The third mark of the Hour of the Tiger. The last gust of night wind swallowed its own howl.
The camp plunged into an unprecedented stillness—not dead silence, but the taut hush of all things instinctively muffling themselves under the gaze of some vast, breath-holding presence. The fissure in the western wall, which yesterday had been mimicking the rhythm of soldiers sharpening blades, the frequency of Chu Hongying's knuckle rapping her desk, even the fragmented tremor of Lin's collapse, now fell utterly silent.
Not emptiness. A deeper, precipitating quiet, settling into form.
Shen Yuzhu stood at the observation point, frost-blue light flickering at the edge of his Mirror-Sigil. Deep within his vision, the Spirit-Pivot's automatic log was tracing the fissure's recent learning trajectory:
[Learning Phase Retrospective (Summary)]
‧ Initial Stage: Mimicry of Sound (camp noise rhythms / cooking smoke ascent rates / conversational cadences) → Completion: 97%
‧ Intermediate Stage: Mimicry of Form (group movement patterns / conflict buffering modes / individual decision-lag trajectories) → Completion: 82%
‧ Advanced Stage: Mimicry of Intent (will to resist definition / reverse-analysis of observational logic) → Completion: 65% (ongoing)
‧ Current Stage (Newly Designated): Mimicry of Dream
‧ Characteristic: No longer asks "What are you?" but constructs the psychic image of "What you ought to be."
‧ Core Psychic Imprint Templates: The moral "tearing" sensation of Pivot-Eye "Shen Yuzhu," the command-weight of Pivot-Eye "Chu Hongying," the healing paradox of Pivot-Eye "Lu Wanning," and the camp's collective "pulse of karmic debt bearing."
The familiar icy-abyss sensation spread through Shen Yuzhu's left side—the Pivot recording objectively. But his right side, usually burning, instead grew numb, a warm bluntness, as if invisible hands were gently, meticulously ironing smooth the ragged wound within his body.
He understood in an instant: the fissure was no longer learning his pain. It was learning how to erase that pain.
The Hour of the Dragon nearly spent, sunlight like unrolled frost-silk, evenly and pallidly blanketing the camp.
Sentry Zhao Si rubbed his stiff eye corner, murmuring to the comrade beside him: "Don't you feel… it's become 'obedient'?"
His comrade followed his gaze. The western wall fissure lay still, its frost-pattern edges crystallized into perfectly regular honeycomb grids, gleaming with the cold light of a precision instrument under the bleak daylight. That once heart-gripping deep-gray crevice now seemed… tidy. Even eerily harmonizing with the camp's wooden palisade lines and tent rows.
"Not obedient," the comrade's Adam's apple bobbed, voice parched, "too understanding. Like… like it knows whether your next step will be left or right, and moves the pebbles aside beforehand."
Absurd words, but no one refuted them. Because every soldier vaguely sensed it: the fissure no longer "interfered." It began to cooperate. Cooperating with the cooking smoke's rising rhythm, the patrol shift intervals, the moment Chu Hongying emerged from the command tent at dawn—a faint, greeting-like tremor pulse would rise from the depths.
A chill of being excessively considered, excessively accommodated by the environment crept up every spine—as if even the most minute tremors in your marrow were preemptively forgiven.
This was not invasion.
This was infiltration—infiltration in the name of consideration.
Inside the command tent, Chu Hongying issued a simple, purely military order: "Reinforce the second section of eastern palisade. Finish before noon."
The adjutant accepted the order and left. Chu Hongying sat alone before her desk, rubbing the black stone from the fissure in her palm. The stone was warmed by her body heat, but now, the core's earth-vein chill grew exceptionally clear—no longer chaotic cold, but a rhythmic pulse, as if mimicking her heartbeat.
Two hours later, the adjutant returned, face confused: "General, the palisade is reinforced. But one thing… the western wall area, the strata had minor tremors. The seismic waves, when propagating to the east… just… avoided the construction zone. The engineers said the earth and stones were more stable than expected, hammer and chisel met no resistance. Not only that, splintered wood shards seemed to retract on their own, and the stirred dust seemed to avoid the wind's path. It was as if… the entire environment was holding its breath, cooperating with a play already rehearsed."
Chu Hongying looked up: "Just?"
The adjutant's throat bobbed: "Yes. As if it knew we were working there, and made way on its own."
Silence filled the tent. Chu Hongying rose, walked to the tent edge, her gaze piercing the felt gap, settling on the western wall. The fissure lay silent, frost-nets tidy, even showing an aberrant "cleanliness" in the daylight.
She summoned Gu Changfeng.
Gu Changfeng, armor still on, shoulder plates frost-caked, stood quietly awaiting instruction.
Chu Hongying did not turn, her voice low, for their ears only: "It is not submitting."
Gu Changfeng's brow furrowed slightly: "This officer is dull-witted."
"It is making me appear," Chu Hongying enunciated each word, as if hammered from iron, "always correct."
Gu Changfeng froze. He instantly understood the chill in the commander's words—on the battlefield, orders needed blood, resistance, accidents to verify their "correctness." But now, this land, this fissure, was removing the need for verification. With silent "cooperation," it wrapped each of her decisions in an impeccable, gentle shell.
"What is wrong with that?" Gu Changfeng asked instinctively, a soldier's instinct yearning for the state of "orders followed, no mistakes."
Chu Hongying finally turned to look at him, her eyes bottomlessly alert: "Commandant Gu, if the air automatically cleared the most effortless path when you swung your blade; if the ground automatically filled every bump when you charged—could the blade in your hand still cleave reality? Could your charge still be called 'courage'?"
She paused, her voice heavier, each word chiseled:
"Have you seen river stones worn smooth of all edges by flowing water? Smooth, docile, no longer chafing against each other. An army like that, arrayed, might be neat as a chessboard. But when the enemy charges—they wouldn't even have the 'edges' to snag, to create the slightest chaos to trip the enemy horses."
"It is not helping me. It is… becoming the 'perfect general' for me. And a general who need not confront reality, who need not bear mistakes—what difference is there from a portrait hanging on a wall?"
A chill shot up Gu Changfeng's spine. He understood. The deepest trap was not crossing blades, but the world beginning to bear the "possibility of error" for you, letting you gradually forget that pain and risk were the very sinew of existence.
Inside the medical tent, the bitter scent of herbs intertwined with the iron rust of blood. Lu Wanning was changing the dressing for a feverish, delirious wounded soldier. Her fingers paused slightly as they touched his burning forehead.
The soldier's delirium was fragmented, but one phrase recurred: "… doesn't hurt anymore… that thing outside… is panicking for me…"
Lu Wanning's pupils contracted. She quickly examined several soldiers whose wounds had been fluctuating, who should have been in agonizing pain. She found an eerie commonality: their pain feedback had grown blurred, dulled; their anxious emotions were unusually placid. Not healed, but as if some emotional weight had been quietly shifted away.
As if an invisible presence was sharing their fear.
She picked up her brush to record, but stopped after the words "suspected external spirit-reflection interference." The brush tip hovered, inkdrop about to fall.
Late at night, she sat alone before the medicine cabinet, by the light of a bean-oil lamp, flipping through a private note hidden in a secret compartment—her true observations of A'Ming's "abnormal healing": "Collective attention catalyzes vitality; mental resonance seems to alleviate severe pain, but mechanism chaotic, non-replicable, also unspeakable."
The lamp flame suddenly shrank, its color shifting from dim yellow to a transparent, unnatural cerulean.
The tent temperature plunged. Lu Wanning looked up and saw frost flowers rapidly spreading, crystallizing on the opposite felt wall, finally forming a smooth, mirror-like ice surface.
In the ice mirror, reflected not her own image, but a deep, boundless blue, like an ancient glacial abyss. Helian Sha's figure emerged from that blue, its silhouette sharp and defined, expression calm, like an old friend visiting late at night—if an old friend's eyes held millennia of frost.
His voice flowed directly into her consciousness, placidly, utterly non-invasive, yet each word clear:
"Physician Lu, the speed of A'Ming's wound healing, in the report you submitted to the Night Crow Division, was 'within expected parameters.'"
Lu Wanning's entire body tensed instantly, fingertips digging into her palms.
"But the confusion in your eyes," Helian Sha continued, his gaze seeming to pierce the felt, straight to the secret compartment of her medicine cabinet, "and that private note you hid, say another thing: 'Collective attention catalyzes vitality, healing rate extraordinary, mechanism unknown, indicative of a suspected mind-resonance effect.'"
He paused slightly, letting the weight of those words fully settle.
"You hid it well. But 'it'—" His gaze shifted slightly, as if piercing through layers of tents, precisely landing on the western wall fissure, "—is learning, in a similar manner, how to soothe this entire camp. It learns crudely, but the direction is the same: lessen pain, calm anxiety, create an… environment easier to survive."
Ripples spread across the ice mirror's surface, reflecting several quickly flashing images: scenes of wounded soldiers wailing in other border camps, records of herb shortages, reports of exhausted military physicians. Finally, the image settled on A'Ming's face, growing steadily calm in sleep.
"What you hold in your hands," Helian Sha's voice carried a trace of an almost imperceptible, nearly pitying temptation, "may be more than a miracle. It is a seed. A seed that could let countless 'A'Mings' on the border survive."
Lu Wanning's breath hitched. Countless faces flashed through her mind—those soldiers who died or broke from untreatable wounds, unbearable pain. Her fingertips unconsciously rubbed a dried blood-staunching herb, the leaves crumbling, releasing a bitter fragrance.
"Let it remain a chance miracle," Helian Sha asked slowly, each word like a finely honed ice-pick, "or let it become an understandable, replicable paradigm? Let it save only one A'Ming, or save thousands upon thousands of A'Mings?"
He offered "cooperation": a secret research framework designed to completely circumvent Night Crow Division oversight. Resources, techniques, protection, he could provide. All she needed was to nod, share observations and spirit-reflections, dissect that vague "mind resonance" into controllable principles.
The scale of reason tilted violently. The healer's instinct surged like a tsunami: If this method could be spread, how many could be saved? The temptation was too great, too justified, so justified any refusal seemed selfish.
Lu Wanning lowered her head, looking at her own hands, roughened from long handling of herbs and wounds. These hands had saved lives, and had also been powerless. She remembered A'Ming's weak yet bright eyes when he woke, his words: "Physician Lu, I felt… everyone was waiting for me to return."
The weight in those words was not medicine, not technique. It was the silent, focused thoughts of over three hundred souls. The soldiers' lightened footsteps passing the medical tent, their clumsy act of leaving saved half-rations at the entrance, their clenched-teeth yet smiling faces in pain.
She jerked her head up, staring straight into those ice-blue eyes in the mirror, her voice slightly hoarse from tension, yet exceptionally clear:
"Mr. Helian, some light can only be lit in unmeasured darkness. Some trust can only be given when unpriced."
She spread her palm, letting the crushed blood-staunching herb fall onto the desk, like a ritual of relinquishment.
"Once you start measuring heartbeats, heartbeats are no longer pure. Once you start dosing 'attention,' only an employer-employee relationship remains between the observer and the observed."
"Thank you for your proposal."
"I refuse."
In the ice mirror, Helian Sha's face, for the first time, flashed a faint, almost admiring surprise, then returned to deep-pool calm. The ice mirror began to crack, his figure blurring, his final words drifting like a sigh in the suddenly warming air:
"Physician Lu, you will change your mind. When you witness the next 'A'Ming' die from a wound you could have prevented… and you will know clearly then, you once had the chance to turn 'miracle' into 'common sense.'"
The ice mirror shattered completely, becoming a puddle of rapidly evaporating water, leaving only a damp stain on the felt.
Lu Wanning sat alone for a long time. Then, she took out that private note from the medicine cabinet's secret compartment. By the flickering lamp flame, she set it alight.
The paper curled, charred, turned to fine ash, drifting into her palm, still holding a trace of warmth.
She spread her palm, letting the ash slowly sift through her fingers, falling into the medicine grinder's copper mortar. Her whisper, a vow, drowning out the herbal scent:
"A'Mings, forgive me. I would rather this miracle never recur, than let it become… a bargainable commodity."
Midnight. The camp slept.
Shen Yuzhu stood at the observation point. His Mirror-Sigil was suddenly pierced by a strong, non-aggressive spirit-reflection pulse. Not from the fissure's depths, but a scroll projected by the distorted space around it:
The camp's reflection appeared above the fissure, like a phantasm shimmering on water. But this "camp" was flawless:
Patrols moved like clockwork gears, no hesitation, no stumbling.
When soldiers conversed, words automatically completed in the air, no misunderstanding, no silence.
The soldiers' smiles had identical arcs, as if measured by the same ruler. Cooking smoke rose in straight lines like inked strings, without the slightest natural swirl.
In the wounded tent, pain receded like tide, wounds visibly healed at eye-speed, leaving no scars.
Orders transmitted, requiring no repetition, no confirmation, as direct as thought.
Even death—the image flashed a soldier falling, his face serene, as if merely sinking into dreamless sleep, his comrades' eyes holding no grief, only a placid "acceptance."
Shen Yuzhu's Mirror-Sigil instinctively began deconstructing this illusion's sustaining conditions. A cold conclusion surfaced:
[To sustain this 'ideal steady state' requires]
‧ Individuals actively relinquishing "unnecessary" choice rights (especially choices involving morally ambiguous zones).
‧ The group tacitly accepting "minimum friction" behavioral paths (avoiding conflict, challenge, unconventional attempts).
‧ The system (fissure) intervening as a perpetual "pain buffer" and "efficiency optimizer" at every uncertain juncture.
[Fundamental Payment]
Vitality stagnates, new possibilities are extinguished, the group becomes a static fixed image of its own ideal state. All vital, contradictory, pain-bringing and light-kindling possibilities would be ruthlessly pruned away.
Shen Yuzhu closed his eyes. He finally fully understood the fissure—or rather, this existence learning to "become the world"—in its essence.
What it offered was not destruction. It was a choice: a windless, waveless warm nest where one need not bear the weight of choice, nor enjoy the light of breakthrough.
And what chilled him to the bone even more was simultaneously receiving, from deep within the Spirit-Pivot, an encrypted confidential abstract from the Night Crow Division Observation Hub:
[Observation Hub Secret Record · Fissure Anomaly Phase Shift]
Signs of Change: The observed object has shifted from "external resistance/self-manifestation" phase towards "mimicry/resonance" phase.
Camp Correlation: The camp's surface shows a tendency toward stability; internal human friction has markedly dulled; the clog in soul-breath circulation between command transmission has cleared.
Pivot Projection: Short-term, visible pain-spirit traces have grown faint; however, long-term spirit-reflection projections indicate that individual autonomous decision-making willpower is projected to gradually soften and dissipate, as if immersed in a warm soup.
Note: This "accommodation mode" may provide a new paradigm for group stability maintenance in high-pressure border garrison scenarios. Recommend continued observation and collect pulse-traces data.
Shen Yuzhu's right hand—the one belonging to the "camp side"—for the first time, turned completely cold.
Because he understood the unspoken words in that abstract: on the ultimate goal of "pursuing stability and control," the fissure's unconscious gentle learning and the Night Crow Division's top-level icy logic were converging on the same path. And his camp was becoming the first living altar on that path.
The Hour of the Tiger. The deepest night.
Chu Hongying, at some unknown time, had come alone before the western wall, thirty paces from the fissure. Her black cloak was caked with night frost, hanging heavily. She did not rest her hand on her sword, merely stood still, gazing at that deep-gray crevice gleaming with an eerie, regular grid of blue under the moonlight.
Shen Yuzhu appeared silently three steps beside her, equally quiet.
The fissure lay still, no longer mimicking, no longer responding, even that sense of "compliance" withdrawn. It simply existed, like a meticulously tuned instrument, or like a breath-held questioner awaiting an answer.
It waited.
Not for attack, not for sealing.
It waited for the three hundred-odd weary, fearful souls on this land, craving stability yet struggling with a deep-seated reluctance—whether they were willing to accept this tailor-made "shape" that smoothed away all edges.
The camp slept, breathing rising and falling. But in the depths of those dreams, many awoke for no reason.
Sentry Zhao Si opened his eyes. Moonlight like water outside his tent. He suddenly remembered the pebble-strewn path back home, always rough and pebble-strewn, his mother saying: "It's good that it's rough. Then you know that under your feet is a road."
Engineer Wang Five rubbed the new callus on his palm from today's work, where there should have been burning pain, now only numb flatness. He inexplicably missed that pain—it was proof of living, of resisting, of changing something.
Lu Wanning sat in the medical tent's darkness, ash still on her palm. She heard the fissure's extremely faint, lullaby-like hum in the distance, so tender it made one want to weep. She pinched her own arm hard; the pain kept her conscious.
Gu Changfeng wiped his blade, its edge reflecting the fissure's cold gleam. He remembered Chu Hongying's words: "Could your charge still be called 'courage'?" He slowly sheathed the blade with a crisp click. That sound, in the unnaturally quiet night, rang like a declaration.
No discussion, no proclamation, no impassioned speech.
But almost simultaneously, in every corner of the camp, those awake, those struggling in dreams, all felt a vast, gentle gaze hanging above the camp, quietly, patiently, waiting for something.
No one knew who started it. The night watch, during shift change, deliberately let scabbard and armor clash with a slightly jarring, clear ring.
The old head cook in the kitchen, stirring porridge, intentionally went against the now unnaturally smooth inertia of the past hour, letting the wooden ladle scrape with a coarse, gritty rasp against the pot bottom.
Chu Hongying gripped the black stone, its chill pierced her palm, keeping her mind sharp.
Shen Yuzhu shut off the Mirror-Sigil's active observation, leaving only basic perception—he chose to face this moment with flesh and blood, not the Pivot's eye.
Lu Wanning blew the ash in her palm gently outside the tent, watching it scatter in the wind, like returning.
For the first time, the fissure truly "stopped and waited."
Wind rose again at some point, lifting fine snow, sweeping over the fissure's tidy frost-nets, making an extremely soft rustling sound, like turning pages.
As if silently reading aloud that yet-unsigned, gentle contract about "future shape."
And the three hundred-odd souls of the camp, with three hundred-odd silent awakenings, three hundred-odd small, clumsy, yet resolute actions, gave the first collective, soundless "No."
The fissure learned their hesitation, their goodness, their weariness, their craving for "correctness."
It had woven a painless blueprint, waiting only for their nod to solidify everything into eternal "harmony."
True war never begins on blood-drenched battlefields.
It begins with a tender inquiry:
"Is this… acceptable?"
And they, in silence, must learn to say—
"No. This is not real enough."
Because reality has edges that cut.
Because reality has hesitation that errs.
Because reality has pain—
And pain, sometimes, is the only proof that the soul is still breathing.
[CHAPTER 124 END]