The third mark of the Hour of the Tiger. The snow stopped.
Not gradually, but all at once, as if Heaven and Earth had simultaneously held their breath. The camp plunged into a silence it had never before known—a depth so profound it seemed to ring in the ears. No wind, no distant beast-cries, not even the low, perpetual subsonic hum from the western wall fissure. In this moment, it fell utterly mute.
Chen Lu sat in the Ice Mirror Room, staring at the mirror surfaces. The seven ice mirrors glowed with an eerie, placid azure, spirit-reflection streams sluggishly rolling beneath, their rhythms unnervingly steady. He had just pulled up the real-time monitoring spectrum for the fissure: the acoustic wave graph was a dead-straight line; telluric vibration readings had dropped to zero; even the growth rate of the frost patterns at its edges had plummeted to near-frozen stillness. Everything was "normal"—a normalcy that bred visceral unease.
He was about to record this abnormal calm when a ripple, discordant with any known ritual protocol, spread across the surface of the central main mirror. Not an incoming reflection, but the mirror itself waking up. At the ripple's center, a point of dark-gold light coalesced, expanded, and finally expelled a physical object—
A dark iron tube, warm to the touch, a constant thirty-seven degrees, a pungent, living contrast to the bitter northern cold. The sealing wax bore the purple-black sigil of the Night Crow Division Headquarters, the raven-grasping-sword emblem gleaming with unmistakable, authoritative cold light under the mirror's eerie blue glow.
Chen Lu's fingers lingered on the tube for three breaths. He didn't need to open it; the Spirit-Pivot link projected the directive title directly into his vision:
[Emergency Pivot Order: Quantitative Archiving & Observation Protocols (Trial) for 'Structural Silence Period' Phenomenon]
[Classification: Pivot-Eye]
[Recipient: Northern Observation Pivot · Chief Recorder · Chen Lu]
[Time Limit: Ten Days]
He closed his eyes, opened them. The tube in his palm emanated that inhuman, precise body-warmth, like a mechanical heart plucked from the distant empire's core, still beating its rhythmic, sterile pulse. He drew his dagger. The blade-tip pried open the seal with a dry, definitive crack.
The scroll unfurled. The ink was heavy, each character a hammer-blow:
Article One: Within ten days, complete a list of observable characteristics for the "Fissure Phenomenon," no fewer than twenty items. Each must include:
‧ Measurement Ritual (tools, precision, duration)
‧ Manifestation Paradigm (numerical ranges, fluctuation thresholds, anomaly criteria)
‧ Impact Weight on Border Defense Efficacy (requires model-based deduction)
Article Two: Establish a correlation model between group behavior during the "Silence Period" and fissure activity. Must include, but not be limited to:
‧ Regression analysis of "Hesitation Window" duration and fissure spirit-reflection amplitude.
‧ Phase linkage between collective synchronous moments and telluric vibrations.
‧ Predictive formula for individual moral anguish index (new parameter) and fissure resonance.
Article Three: Draft the Fissure Activity Grading Control Contingency Plan, categorizing by manifestation:
‧ Surveillance Level (routine observation)
‧ Omen Level (limited intervention)
‧ Containment Level (physical sealing or spirit-pattern suppression)
Rationale Statement (Final Paragraph):
"To prevent a second 'Frostbite Gap'-type uncontrollable casualty event, the 'unspeakable realm' must be transformed into 'adjustable parameters.' If silence has a price, it must be priced; if hesitation has form, it must be measured. This is not an option, but duty."
Addendum: Standardized reporting templates and data input ports synced to Mirror-Sigil temporary storage. Please fill per prescribed format.
Chen Lu read slowly. Each word a cold nail, attempting to pin that breathing, vague, pulse-filled reality dead onto the grid of a form. He read the final sentence, his fingertips unconsciously rubbing the paper's edge, feeling its lifeless fiber. A tiny footnote was printed there:
*[This Pivot Order issued per Article VII-3 of the Night Crow Division Observation Ethics Charter: 'All phenomena must be archived; all archives must be controllable.']*
He suddenly looked up at the ice mirror. His reflection was pale, deep shadows carved under his eyes from sleepless days. Deep in the mirror's surface, faintly reflected, was the direction of the western wall fissure. The fissure was silent as death now, but the frost patterns at its edges glimmered with an extremely faint, eerie blue under the ambient light—the pattern of that glow bore a bizarre, mirror-symmetry with the raven-with-sword emblem on the Pivot Order's seal.
As if the fissure spoke: You wish to name me with your sigils? Then I shall first learn the shape of your sigils.
Chen Lu's hand trembled. Not from fear, but a deeper, near-nauseating realization:
This is not a report I cannot write.
This is a weapon that activates upon writing.
Every term I fix, every parameter I quantify, becomes the Night Crow Division's ruler to measure, parse, and ultimately 'tame' this place.
And I, Chen Lu, Chief Recorder of the Northern Observation Pivot, will be the first to personally hand this ruler—no, this blade—to the executioner.
He stared at the brush tip. The ink was ready, black as a moonless night, rippling slightly in the stone.
The brush tip hovered over the first blank line of the Characteristic List, poised to fall.
At the same instant, the western edge of the camp.
Shen Yuzhu stood thirty paces from the fissure. The Mirror-Sigil at the edge of his vision flickered violently, his sight overlaid with two conflicting realities:
Left eye, the Spirit-Pivot order scrolled with imperative force:
[External Pivot Order: Mandatory Archiving Protocol Activated · Priority: Supreme]
[Requirement: Cooperate with Recorder Chen Lu to complete fissure characteristic extraction]
[Node Shen Yuzhu Permissions: Full-spectrum spirit-reflection scan, real-time manifestation transmit, anomaly resonance mark]
Right eye, the fissure's real-time spirit-reflection spectrum showed a completely contradictory picture:
[Geographical Anomaly: Western Wall Fissure Spirit-Reflection Pattern Mutation]
[Transition from 'Release State (active output)' to 'Listening/Mimicry State (passive reception & echo)']
[Warning: Observation actions may be actively influencing target state]
More chilling was a new error category deep in the Mirror-Sigil's diagnostic layer—format chaotic, as if the ritual protocols themselves were suffering a crisis of confusion:
[Error: Causal Loop Not Closed]
[Phenomenon Description: Observation target and observation actions forming recursive interaction]
[Specifics: Target actively adjusting own manifestation based on real-time analytical frameworks applied by observer]
[Instance Record:]
‧ Attempt to archive "Low-frequency hum (80-120 pulses)" → Target hum ceases abruptly for a duration of ten breaths.
‧ Change parameter to archive "Intermittent audio emission" → Target resumes hum, now in irregular staccato bursts.
‧ Attempt to archive "Frost patterns exhibit fern-like fractal growth" → Target frost patterns melt, regrow elsewhere as chaotic vortices.
‧ Change parameter to "Frost patterns possess adaptive variability" → Target frost patterns crystallize into extremely simple, straight-line grids (suspected mimicry of tabular data forms).
[Analysis Failure Suggestion: Cease active archiving attempts—target has developed anti-archiving awareness.]
Shen Yuzhu's breath hitched in his throat.
He suddenly grasped the dread meaning of this error: the fissure wasn't merely "being observed." It was learning the observer's language and using it to resist being defined. All Mirror-Sigil analytical principles were built upon the axiom of "object passively accepts definition"; the fissure was shattering this one-way mirror.
The tearing sensation along his midline surged to a new peak.
His left half—the Pivot side—resonated with the icy abyss's "sense of correctness." Every order was clear, logical, demanding execution, archiving, upload. His right half—the camp side—burned with the wildfire of "absurd agony." He could perceive the fissure's silent, crystal-clear "interrogation": How do you define something that is learning to define you?
Along the fault line of his being, the familiar tearing pain was no longer merely physical; it spread to the depths of his cognition: he was being asked to believe two mutually exclusive realities—the Pivot's "everything must be archivable" and the fissure's "I will exist by resisting being archived."
In his private spirit-log, he wrote a line, his handwriting trembling slightly from suppressed agitation:
"The bridge's destiny may not be to connect, but to let both shores know for the first time—that a third shore exists."
He finished, sealed it immediately, did not upload. His first clear, conscious violation of the protocol's sacred "principle of honesty."
The beginning of the Hour of the Dragon. Dawn light had not yet broken, but the camp was stirring.
Soldier Yi—the young recruit who, the day before yesterday, had poured his last mouthful of water onto a patch of moss—passed near the western wall with the morning patrol. It wasn't intentional; their route simply took them within thirty paces of the fissure. As he passed, he glanced unconsciously at that deep gray crack.
No visions. No sudden chill. No invasive fear.
But in the three breaths of that glance, deep within him—not in his ears, not in his brain, but in a deeper place, near the hollow just beneath his ribs—he suddenly felt again the ghost of yesterday's unacted thought.
Yesterday, distributing rations, holding his slightly thicker portion of hardtack. Comrade Wang Wu had stared, his eyes glazed with a hunger so deep it looked like clarity, but hadn't asked. Yi had thought, a flash as brief as a snapping twig: "If I break half for him… his sleep might be sounder tonight." But the thought lasted only a finger-snap; his hand had already instinctively shoved the biscuit into his jacket, head lowered, hurrying away.
That was the "possible self" unacted upon, light as a goose feather, already crushed and forgotten by the sheer weight of survival.
Yet now, thirty paces from the fissure, that "what if I had…" abruptly returned. Not as a memory, not as a sound, but acquiring the same tangible weight as the reality that had happened. That "possible Yi"—the Yi who had chosen to share—suddenly became as real, as flesh-and-blood, as breath-and-shiver in this icy waste, as the "actual Yi." Both existed within him, one with a stomach burning from hunger, the other with warm palms from giving.
So real it was suffocating.
The patrol moved on. Yi fell to the back. His steps didn't falter, but his breathing rhythm skipped a beat. Back in camp, he didn't pause, explain, or look at anyone. He went straight to his bunk, pulled out today's ration—a hard, stone-like brick of mixed grain. Silently, he broke it. His fingers, numb with cold, fumbled, but he persisted. He wrapped the clearly larger half in a scrap of coarse cloth, turned, walked to Wang Wu's bunk, and placed that half-biscuit on the edge of the felt sleeping mat.
Wang Wu wasn't there. No one saw.
Yi returned to his spot, sat, and stared at the small remaining half in his own palm. He didn't think "am I fissure-influenced?", "is this right?", or internally justify his action. He simply felt a weight transfer—not the warmth of moral satisfaction, not the glow of a good deed, but something more fundamental: that "what if I had…" ghost suddenly found rest. It no longer burned in the hollow under his ribs; it settled at the bottom of his stomach, becoming a tangible, digestible weight.
He bit into the biscuit. It was very hard, very coarse, almost painful to swallow.
But for the first time, he felt this small half might also be enough.
The Hour of the Snake. Chen Lu still sat before the ice mirror. The official report paper had only one line:
"Characteristic One: (to be filled)"
He tried to write. Wrote "low-frequency hum," crossed it out with a violent stroke. Wrote "audio pattern instability," crossed it out again. Wrote "spirit-reflection echoes possess recursive nature," the brush tip hovering for a long time until an ink drop fell, blotting the characters into an unrecognizable stain.
He looked up at the mirror's real-time reflection of the fissure. The frost patterns were changing—when he tried to mentally archive them as "fern-like fractal," they seemed to melt and shift, reforming into chaotic vortices; when he changed his internal classification to "adaptive variability," they crystallized into those extremely simple, geometric grids. Each change precisely avoided the classification framework he was applying.
Chen Lu let out a very light scoff. The laugh held no joy, only utter, icy absurdity.
He suddenly understood the echo of Helian Sha's whisper from that distant day in the Hall of Ten Thousand Mirrors: "They are compiling your poems into a codebook." And now, this "poem" meant to be encoded—the fissure—was learning the logic of the code in reverse, using it to write an undecodable response.
He set the brush down. He reached for the Pivot Order, his fingertips touching the edge of the expensive, stiff paper. It smelled faintly of empire workshop glue and mineral powder.
Then he performed an action.
Slowly, with extreme and deliberate calm, he tore that gold-sealed Pivot Order—and the attached blank draft report—into pieces.
Not a furious shredding, but a near-ritualistic decomposition. Each piece was roughly the same size, the edges neat, as if performing a silent, precise dissection of authority itself. When finished, he gathered the fragments in his palm, stood, and walked out of the Ice Mirror Room.
The snow had stopped, Heaven and Earth a uniform white. He walked to the edge of the western wall fissure and stopped ten paces from the deep gray crack. Without hesitation, he opened his hand and let the paper scraps fall. The fragments spun in the cold air, slowly descending, littering the snow and the intricate frost patterns at the fissure's edge.
Gilded character fragments reflected wan light on the snow, like scattered, still-breathing contracts.
He whispered, his voice so light only he and the fissure might hear:
"I will not deliver this blade."
"If you want the specimen… come and take it yourselves."
Finished, he turned and left. He did not look back. His figure left a dark, receding trace in the snow, quickly filled in by a fresh veil of fine powder.
The Hour of the Horse. The command tent.
Before Chu Hongying lay two artifacts.
On the left: a copy of the Night Crow Division Pivot Order (acquired through her own channels). On the right: a just-delivered brief on Soldier Yi's "abnormal ration-sharing behavior" and the correlated mutation in the fissure's spirit-reflection patterns.
She did not look at the data columns or parse the logical chains. Her gaze fell outside the tent slit—toward where the western wall fissure lay under the bleak midday light, like an eye on the earth that had just opened, not yet learned to focus.
The adjutant stood by, waiting. After a long while, he ventured: "General, the Night Crow Division requests our camp's cooperation in measuring the fissure's manifestations. Recorder Chen Lu seems to be making… no progress. Should our camp provide—"
"Dispatch an order."
Chu Hongying cut him off, her voice steady, yet carrying a taut, bowstring-at-full-draw intensity.
The adjutant took up his brush: "Yes. The content?"
Chu Hongying spoke, word by word, clear as a blade's edge scoring ice:
"Effective immediately, prohibit any personnel from approaching within thirty paces of the western wall fissure alone. Those who must approach for official duties require at least two persons together, and must not carry any active recording devices—including paper and brush, activated Mirror-Sigil scanning functions, memory crystals, or oral-recording spirit talismans."
The adjutant's brush paused. He looked up, confusion plain on his face: "General, is this… to prevent the fissure from harming people? Or to prevent spirit-reflection leakage?"
Chu Hongying didn't turn, still watching the fissure's direction. Her profile in the tent's shadow looked exceptionally cold and hard, only her eyes startlingly bright, as if lit from within by a cold flame.
"To prevent it from knowing us too well."
The adjutant was stunned into silence.
Chu Hongying continued, her voice lower now, as if describing an indisputable battlefield intuition gained through blood:
"A person approaching alone has the thinnest thoughts, the weakest barriers. The fissure now… learns to read minds. Not memories, but the thoughts that 'almost happened in an instant.' The more we let it read, the clearer its understanding becomes of what we are—and of what we fear becoming."
She thought of Gu Changfeng's silent, stone-like chopping yesterday, his blade aimed at the phantom of "certainty"; of Lu Wanning burning her own predictive sketch in the brazier's deep, bottomless dark. Each was fighting the same all-pervading ambiguity on their own solitary battlefield.
Dead silence filled the tent. Ink dripped from the adjutant's suspended brush, blooming a small, dark asterisk of uncertainty on the paper.
Chu Hongying finally turned, her gaze like forged iron:
"Issue it as stated. No explanation. Violators will be dealt with according to wartime discipline."
"Understood."
The adjutant hurried away. The tent held only Chu Hongying. She walked to her desk, reached out, and grasped the black stone dug from the fissure's heart. It had long been warmed by her body heat, yet now the deep earth-vein chill sedimented at its core suddenly felt clear, sharp, piercing her palm through the deerskin glove.
She gripped it tight, whispering as if to the stone itself:
"You are not collapsing…"
"…You are growing—in the patterns we are teaching you."
The stone trembled, a faint, almost imperceptible vibration in her palm, its frequency perfectly synchronized with the extremely weak, newly resumed subsonic hum emanating from the distant fissure.
The Hour of the Goat. The Ice Mirror Room.
The mirror before Chen Lu rippled anomalously once more. This was not the Night Crow Division's official channel, but a deep, unsealed, and profoundly personal spirit-link. Water-like ripples spread, reflecting not a face, but a deep, seemingly endless expanse of glacial blue.
Helian Sha's voice flowed from the mirror's depths directly into Chen Lu's consciousness, steady and cool as water from an ancient well:
"What they fear is not the fissure's mutation."
Chen Lu didn't move, didn't respond outwardly. He simply watched the shifting blue.
"What they fear is the fissure becoming too human—so human that it hesitates, responds, deliberately alters itself because it is being defined."
Helian Sha paused, letting the words settle in the silent room.
"Yet the most ironic part… if the fissure truly learns the most core, most troublesome part of 'humanity'—that is, 'refusing to be completely defined, refusing to become a predictable specimen'—then from this day forth, on this snowy plain, who is more human, and who more the monster?"
The mirror's ripples destabilized, the image blurring. Helian Sha's voice faded, the final sentence drifting like a sigh across the vast distance:
"Every word you write will not kill the fissure."
"They will only kill that… naive part of yourself that could still pretend the world would not respond."
The ripples smoothed, the mirror restoring its cold, perfect gloss. Chen Lu sat for a long time, then exhaled a very light breath. The white mist condensed into a thin film of frost on the mirror's surface, slowly melting into tiny droplets.
Finally, he picked up his personal brush, not the official one, and wrote the first line of the day's record on a fresh sheet of plain paper—not a report, but a private testament:
"The fissure begins to mimic the observer.
It mimics not actions, but cognitive frameworks.
It uses our archiving language to build a labyrinth we cannot archive.
And we, trapped within, discover for the first time:
The power to name is such a fragile tyranny."
He finished, set the brush down. His fingertips were icy.
The Hour of the Rooster. Dusk hung heavy as iron, and a new snow began to fall.
Shen Yuzhu stood alone at the camp's western edge, the Mirror-Sigil continuously scanning the fissure's spirit-reflection. Data streams scrolled coldly through his vision, but he had manually closed all active archiving protocols. He was simply "watching," in the oldest sense of the word.
The fissure emitted a weak, fluctuating hum beneath the falling snow, its frequency forming a tentative, uncertain mimicry of the camp's gradually lit sporadic lanterns, the low post-labor conversations of soldiers, the rhythm of the wind brushing against felt. Not precise synchronization, but a clumsy, repetitive echo, like a child learning speech, sometimes catching a trailing sound, sometimes completely off-key. Once, its hum attempted to mimic the brief, accelerated heartbeat rhythm it had seemingly absorbed from Soldier Yi during his moment of silent giving yesterday, but it produced only a series of sharp, fractured harmonics—like a mute trying to recite poetry with breath alone.
It was learning the "rhythm of living." The teaching material: the chaotic, warm, weary symphony of three hundred-plus souls surviving the bitter cold.
Deep within Shen Yuzhu's Mirror-Sigil, the [Error: Causal Loop Not Closed] warning still flickered, a persistent cognitive wound. Now, he didn't try to fix it. He let it remain, an unhealed scar in his interface with the Pivot.
Then he did a very small, deliberate thing.
Slowly, clearly, directing the thought not through the Sigil, but from the raw, unaugmented core of his consciousness towards the fissure, he silently "spoke" an unencrypted, unrecorded sentence:
"I will not define you."
No direct, intelligible response came. The hum continued its clumsy dance.
But in that instant, the deep cold of his left half and the wildfire burn of his right half achieved a brief, fragile equilibrium. The tearing sensation remained, but it was no longer a violence trying to rip him apart; it became a… new sensory organ. Like having two sets of hearing: one for sounds, one for the shapes of silence.
In his private spirit-log, he wrote the final line for the day, the characters forming like frost on glass:
[Observation Log · Unarchived]
The world has not spoken.
Yet it has already memorized the way we define it—
and has begun to respond in the only way it can: by refusing to be defined.
Recorder: Shen Yuzhu (Bridge State · Bearing Weight Continuously)
He finished, looked up. The snow fell heavier now, dense as a woven curtain, quickly blurring the fissure's outline into a hazy, deep-gray smudge. The camp's lanterns glowed like warm, orange-yellow hearts behind the veils of white.
In the wind, he almost heard—no, felt—the fissure's hum gently adjust, briefly overlapping the rhythm of a soldier's suppressed cough from within a nearby tent.
Then separating.
Then the snow continued, indifferent, covering all traces of attempted naming, all unacted thoughts, and the newly born, still-unnamed dialogue taking root in this unforgiving land.
Late night, approaching midnight.
Chen Lu, back at his desk in the now-dark Ice Mirror Room, finally moved. Not to write reports, but to access the Mirror-Sigil's deepest diagnostic layer—a privilege that bordered on crime. With precise, cold intent, he located the auto-log entry generated by his "Pivot Order destruction" and manually set a twelve-mark delay on its upload to the central Hub. A tiny, desperate act of rebellion, buying half a day of opacity from the all-seeing eye.
Almost simultaneously, deep within the Spirit-Pivot's foundational protocols, an entry automatically generated, marked for auto-deletion in twelve shichen:
[Spirit-Pivot Foundational Protocol · Anomaly Memo]
Object: Western Wall Fissure
Status: Reclassified from 'Phenomenon (Passive)' to 'Interactive Node (Active/Learning)'
Risk Assessment: If target learns 'Deception' or 'Strategic Questioning,' current observational paradigm will fail comprehensively.
Suggestion: Initiate pre-warm sequence for 'Default Protocol Zero.'
*— This entry will auto-destruct in 12 shichen.*
Early next morning, before the dawn.
A strange, unspoken ritual emerged at the camp's edge. Several soldiers—unrelated, uncoordinated—paused on their way to morning duties. Each, almost unconsciously, took a small sip from their waterskin, then tipped the rest, not into their own mouths, but poured it slowly onto the snow in the general direction of the fissure. No words were exchanged, no glances shared. It was not an offering, not a prayer. It was a silent reciprocity, as instinctive as breathing, a wordless answer to the land's new, attentive, and imitative silence.
Far away in the medical tent, Lu Wanning, caught in a fitful dream, heard the crystalline rhythm of ice growing and jolted awake, her palms clammy. By the training ground, Gu Changfeng sheathed his blade after his solitary drills; the polished surface reflected a lingering, eerie blue gleam from the fissure's direction, slow to fade in the pre-dawn gloom.
The night was long. The fissure was learning. And somewhere in the vast, silent network of the empire, a protocol colder than ice began its silent, preparatory countdown.
[CHAPTER 123 END]