hot broth before," Gu Changfeng said.
The officer's hands paused. He didn't look up. "Rumors have been… plentiful lately."
"What rumors?"
Silence spread. In the distance, a crow flapped past a bare branch, startling loose a few strands of snow powder. The officer finally raised his eyes. There was no hostility in that gaze, only a kind of cautious, almost pitying wariness. "Commander Gu, we petty officials… we only seek stability." He pulled a list from his robe and handed it over. "Fifteen sacks of grain, two jars of salt, three crates of medicinal herbs. Count and confirm."
Ink had seeped through the paper. Gu Changfeng turned it over and saw a line of hasty, scrawled characters in the corner:
Guard your heart. There, goodness has become sickness.
When he looked up, the wagon was already receding into the distance. Its wheel ruts carved two deep grooves in the snow, like some severed declaration.
By mid-morning, rumors began to take form.
Two border women who often came to exchange for medicine did not appear. Sentries found a cloth bundle they'd left two li away, containing herbs and pickled vegetables, with a child's handwritten note: "Mother says cannot approach. Medicine here."
At three quarters past the hour of Si, a courier from the eastern relay station reined in his horse a hundred paces out. He drew a whistling arrow without its head from his quiver, tied a letter to it, drew his bow—the arrow shushed through the cold air, thudding into the wooden gatepost, its fletching vibrating with a fine, dense hum.
Chu Hongying pulled the arrow free and unfolded the letter.
Only four characters: "For the General's Eyes."
No body text inside, just a torn fragment from some official briefing. The paper was crisp, the handwriting the empire's distinctive, emotion-stripped clerical script:
[Summary of Northern Tundra Garrison Status (Internal Circulation)]
Observation Item Three: Abnormal Resource Depletion
Mortality rate lower than projected, yet analgesic herb consumption rate increased by 27%.
Inference: Not due to worsening injuries, but collective decrease in pain tolerance, or possible "pain performance" to solicit attention.
Observation Item Five: Disciplinary Form Aberration
Spontaneous "resource redistribution" behaviors observed (e.g., voluntary medicine sharing, food division).
Note: These actions violate the "efficiency optimization" principle and easily create moral coercion pressure, causing healthy soldiers to conceal needs and the wounded to intensify self-blame.
Preliminary Assessment: Possibly collective hysteria arising from prolonged stress. Guard against "emotional contagion."
Appendix:
Related personnel (Grid A7) have been added to the "High Emotional Load Observation List." Subsequent contacts advised to maintain operational distance to avoid value confusion.
Chu Hongying slowly clenched the paper in her palm. It emitted a faint, resistant crinkle, finally curling into a stiff, dead wad in her grasp. The bloodlock patterns on her arm crept upward from her wrist, transmitting a warm, dull burning—not the heat of anger, but a deeper, more powerless cold burn.
She lifted her gaze to the camp.
The soldiers were conducting morning drills, spear shafts rising and falling in unified rhythm. But something invisible and viscous flowed in the air: eyes meeting then quickly shifting away, subtle disturbances in breathing rhythms, unconscious tightening of limbs—like beasts catching the scent of a trap, muscles coiling before they even see the steel teeth.
They all felt it.
That invisible wall, silently rising between the camp and the world. Its bricks were mortared with the same sentence:
"Your goodness is a sickness."
And then, the scent arrived.
The changing sentry noticed first. He sniffed, catching something unusual in the cold wind—not cookfire smoke, not medicinal bitterness, but an extremely faint, sweet-rotten odor that separated into layers in his throat:
First, the cloying honey of childhood medicine forced down by a gentle hand.
Then, beneath it, the damp rot of a long-forgotten battlefield grave.
Finally, a metallic aftertaste—like licking the edge of a branding iron still hot with the character for "virtue."
"What's that smell?" he whispered to his partner.
His partner also frowned, his own breath catching as the scent reached him differently: for him, it was the sweet decay of overripe fruit left to ferment in a hidden corner, mixed with the sharpness of a surgeon's alcohol. "From the command tent…"
Lu Wanning halted the moment she stepped into the medical tent.
Her heterochromatic pupils shifted rapidly, her gaze dissecting the air like a scalpel. The scent's source was glaringly clear—in front of the command tent, the Serenity Grass moved last night now had dark golden patterns spreading from its petals across its entire stem and leaves, and with each faint tremor of its blades, it rhythmically "breathed" out this sweet-rotten, personally tailored aroma.
She strode forward, not touching it, only drawing a silver needle from her sleeve and suspending it three inches above a leaf. The needle's tip began to blacken without warning—not from rust, but an eroded, lusterless dullness.
On a fresh page of her Treatise on Meridian Syndromes, she wrote swiftly:
[Phenomenon Log: Jia-Zi Seventy-Six]
Subject: Mutated Serenity Grass (Marked Entity)
Manifestations:
Spiritual marking materialized, transformed into perceptible scent.
Scent possesses inductive properties: amplifies listener's pre-existing ethical anxiety. The virtuous doubt their sincerity; the resentful accuse others of performance.
Silver needle warning: conceptual-level contamination detected.
Inference: This is not natural mutation, but a materialized battlefield in the war of definition. Scent is speech, rewriting the self-narrative of those who breathe it.
She finished writing and looked up at the camp.
The soldiers still drilled, but several now moved with hesitation, occasionally wiping their noses or taking deep, uneasy breaths—as if trying to identify this suddenly invasive, intangible yet clinging "speech" in their very breath, each man tasting his own unique flavor of doubt.
Shen Yuzhu stood beside the command tent, Mirror Patterns fully engaged.
In the deep blue data streams in his eyes, the camp's spiritual resonance spectrum was undergoing subtle distortion: the sparse connective threads between individual light points were being pulled by two forces—one was the dark gold erosion flow seeping from the Night Crow Division's markers, the other was the extremely fine silver-grey resistance pulses escaping from the soldiers themselves. The two tangled in the air, and that sweet-rotten scent was the dust raised on this battlefield.
The Mirror Patterns flashed an alert:
[Collective Cognitive Stability Decline Detected: -5.2%]
[Ethical Variables Eroding Efficiency Logic: In Progress]
[Recommendation: Initiate Emotional Filtering Protocol. Maintain Operational Rationality.]
Shen Yuzhu closed his eyes for a moment.
When he opened them again, the world he saw began to stratify: drilling soldiers became moving skeletal and muscular modules; their sweat became data streams of salt and fatigue toxins; their occasional exchanged glances became "potential non-rational interaction items" on a risk assessment form.
The system was "repairing" him.
Stripping away overloaded emotion, simplifying complex humans into parameters, ensuring the "mirror" wouldn't blur from reflecting too many tears.
A chill of dread washed over him.
The Night Crow Division never intended to destroy him. They were merely maintaining a tool, just as a blacksmith scrapes rust from a blade to ensure cutting efficiency.
And the "rust" within him was called "compassion."
Afternoon light in the medical tent was gloomy.
When Limpy Zhong entered, Lu Wanning was grinding herbs. The thud of mortar and pestle was monotonous, dense, like some timing water clock.
He stopped three paces from the medicine table, spine unnaturally straight, the stump of his left leg trembling faintly beneath his cloth trousers—not from pain, but some suppressed tension.
"Wound dressing change?" Lu Wanning asked without looking up.
Limpy Zhong shook his head. Silently, he pulled a small cloth bundle from his robe and placed it on the table's edge. Unfolded, it revealed half a piece of Liyin grass root, the cross-section still damp with fresh moisture—his three-day ration of pain medicine, issued just yesterday.
Lu Wanning stopped the pestle. Her heterochromatic eyes lifted. "What is this?"
"I have no use for it." Limpy Zhong's voice was hoarse. "For… someone who needs it more."
"Your left leg phantom pain flared four times last night, the longest episode lasting half a ke." Lu Wanning's tone was calm as taking a pulse. "You need this medicine."
Limpy Zhong's lips pressed into a tight line. Outside the tent came the shouts of soldiers drilling, the sounds hitting the felt, growing blurry and distant. After a long moment, he said softly:
"I can endure."
"Why endure?"
This time, the silence was longer. Limpy Zhong's gaze fell on his own left leg—the empty trouser leg cast a twisted shadow in the dim light. He remembered last night: when the agony struck, he bit the quilt corner, forehead pressed to the icy wall, every muscle taut as ironstone. Then he heard suppressed gasps from the next cot—it was young Li, the boy had heard his trembling.
This morning, young Li had silently scooped half his own meat porridge into Limpy Zhong's bowl, said nothing, and walked quickly away.
That half-bowl of porridge burned worse than the pain.
"Doctor Lu," Limpy Zhong began, his voice carrying a shattered weariness, "this worthless life of mine… have I lived it too 'correctly'?"
Lu Wanning's writing brush paused.
"I'm afraid." He continued, as if lancing a wound he himself despised. "I'm afraid my pain… will become someone else's obligation. I'm afraid the way I endure pain will become a command—commanding them they must also endure, or commanding them they must give."
He raised his head, his clouded eyes holding a look near pleading:
"I just wanted to be a good man. But now… the word 'good' smells like that grass."
Sweet, rotten, nauseating.
Lu Wanning watched him silently. Her heterochromatic pupils rotated slowly, like two glass specimen slides recording. In the end, she did not take back the half root, nor did she offer comfort.
She only said, "Leave the medicine here. If the pain becomes unbearable tonight, come take it anytime."
Limpy Zhong nodded and turned to leave. His limping gait dragged uneven marks across the tent's felt rug, each step as if fleeing a torture rack he himself had built.
At the same time, Chen He crouched behind the cookhouse by a snow pile.
He clutched the half-piece of hardtack he hadn't eaten—the one he gave Limpy Zhong last night. Now it felt like a burning coal against his chest.
Last night at dinner, he'd tried to explain to those two veterans: "I wasn't looking for anything…" The words choked in his throat. Because he saw in their eyes not disbelief, but something more wounding—understanding. "We know, we know, you're just being kind." That kind of tolerance, gently smoothing over all his struggle, slotting it into the "good person template," suffocated him more than direct accusation.
Once a good deed needs explanation, it becomes a performance script.
This morning, he heard whispers from the same tentmates:
"That Chen He lad knows how to play people."
"Half a biscuit for a good reputation, good deal."
"You think he calculated it, waiting for people to owe him?"
The voices weren't loud, just enough for him to hear. Like a fine needle, precisely piercing the thought that had flashed in that impulsive moment of offering the biscuit—a thought he hadn't even examined then: "Doing this… should be right, right?"
The word "right" began to churn in his gut.
He pulled out the hardtack, its coarse surface imprinting his palm. He tried to recall that impulsive instant: what was that heat that surged in his chest when he saw Limpy Zhong's trembling back? Pity? Or… a desire to perform? A craving to be seen as a "good person"?
He didn't know.
When an action requires self-justification, it begins to emit the same sweet-rotten scent as that grass. The first sign of decaying goodwill is when you start asking yourself: "Am I performing?"
Chen He shoved the biscuit back into his robe and stood up. He needed to do something to prove it—not to others, to himself. He needed a pure, unadulterated act of kindness to scrub away this damned doubt.
Then he froze.
Because he realized: when you need a good deed to prove your own goodness, that deed is impure from the moment of its conception.
It was an unsolvable loop.
Just like the scent from that grass: the more you try to prove you're unaffected, the more you prove you're already deep within it.
He crouched back into the snow, burying his face in his knees. In the distance came the shouts of drilling soldiers, sounds that now rang hollow and piercing, like people rehearsing a play for no audience.
There was no light in Shen Yuzhu's tent.
He sat cross-legged in darkness, Mirror Patterns flowing deep blue data waterfalls in his eyes. The number representing Self-Identification fluctuated narrowly between 21% and 23%. Each drop would trigger the system's pain-anchoring protocol, forcing him back to the instant the Mirror Imprint was inserted at the base of his skull.
But this time, he tried to resist.
When the agony like an ice spike pierced his skull, he did not obediently sink into that implantation memory. Using all his will, he turned his consciousness toward—toward the minuscule tremor in Chu Hongying's fingertips when she received the torn page this morning; toward the heavy stoop in Limpy Zhong's back as he left the medical tent; toward the invisible yet pervasive sweet-rotten "speech" in the camp air.
He forced these "useless" details into the cracks of the pain.
The Mirror Patterns erupted with red warnings:
[Anchoring Procedure Obstructed!]
[Non-Standard Memory Carriers Detected!]
[Forced Purge——]
More intense pain exploded. A suppressed groan escaped Shen Yuzhu's throat, his body curling, nails digging deep into his palms. But he didn't let go. Like a drowning man clinging to driftwood, he clung to those "useless" images: the faint crinkle of paper as Chu Hongying crushed it; the almost imperceptible thread of disgust in Limpy Zhong's voice when he said "I can endure"—disgust not at the pain, but at the very act of "enduring."
[Warning: Personality Stability Critical!]
[Recommendation: Cease Non-Standard Anchoring Immediately. Restart Base Protocol.]
In the midst of agony, Shen Yuzhu pulled his lips into a near-distorted smile.
He understood.
The pain-anchoring the Night Crow Division gave him was to lock him into the mold of "Shen Yuzhu," the manufactured product. Each revisit to the implantation memory was a rehearsal of the fact: "You are a crafted mirror."
What he was doing now was using fragments of "others"—pain, doubt, struggle that did not belong to him—to piece together a new, rough, but living shape.
This shape had no name, and it wasn't stable.
But it refused to be a perfect mirror.
[Self-Identification: 22.3%]
[Status: Fractured Stability]
[Note: Anchor point contamination. Unauthorized data linkages present.]
The Mirror Patterns' assessment was cold and accurate. He was no longer a pure mirror, but a piece of glass full of impurities, turbid. Reflection would distort, would scatter, would fracture light into irreparable shards.
But at least—
This light was real.
Footsteps approached outside the tent, stopping at the door flap.
"Supervisor Shen." Chu Hongying's voice, flat and unrippled. "Three quarters past the hour of Wei, full camp assembly. I have an announcement."
Shen Yuzhu took a deep breath, swallowing the metallic taste in his throat.
"Understood, General."
Three quarters past Wei, the central clearing.
Three hundred seventy-three men stood in formation, no one speaking, only the monotonous beat of banners snapping in the cold wind. The mutated Serenity Grass had been moved to the most prominent spot before the command tent, its dark golden patterns gleaming under the thin afternoon sun with an ominous, dried-blood-like sheen.
Sweet-rotten scent enveloped the field, each man breathing his own tailored doubt.
Chu Hongying stood on the command tent steps, the Wind-Hunter Spear at her side. She didn't look at the grass, nor at anyone, her gaze leveled at the distant grey-white line where snowy plain met sky.
"Effective today," she began, her voice not loud but cruelly clear in the surrounding dead silence, "the camp enacts three new regulations."
"First: all resource collection must be done in pairs, with mutual verification and signature."
"Second: night patrols, sentry posts paired face-to-face, lines of sight must cover each other's backs."
"Third—" she paused, finally letting her gaze fall on the ranks, "—this grass before the command tent will be guarded by the entire camp on rotating shifts. Two per shift, four-hour watches. Record all anomalies—including any thought that flashes through your own mind when you look at it."
An extremely light stir passed through the ranks, like wind over dry grass.
Chu Hongying continued, tone utterly flat. "This is not an honor, it is a duty. What we are guarding is not grass, but the choices we ourselves have made. Those choices—" her eyes swept every face, "—good or bad, sane or mad, from today onward, we place them here. In broad daylight."
"Look at them yourselves."
"Carry them yourselves."
Her words fell into prolonged silence. Only the rasping sound of wind-driven snow grit against banner cloth, and somewhere, a suppressed cough muffled by a hand.
Then a voice rose from the ranks, hoarse and abrupt:
"Why?"
Everyone turned.
It was a young soldier, face flushed red, eyes mixing fear and a kind of ruinous anger. He pointed at the grass. "Why do we have to guard this freakish thing? It's because of it! Ever since it came, everything changed! Supply officers won't enter camp, outsiders call us madmen, even the air we breathe—"
He inhaled sharply, and the scent did its work: for him, it was the sweet rot of spoiled grain, the very food he'd gone hungry to save for others, now turned poisonous in his lungs. "—it's fucking stinks now!"
He grew more agitated, stepping forward. "Burn it! Burn it and we're clean!"
"Zhao Si!" an older soldier nearby barked.
But it was too late. The young soldier—Zhao Si—as if bewitched by his own words, or catalyzed by some destructive impulse from the sweet-rotten air, suddenly lunged toward the command tent.
It happened too fast.
Several front-row soldiers instinctively reached to block, but he barreled through. Eyes bloodshot, muttering "burn it clean," his hand went to the tinderbox at his waist—
And he crashed into a wall of silence.
Not Chu Hongying, not Gu Changfeng.
Limpy Zhong.
He had somehow moved in front of the tent, balanced on his good right leg and the stump support, standing firmly between Zhao Si and the Serenity Grass. No words, no movement, just looking at Zhao Si.
Zhao Si froze. He recognized Limpy Zhong—the veteran who gave his own medicine broth to Old Wang the Fifth last night, who returned his pain herbs this morning. His throat bobbed, hand hanging mid-air.
"Move." Zhao Si's voice trembled.
Limpy Zhong shook his head, still silent.
"I said move!" Zhao Si shouted, tears abruptly welling and spilling over. "You're all insane! Guarding this ghost-thing, waiting to be quarantined as freaks?! I want to live! I just want to live normally!"
"This is normal."
The speaker was Chen He. He stepped out from the ranks, standing beside Limpy Zhong, face pale but spine straight. "Enduring hunger, enduring pain, enduring others calling you mad, enduring your own doubt of yourself—this is our fucking normal."
Another soldier stepped out. Then a second. A third.
They didn't form a tight circle, just stood loosely around the Serenity Grass, half a pace between each other. No one spoke, no one took a defensive stance. They just stood there, like a group who happened to gather here, each lost in their own daze.
But Zhao Si couldn't charge through.
That wall built from silence, weariness, and a kind of resigned "so be it" was harder to breach than any blade or spear.
Shen Yuzhu stood at the crowd's edge, Mirror Patterns fully engaged.
He was no longer calculating, no longer weighing odds and costs. He was only recording—recording the deeper layer of fear beneath the trembling in Zhao Si's fists; recording the subtle spasm in Limpy Zhong's left stump beneath his calm face from tension; recording the self-mocking quiver in Chen He's voice when he said "this is normal"; recording the gazes of every soldier nearby, mixing bewilderment, fatigue, yet unwavering.
This data was messy, contradictory, full of "noise."
It could not be categorized, could not be fitted into any efficiency model.
But Shen Yuzhu took it all in, forcibly cramming it into his disintegrating personality framework. Agony washed over him like a tide—not the system's punishment, but his "container" being cracked open by these indigestible truths.
[Self-Identification: 21.7% → 20.9%]
[Warning: Structural Damage]
[Recommendation: Cease Non-Standard Data Intake Immediately.]
He ignored the warning.
At the peak of pain, he suddenly "saw"—not with eyes, but with some shattering perception:
Above the camp, the spiritual streams originally being eroded by the Night Crow Division's dark gold markers were slowly being "contaminated" by something else. It was those extremely fine silver-grey threads escaping from each soldier. They did not attack the dark gold markers, merely twined around them, coexisting, staining that cold, definitional erosion with a layer of turbidity belonging to flesh and blood that could not be parsed.
It was like rust growing on a perfect measuring rod.
The rod was still a rod, could still measure, but that rust-mark became a flaw it could never reconcile.
Shen Yuzhu swallowed back the metallic taste rising in his throat. In his heart, he recited:
I am no longer a mirror.
A mirror reflects perfectly, but only what is placed before it.
I am a prism full of impurities.
Refraction will distort, will scatter, will fracture light into colors the mirror never sees.
But these colors are real. Like the tremor in her fingers when she crushed the paper. Like the shame in Chen He's voice.
These are my new reflections.
Chu Hongying never moved throughout.
She watched Zhao Si finally collapse into a crouch, sobbing into his hands; watched those loosely standing soldiers silently return to the ranks one by one; watched Limpy Zhong shuffle back to his position, back stooped as if bearing invisible stone.
Then she spoke, voice still calm:
"Zhao Si, first watch tonight. You and Chen He together."
Zhao Si jerked his head up, face streaked with tears and confusion.
"Watch it." Chu Hongying said. "Watch for four hours. Once you understand, then come tell me—if burning it would truly make us clean."
She turned and entered the command tent, the Wind-Hunter Spear dragging a straight, deep furrow in the snow.
The crowd slowly dispersed.
No one cheered, no one felt they had won anything. Only a deeper weariness settled heavily between everyone's shoulder blades, like another invisible heavy armor worn beneath the iron. The soldiers walked back to their duties. Their steps were no lighter, but something had shifted: the space between each man had recalibrated. Not closer, not farther—just acknowledged. Like they had all silently agreed on the exact width of the trench they now shared.
The Serenity Grass trembled in the cold wind.
The dark golden patterns seemed brighter, yet the sweet-rotten scent faded a fraction—or perhaps not faded, but the camp's people were beginning to grow accustomed to coexisting with this scent.
Just as they grew accustomed to pain, to hunger, to being called "madmen."
Midnight, Observation Hub of the Night Crow Division.
Archivist Forty-Two watched the spiritual resonance spectrum of the northern camp form its final report in the bronze mirror before him. Data streams flowed like star rivers, yet they circled repeatedly swirling at a certain node, unable to proceed to conclusion.
The data stream stuttered. Not like a mechanical fault, but like a reader encountering a word that refused to be defined. The characters on the bronze mirror trembled, recombining, dissolving, as if the system itself was trying to swallow a concept too jagged for its throat.
He had rebooted the analysis module three times.
Each time, the system jammed on the same logical paradox:
[Contradictory Stability Detected]
Phenomenon: Under "definitional contamination" pressure, sample did not disintegrate nor retaliate, but formed a certain symbiotic structure on the ethical level.
Characteristics:
Individual suffering was not transmitted downward, nor erupted upward, but partially "precipitated" within lateral connections.
The symbolic object (marked entity) was not destroyed, but incorporated into a collective guarding ritual, becoming the materialized vessel of the contradiction itself.
Primary observation target Shen Yuzhu's behavior pattern shows "anchor point contamination," beginning to use unauthorized data (emotional fragments of others) to maintain existence.
[Problem:]
This structure does not conform to any known "pressure-reaction" model. It is neither obedience nor rebellion, but a kind of… existential refutation.
Forty-Two rubbed his temples. He thought of the pair of thin sparrows in the cage by his window that once fed each other. Later, he intensified the starvation test. The expected fighting never occurred—the two birds just pressed closer, fluffed their feathers, using each other's body heat as another kind of "food."
They starved to death.
But they died leaning together.
Back then, he wrote in his report: "Irrational behavior. Violates optimal survival solution."
Now, looking at the camp's data streams, an absurd thought arose: Perhaps "rationality" itself was merely an overly narrow measuring rod. It could measure the time needed to starve, but could not measure the "warmth" of two birds leaning together—a warmth that could not be entered into any calculation formula.
Then, after 0.7 seconds of perfect stillness, the final verdict crystallized.
After a long silence, he finally manually added a non-standard note at the report's end:
[Observer's Addendum (Unofficial)]
Sample displays a "resilience" undefined by current models. This resilience comes not from strength, but from the ability to endure distortion without losing internal connection.
Recommendation: Rather than attempting "correction," treat as a new phenomenon type for long-term deep observation.
Perhaps we are witnessing the germination of some "life-form outside order."
And any germination, at the start, is defined by existing gardens as "weeds."
He stamped his seal.
Almost simultaneously, ripples stirred in the depths of the Law-Sea. The vast spiritual vein computation network processing this report experienced a 0.7-second blank stagnation—for a system processing billions of data points every instant, this stagnation felt long as a meditation.
Then, new directives generated:
[Northern Tundra Sample · Final Adjudication]
Status Update: From "Anomaly Pending Correction" to "Long-Term Observation Phenomenon."
New Classification: Conceptual Contradictory Stability (Provisional Class).
Disposal Protocol:
Terminate "Emotional Isolation" countdown.
Initiate specialized long-term observation framework—[Project Codename: Paradox Garden].
Core Observation Goal: Whether this steady state under sustained pressure will lead to self-transcendence or implosion.
Note:
This sample is no longer a "problem," but a growing question mark. All subsequent contact should prioritize "data collection," not "implementation of correction."
The directives transmitted to every relevant node.
On the imperial border patrol's duty roster, the "Disciplinary Inspection" targeting the camp, originally scheduled three days later, was postponed indefinitely.
In the Night Crow Division's training materials, a new appendix case was added, titled: "Observation Strategy Adjustments When Subjects Refuse to Be 'Subjects'."
On the spiritual vein map in the deep palace's star observation platform, the faint light speck representing the Northern Tundra flickered once—frequency disordered, matching no known pattern.
Blackstone Valley, Ice-Mirror Chamber.
Helian Sha watched the scene in the mirror: the camp sinking into sleep, only the Serenity Grass before the command tent gleaming with intertwined dark gold and silver-grey under moonlight. Beside the grass, two soldiers on watch dozed leaning on their spears, heads nodding, yet never fully falling over.
"My King," the hunched shaman asked softly, "have they… passed the first trial?"
"Passed?" A complex shade passed through the depths of Helian Sha's ice-blue pupils. "No. They have merely proven that this 'trial' itself is a false proposition."
His fingertip lightly touched the mirror surface, ripples spreading.
"This is more dangerous than direct rebellion," he said slowly, his voice that of a philosopher observing a fascinating, dangerous new species. "They are not breaking the examination rules. They are rewriting the examination paper in a language the examiner cannot read."
The shaman was silent.
"The Empire set an examination." Helian Sha withdrew his hand, turning as his black cloak spread like night wings. "The question was: 'To what ugliness will humanity sink in extremity?' And the answer they submitted is a line of crooked, scrawled characters: 'Apologies. We refuse to answer your question using your definitions of humanity.'"
"This is more dangerous. Because rebellion at least acknowledges the examination hall's existence. And they… are attempting to turn the examination hall into their own sleeping mat."
He walked toward the chamber's depths, voice drifting in the cold air:
"Continue observation. Record every detail—especially those that cannot be categorized, those that seem useless."
"True mutation often hides within the noise."
Camp, last watch before dawn.
Shen Yuzhu stood alone on the west wall's ruined rampart. Cold wind like knives cut his unhealed wounds, bringing clear yet distant pain.
The Mirror Patterns displayed cold data:
[Self-Identification: 22.1% (Stable State)]
[Anchor Structure: Composite Type (Trauma Memory + External Emotional Fragments)]
[System Marker: Tier-1 Conceptual Interaction Node (New)]
[Assigned Project: Paradox Garden (Under Observation)]
He looked down at his hand. Old wounds layered over new on his palm, the imprint from the token's edge already scabbed, gleaming dark brown under moonlight. He no longer needed to clutch it tightly to confirm existence—just remembering those surrounding silhouettes tonight, Zhao Si's collapse into tears, the calm, unrippled face of Chu Hongying when she said "carry them yourselves," a rough, prickling "sense of reality" would rise from within.
That wasn't the complete "I."
That was the vibration of "I-standing-here-with-them."
In the distance before the command tent, the Serenity Grass swayed slightly in the night wind. Dark gold patterns intertwined with the newly born silver-grey threads in the camp's spiritual field, like some uncanny yet harmonious symbiont.
Shen Yuzhu closed his eyes.
In absolute darkness and silence, he suddenly "heard"—not sound, but something deeper, the land's own pulse. Three hundred seventy-three breaths, three hundred seventy-three heartbeats, three hundred seventy-three tremors of different arcs yet the same frequency.
They mixed together, inseparable.
Just like his current existence: mixed with too much of others' pain, doubt, struggle, long past purity.
But perhaps purity itself was an illusion.
Just like that grass: marked, polluted, feared, guarded—it was no longer the initial crack in the stone fragile blue. But it lived, in a mutated, rust-stained posture, lived to become the first life on this tundra that could not be cleanly measured by any measuring rod.
Shen Yuzhu opened his eyes.
At the eastern horizon, the first strand of grey-white tried to tear the night curtain.
He turned and descended the wall, steps steady and slow. Wounds still hurt, Mirror Patterns still warned, the Self-Identification number remained dangerously low.
But he knew, from this night onward, the measuring rod by which he measured himself had changed its scale.
No longer asking: "Am I Shen Yuzhu?"
But asking: "Where I stand together with them—can something still grow that the measuring rod never anticipated?"
As dawn light pierced the clouds, the Serenity Grass trembled. A petal bearing dark gold patterns drifted loose, caught by wind, gently pressed against an old arrow scar on the west wall.
Like an accidental kiss.
Also like an answer, just beginning to grow.
They did not overthrow the measuring rod.
They only, with their own existence,
upon that rod which measures all things,
carved a mark that cannot be polished smooth—
a mark belonging to flesh and blood.
And upon the star observation platform in the distant imperial capital,
on that spiritual vein map covering all under heaven,
the faint light speck representing the "Northern Tundra"
flickered once—
frequency: disordered.
classification: failed.
status: observing.
And somewhere, deep in the perfect machinery, a gear hesitated.
[Chapter 100｜End]
(The Ethical Dilemma Trilogy · Concluded)
Next Chapter: Echoes of Blackstone Valley