In the third watch of Yin, the Night Crow Division's Central Pivot Chamber held no light, save for the pale, cold luminescence flowing from seven ice mirrors.
"The tool dispute event, catalog B7-110-01, imprinting complete."
The voice was flat, like ice being scored. Upon the surface of the main mirror, an integrated Imprint materialized line by line:
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[Imprint Completeness Verification: Passed] - Verbal Transcription Word-for-Word: Conflict dialogue, duration two minutes twenty-four seconds. - Motion Capture: Seven key muscle group tension peaks, three-dimensional reconstruction of gesture trajectories. - Physiological Data: Soldier A's heart-rate peak +42%, Soldier B's dermal electrical response indicates defensive state. - Environmental Parameters: Wind trace, light levels, observer position map complete. [Logical Consistency Verification: Passed] - Event Type: Resource dispute (low priority). - Conflict Evolution Paradigm Match: 91%. - Outcome Prediction Accuracy: Event terminated at 'discard tool and leave' node, consistent with paradigm-predicted 'non-escalation path'. [Efficiency Impact Assessment: Negligible (tool repair cost ≈ 0.3 man-hours).]
The report was perfect, until the final assessment field.
The Spiritual Pivot's calculations stalled for 1.7 seconds. In a system that prided itself on 'myriad calculations in a single breath,' this was near-eternity.
Then, the mirror surface manifested three final lines, their format still impeccable, their content like a chasm suddenly cracking open:
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[Causal Chain Deficiency Rate: 18.7%] [Key Fracture Point: Individual, at the node where the predictive paradigm judged 'conflict escalation probability > 87.7%', chose to 'leave'.] [Nature of Deficiency: Cannot be backfilled using existing paradigms such as 'moral restraint', 'group pressure', or 'individual risk calculation'.] [Status: No applicable Imprint patch available. Archiving Suggestion: Mark as 'Paradigm Coverage Insufficient' observation subject.]
No one in the room moved. The cold blue mirror-light illuminated the lower halves of their faces, lips pressed tight as if carved from stone.
This was not an error.
This was the first time the Pivot faced a fact it could not formulate a sentence for—it held all the runes, but had lost the grammar to connect them.
Shen Yuzhu awoke to the permanent hum deep in his left ear—now a complex chord, its notes the colorless bloom's unfurling, the West Wall's compliant resonance, and the Pivot's own structural grinding. The camp slept within a silence too meticulously ordered. No snores, no dream-mutterings, even the wind's tearing against the felt tents seemed trimmed. He pushed aside the tent flap and stepped out.
Soldier A turned and walked away from the group, heading toward the abandoned watchtower foundation at the camp's edge. Moonlight stretched his shadow long, dragging a trail of silent ink across the ground.
The Pivot's Imprint:
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[Individual: Soldier A | Status: Moved to abandoned watchtower foundation | Behavior Classification: Solitude/Static.]
Shen Yuzhu stood in the shadow of the command tent, the Mirror-Sigil in his vision pulsing in sync with the camp's spiritual veins. What he 'saw' went far beyond the Pivot's recorded words.
From 00:00 to 00:60 seconds: Soldier A crouched, fist striking the frozen earth.
Pivot record: "Repetitive limb motion."
Mirror-Sigil perception: Force decreasing incrementally—97 Newtons, 43 Newtons, 12 Newtons. Not an outburst, but exhaustion.
From 00:61 to 02:00 seconds: He sat, face buried in his hands.
Pivot record: "Static posture."
Mirror-Sigil capture: Shoulder blades trembling at 0.7 Hz, like a bird with broken wings trying to fold its stumps.
From 02:01 to 03:00 seconds: He looked up, gazing toward the western ridge.
Pivot record: "Visual orientation adjustment."
Mirror-Sigil annotation: Pupils remained unfocused for 53 seconds—he wasn't staring at the mountains, but at some landscape of ruins existing only within him.
Heavier still was the Emotional Afterimage lingering at that spot. The Mirror-Sigil attempted analysis, but could only generate bewilderment:
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[Emotional Spectrum Detection: Anomalous] [Frequency: 0.1 - 0.3 Hz ultra-low frequency fluctuation (characteristics similar to 'instantaneous release after long-term structural stress accumulation')] [Intensity: Medium-High (Spiritual Pressure Value 7.2/10)] [Key Trait: Does not correspond to existing label bank of 'anger', 'sorrow', 'remorse', etc.] [Temporary Label: Undefined Emotional Residue-01.]
Shen Yuzhu closed his eyes. Those three dull thuds against the frozen earth echoed repeatedly in his skull, each lighter than the last, each carrying less force—and more absence.
Those three minutes were not a continuation of behavior.
That was the process of the behavior's true reason, slowly precipitating, taking form, and finally solidifying into something unspeakable in the unobserved dark.
The Pivot had recorded every action.
It had lost the entire reason.
In the Paradox Garden observation station, the oil lamps were dim. Three recording officials sat around the report marked '18.7% Deficiency'.
"Unrecorded is non-existent," the elder recording official tapped the paper, his voice like shattering ice. "Mark 'Insufficient Data', proceed to next item. That is procedure."
"The blank space itself is data!" the younger one retorted, agitated. "I propose adding a speculative note: 'Possibly stems from unidentified group-belonging anxiety, or irrational adherence to an individual moral threshold…'"
His words were cut off as the terminal screen suddenly glowed red:
[Operation Denied: Injection of unverified narrative frameworks prohibited.]
The third recording official had remained silent. After a long while, he spoke very softly, his voice so low it seemed afraid to wake something:
"Are we… attempting to record the part of the world that refuses to be recorded?"
"And the harder we try to delineate it, the more completely it… slips through our fingers?"
Dead silence filled the room.
The Pivot's processing of this sentence arrived after three breaths: No response. It was automatically archived as an [Observer Internal Redundant Communication] audio fragment, stored in a folder labeled [No Analytical Value].
The debate was not resolved. It merely sank beneath the surface, becoming a chasm in their way of seeing the world that could never again be crossed.
Shen Yuzhu walked alone through the camp. The eternal hum deep in his left ear, at certain locations—like where Soldier A had sat—would emit faint, hollow reverberations, as if sound were falling into a bottomless well.
He stopped by the remnants of a campfire and closed his eyes, turning his vision inward.
The Mirror-Sigil interface had changed.
At its base layer was still the bright, Pivot-legible network of spiritual veins, Imprint-data flowing like a starry river. But superimposed upon it now was an additional landscape: patches of dim, blurred-edged regions, like blanks on a map, like blind spots in a spectrum. One prominent dim patch, its coordinates coinciding exactly with Soldier A's sitting spot, bore a small annotation: 18.7%.
His mind quaked, sudden clarity dawning.
His Mirror-Sigil was no longer passively receiving. It had begun to inversely map the Pivot's cognitive blind spots.
A prompt surfaced then, in cold blue text:
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[Cognitive Mode Upgrade Available: Shift from 'Receiving & Parsing Imprints' to 'Observing How Imprints Are Woven, and Identifying the Silences & Fractures Within That Process'.] [Potential Gain: Obtain a more complete 'topological perception' of phenomena.] [Confirmed Risk: This mode will cause you to persistently perceive the Pivot's own 'incompleteness', potentially leading to progressive divergence from the main Imprint-stream and a significant increase in cognitive load.] [Activate?]
Shen Yuzhu stared at that 18.7% darkness in his Mirror-Sigil, representing that which cannot be imprinted.
It was no longer an abstract percentage. It was a blank on a map, a silence in the spiritual veins, an uncompletable sentence in the Pivot's grammar.
He raised a finger and tapped lightly in the empty air.
"Activate."
Instantly, the hum deep in his left ear shifted tone. All constant background noise was stripped away, revealing its core frequency—it was the sound of structural friction: the Pivot's own bedrock protocols, in their recursive attempt to fill voids, colliding against the very architecture of their operational limits. Simultaneously, a fresh, sharp phantom pain bloomed beneath his left shoulder blade. Not sharp, but crushingly heavy, like an ice-cast pile being slowly driven between his bones.
The Mirror-Sigil interface refreshed in sync. Those dim blind spots began linking one-by-one to the pain points in his body, forming a cruel correspondence map:
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[Correspondence Established] - Blind Spot #01 (Soldier A sitting spot, 18.7%) → Beneath left shoulder blade, dull pain of an ice-pile driven against bone. - Blind Spot #02 (Limping Zhong's wordless turning moment) → Old wound at right ankle, burning phantom pain. - ... [Pivot Note: Cognitive load correlates positively with physiological pain. The blind spots you perceive are becoming **new scars** upon your neural map.]
Cold sweat beaded on Shen Yuzhu's temples, yet the corner of his mouth twitched almost imperceptibly.
Not a smile, not a grimace.
It was understanding.
For the first time, he was using the pain of his flesh-and-blood body to remember a limitation of the Pivot.
Inside the command tent, a single oil lamp burned like a bean. Chu Hongying polished an old scar on her Wind-Hunter lance, her gaze falling on Shen Yuzhu's unconscious hand massaging his left shoulder.
"Hurts?"
Shen Yuzhu nodded. "New pain. Corresponds to things the Pivot… cannot comprehend."
"The Pivot scribbles its reports, dissects its observers, yet remains blind to the weight that stays a man's fist," she said, her gaze sharp as the lance-head. "It lost an eye last night, trying to stare into a silence. Do not become its other."
Shen Yuzhu was silent for a moment. "Yet this 'incomprehension' can be fatal. Yesterday it was a pulled-back fist. Tomorrow… perhaps someone, believing 'in the end, no one can understand,' will walk alone into a blizzard and never return."
"So you wish to re-establish rules?" he asked.
"No." Chu Hongying set down her lance, her voice cleaving iron. "Establishing rules is what the Pivot does. It forces what it cannot comprehend into squares it can comprehend. We will not do that."
She paused, her words clear, as if chiseled into permafrost:
"We establish only this one thing:
'Any choice that may cause a companion to pay a price must first be told to another person.'
"Not for approval. Not awaiting permission. Merely told. So that in this world, there is one more pair of eyes that knows where you are going, that knows what is suppressed beneath your silence."
"This is not a rule. This is the minimal unit of connective responsibility."
She drove the butt of her Wind-Hunter lance into the frozen ground beside her. Not hard, but deep enough that the ice cracked in a tiny, star-shaped pattern around it—a physical anchor for an invisible thread.
"A thread, so fine it is almost invisible. Yet as long as it remains," she said, her voice dropping to the quiet rasp of a whetstone, "a kite drifting far knows… there is still a tether that can pull it back."
In a different, deeper stratum of the Pivot—far from the chambers where "Harvest Protocols" were coldly weighed—another kind of admission was being forged in silence:
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[Internal Memo · Security: Pivot] [Subject: Preliminary Reflection on the 'Causal Chain Deficiency Rate' Phenomenon] [Observation: Observation Subject B7-110-01 demonstrates that when an individual's behavioral outcome is highly predictable, yet its core decision-making motivation remains completely irreconcilable with existing paradigms, the 'completeness' claimed by the paradigm reveals a fundamental fissure.] [Deduction: This is not a lack of data, but the presence of a category of phenomena **incapable of assimilation** within the current cognitive framework.] [Interim Resolution: For similar phenomena, **suspend the causal compression protocol**.] [Clarification: Cease forcibly compressing incomprehensible motivations to fit known paradigms of 'rational decision', 'emotional dysregulation', or 'moral calculation'. Allow them to persist in a state of 'motive unclear'.] [Note: This resolution does not affect external report format. Solely an internal cognitive state adjustment.]
Suspend the causal compression protocol.
Six words like an oracle, a gentle abdication edict the system had issued to itself in silence. It admitted: Not everything in the world could be compressed into a formula.
The irony lay in this: At the very same moment, the official version of the Northern Frontier Weekly Stability Report dispatched to the High Judicial Court concluded the matter thus:
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OFFICIAL DISPATCH | INCIDENT B7-110-01: RESOLVED. NO RESIDUAL RISK. GROUP NORMS FUNCTIONAL.
The Pivot did not lie.
It was merely growing increasingly adept at… displaying disparate truths. Its understanding of the world henceforth split in two: one, a glossy facade to maintain operation; the other, an internal ledger growing ever heavier under the weight of silent truths.
Blackstone Valley, the Ice Mirror chamber.
Helian Sha's fingertip hovered a hair's breadth above the mirror surface, not touching. Reflected within was not a concrete scene of the camp, but an abstract topological map of spiritual veins. Where the Northern Frontier camp should be, a web of fine, yet unnervingly clear, dim fissures had appeared within—each one perfectly matching the cognitive blind spots mapped by Shen Yuzhu's Mirror-Sigil.
His ice-blue pupils constricted slightly. The corner of his lips lifted in a curve approaching pity, his whisper like a sigh:
"Observe… the recorder has begun recording the absence of recording itself."
"When a system can no longer perceive even what it chooses not to see…"
His fingertip touched the mirror. The image swallowed itself, ripple by ripple, until only his reflection remained—and even that seemed uncertain.
"…the first illegible character of its glorious epitaph has already been quietly carved by its own hand."
The next dawn, the sky was pale, thin as bleached gauze.
Soldier A took his watch as usual, silent as any cornerstone of the camp. No one mentioned the previous night's dispute, as if those three minutes had never existed.
Yet, as he passed the camp's edge, by that abandoned foundation, his footsteps hesitated almost imperceptibly.
Then he bent down, and with the tip of his boot, scored a short, deep vertical line into the pristine, untrodden snow.
No words. No symbol. No decipherable meaning.
Just a mark.
For Shen Yuzhu, watching, the Mirror-Sigil rendered not the line itself, but the negative space it carved into the Pivot's field of perception. It was kin to the black stone left at the gate: one, a recorder's abandoned tool; the other, a soldier's unwritten testament. Both were specimens the Nexus could not classify.
The west wind came, carrying fine snow, beginning to cover it tenderly, inexorably.
The Pivot's Imprint:
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[Individual Behavior: Suspected unconscious snow-marking. No significant meaning.]
Shen Yuzhu's Mirror-Sigil (in new mode):
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[Observation: Marking behavior not interpreted by Pivot.] [Correlation Point: Located at Spiritual Vein Cognitive Blind Spot coordinate #01.] [Intent Inference Spectrum: Private memorial (40%) / Unconscious venting (35%) / Minor resistance against state of 'not being imprinted' (25%).] [Commonality: All unquantifiable/verifiable.] [Final Suggestion: Archive raw image only. Abandon interpretation.]
Before noon, the new snow would completely swallow that trace.
As if nothing had ever happened.
But Shen Yuzhu knew differently.
This was not like the twelve 'traces of departure' from Chapter 108 that walked toward distant mountains and were eventually smoothed by wind and snow.
This was a mark of existence—scored only to be buried; spoken only to declare the unspeakable.
Some traces are not inscribed upon the snow's surface.
They are carved within the fissure between imprint and truth.
And a fissure, once formally acknowledged by a gaze as 'existent', will begin its own, irreversible… growth.
In the quiet afternoon as the camp returned to calm, Shen Yuzhu stood alone before the command tent. His Mirror-Sigil, having parsed its own futility, offered one final, simple entry before falling silent:
[Cognitive Mode: Stable. Primary Input: Direct Sensory Field. Pivot-Imprint relay: Terminated.]
Left alone with his own senses, he listened.
Within the eternal hum deep in his left ear, amidst the noise representing the Pivot's structural friction, there mingled for the first time a thread so faint, yet impossible henceforth to ignore—
The sound of falling snow.
[End of Chapter 110]