The mother's tearful pleas finally faded into silence in the afternoon ward, replaced only by exhausted, hiccupping sobs. A nursing aide softly consoled her, guiding her to rest in a nearby chair. Her swollen, red-rimmed eyes remained fixed on the hospital bed, as if a miracle might occur at any moment.
No miracle came. Only the steady hum of the machines.
But some changes, subtle as dust, had already settled.
When Lin Yuan came by in the afternoon to verify orders, she noticed the difference immediately. By Bed 7—the young man named Chen Yu—a sleek, silver device now sat on the bedside table, its indicator light glowing a faint green. She approached for a closer look. It was a new multi-parameter environmental and physiological monitor, more sensitive than the standard ward equipment, capable of integrated analysis of potential weak correlations between factors like light, sound decibels, temperature/humidity fluctuations, and the patient's physiological parameters.
"Equipment department installed it this afternoon," a passing resident doctor explained casually. "Family insisted. Said it was for baseline monitoring to some... external stimulation therapy for consciousness recovery. Doesn't interfere with treatment, so it's fine."
Lin Yuan nodded, her eyes scanning the screen. The basic vital signs still fluctuated within that "stable" range, but a newly added graph caught her attention. A light blue waveform representing "environmental sound pressure" showed a clear, gentle peak during the afternoon family visit, then slowly subsided. Beneath it, a thin orange line representing "skin conductance level" had also, during that same period, exhibited almost synchronous, extremely. The amplitude was small, but it had completely deviated from its previous near-flatline state.
Skin conductance, related to emotion, stress, subconscious arousal. A vegetative patient declared unconscious had shown a electrical skin response to sustained emotional.
Lin Yuan's heart skipped a beat. This was unusual. This didn't fall under the category of common spinal reflexes. Instinctively, she looked at Chen Yu's face. He still appeared asleep, but between his brows, skin that had once been absolutely smooth now seemed, in the slanted light from the window, to hold a barely perceptible, extremely faint trace of a furrow. As if拧 by something.
She immediately called up more detailed EEG trend analysis. Within the time window of the family visit at noon, against the backdrop of near-flat alpha and delta waves, several brief, low-amplitude but frequency-aberrant sparks of beta waves could indeed be captured. They were transient,. The AI analysis system had only provided the vague notation: "Possible artifact. Recommend correlation with clinical observation."
Artifact? Lin Yuan didn't believe it. The finger twitch, the skin conductance fluctuation, the aberrant EEG sparks, and now this between the brows... These fragments were piecing together a disquieting picture.
She thought again of dimming the lights on the night shift, and that pale finger's tremor.
Just as she was concentrating on this, a small sub-window in the corner of the monitor screen refreshed its data automatically. It was the newly added "non-contact micro-motion monitoring" data, assessing possible by analyzing in the bed area. Right now, a was showing a peculiar, low-frequency rhythmic fluctuation—like a rhythmic tremor, or perhaps... a form of resonance.
---
In the rotting garden, the leaden gray sky seemed to press even lower.
The black vines had ceased their "pulsing." Instead, they had transitioned to a more "manipulation." They were no longer content with surface-level coiling and consumption. Several of the most flexible tendrils, their tips forked like neural, were attempting, with unnerving precision, to penetrate areas within the "statue" not yet. This wasn't, but imitation—mimicking the frequency and intensity of the tremors recently received from the "outside."
The warm, fragmented brought by the mother's had been, parsed by the vines, transformed into a cold, probing "stimulus signal." They were applying this signal along self-created "pathways" to the remaining of the statue.
Thus, what "he" experienced was no longer the pure agony of dissolution, but a bizarre "playback." The familiar tonal qualities of his mother's voice—that high-frequency anxiety and low-frequency grief—were stripped away, simplified into rhythmic, cold "pulses" hammering against the core of his. Simultaneously, another, newer, fainter "signal"—from the faint electrical hum of the newly installed monitoring equipment, and the inaudible yet somehow deeper-perceived "brush" of infrared scans.
The vines showed intense "interest" in both signals. They, adjusting the angle and force of their "penetration," as if fine-tuning a precise yet cruel instrument, trying to find the resonance frequency that would elicit a stronger "echo" from the statue
The statue itself endured an unprecedented sense of. On one hand, there were the distorted "sensory echoes" from the vines' imitation of external stimuli; on the other, there was the deeper intrusion and alteration of his"existence" by this very act of imitation. He felt as if he were being "wired," forcibly connected—in a wrong and painful way—to two worlds: one a despairing dream of rot, the other a.
The garden's soil seemed to tremble faintly under the rhythmic of countless vines. In the distance, the ruins of crumbled statues shed more in this vibration, dissolving faster into the dark purple muck.
And the central focus of all the vines' "attention" never strayed from the marked "point" in the dream—the direction corresponding to the entity capable of changing the light, bringing "sound pressure," installing new equipment... the "intervenor."
A collective sense of icy "anticipation" in the. They were waiting for the next "signal." Waiting for a clearer "disturbance." To perform a more precise imitation, a deeper... connection.
---
In the real hospital room, Lin Yuan recorded her new observation: "15:20, observed in patient's glabellar region. Combined with new monitoring data, suggests potential sub-clinical-threshold neural reactivity. Reported to attending physician."
She closed the tablet and took a final look at Chen Yu. He lay there, as quiet as ever. But in the ward's air, it was as if an invisible string had been slowly, ominously, drawn taut.