The ghostly short-long-short tremor had lodged itself like a cold wedge into the sturdy shell of Lin Yuan's professional understanding. She compared the waveform charts repeatedly, consulted references, and even asked a nurse friend from the cardiology department. The responses were either "never encountered that" or "most likely instrument noise." But noise didn't present such a regular, code-like pattern. She knew she probably wouldn't get more support from Dr. Zhao either; the existing evidence was too weak, too easily dismissed as "unidentified artifact."
She buried her doubts deep, but her observations became subconsciously intense. Every time she passed Room 7, her gaze would linger a few seconds longer, sweeping over the monitor screens, Chen Yu's placid face, and that hand resting outside the blanket. During night shifts, she even began deliberately dimming the lights at similar times around midnight, varying the degree slightly, then staring intently at the multi-parameter monitor screen, especially the PPG waveform and the newly added "micro-expression EMG monitoring" channel. Most of the time, there was no reaction. But once, several dozen seconds after the lights dimmed, the rhythmic tremor reappeared on the PPG waveform, and the "glabellar EMG" channel captured an almost imperceptible, sub-0.1-second burst of faint electrical signal, precisely corresponding to the location of that faint furrow she had noticed before.
Coincidence? Stress response? Or... a response?
The thought sent a chill down her neck. If this was a "response" to a specific environmental change (dimming the lights), however faint and borderline undetectable, it meant some form of "perception-reaction" arc might still linger, perhaps even be triggered by specific conditions. This created a dangerous crack in the definition of a completely unconscious vegetative state.
What unsettled her even more was the change in Chen Yu's mother. Once ignited, that spark of hope had spread like wildfire, consuming the rationality of the already wan woman. No longer satisfied with hours of soft murmuring each day, she began bringing various items—her son's former favorite music player (volume set very low), an old blanket from home with familiar scents, even an "energy crystal" recommended by a distant relative. Holding her son's hand, she no longer just wept but spoke with a near-fanatic, commanding tone: "Xiao Yu, listen to the music, you liked this song." "Xiao Yu, let Mom wipe your face, feels nice, right?" "Move, move your finger again, let Mom know you're there!"
This high-frequency, emotionally charged, expectation-laden stimulation was like stones continuously thrown into a deep pool. The monitor's "environmental sound pressure" curve remained elevated for prolonged periods, and Chen Yu's skin conductance level and heart rate variability showed more pronounced, sustained fluctuations. The frequency of those aberrant beta wave sparks also seemed to increase slightly.
Dr. Zhao had another serious talk with the family, emphasizing the potential negative impacts of overstimulation and the dangers of false hope. The mother nodded, tears streaming, yet on her next visit, she resumed as before. Desperation and hope had twisted within her into a powerful, irrational drive.
Lin Yuan felt that invisible string drawn tighter. On one end was the family's fervent, almost frantic expectations; on the other were those inexplicable, scientifically ambiguous faint signals from the patient. And she herself, stuck in the middle, was both an observer and, unwittingly, a participant in some kind of "experiment"—especially when she dimmed the lights.
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The rotting garden was "evolving."
The vines seemed to draw sustenance from the continuous, intensifying influx of "external signals." The mother's high-frequency pleas and intense emotional fluctuations were greedily absorbed, parsed, and transformed into more complex, more aggressive "encoding commands." Their attempts to "hijack" the statue's primitive neural circuits became bolder and more proficient.
The short-long-short PPG tremor pattern could now be triggered more stably and had even begun to show variants—for instance, longer sequences corresponding to musical rhythms, or brief high-frequency tremors responding to simulated touch (the vines brushing the statue's surface in specific ways).
But this was far from the goal.
The vines' "collective consciousness" (if this darkness possessed such a thing) had a clear aim: to establish more stable "output channels," to send clearer "signals." They began shifting their focus toward the neural pathways possibly still retaining partial function related to controlling subtle facial muscles. The faint electrical signal burst in the glabellar region was a preliminary, unsuccessful "reconnaissance in force."
The pain endured by the "statue" had transcended mere consumption or pulsed stimulation. He felt like a dilapidated machine invaded by countless cold probes, being savagely rewired. Each "encoding" attempt by the vines tore at and overwrote his residual self more deeply. The fragmented, warm memories triggered by his mother's voice had now become catalysts for intensifying agony—for the vines were using these emotionally charged "raw materials" to forge more precise "tools" for his torment.
The garden's scenery was also subtly changing. The leaden sky would occasionally, for the briefest instant, flicker with a distorted, faint greenish light reminiscent of hospital monitor screens. The soil's tremors sometimes carried the ultra-low-frequency rhythm of distant traffic from reality. Most eerie of all, the surfaces of the black vines entwining the statue began occasionally revealing extremely vague, fleeting dark patterns resembling numbers or waveform graphs, as if they themselves were giving form to the absorbed "data."
All the vines' "attention" grew more intensely focused on the direction corresponding to the "intervenor." Their "learning" speed was accelerating, and the learning material stemmed largely from the extremely faint yet relatively "clean" environmental variable changes brought by Lin Yuan each time she dimmed the lights or approached to observe. They seemed able to distinguish the different "texture" between this "calm observation" and the mother's "frenzied calling," showing a more "focused" curiosity toward the former.
Once, when Lin Yuan adjusted the lights again late at night and unconsciously whispered to the comatose Chen Yu, "What will be different this time?" (she barely even registered saying it), all movement in the rotting garden ceased abruptly for an instant.
Then, from the spot on the statue's glabella that had been repeatedly "stimulated," a slender tendril unlike any before—nearly translucent—began to "grow" with excruciating slowness. It lacked physical substance, more like a beam of solidified malice, trembling as it pointed into the void, toward Lin Yuan's direction, persisting for several seconds before dissipating.
Within the statue, "he" experienced, in that moment, an unprecedented, clear sense of "connection"—not of being eroded, but of being "marked." A cold "thread" from the nightmare's depths had lightly attached itself to a specific point in the real world.
In reality, Lin Yuan remained utterly unaware. She simply recorded the data showing no significant change after yet another light adjustment, rubbing her throbbing temples.
But in the cloud-based data lake, amidst the massive volume of monitoring data, a hidden correlation pattern was gradually emerging under analysis by complex algorithms. A certain regularity pointed toward potential correlations between subtle environmental stimuli (specific light changes at particular times during the night) and faint responses in the patient's specific physiological parameters. A preliminary analysis report was auto-generating, titled "Preliminary Exploration of Atypical Physiological Response Patterns to Subtle Environmental Stimuli in a Long-Term Vegetative State Patient."
And deep within the hospital's power monitoring system logs, an anomaly record concerning "minor, intermittent, unexplained current fluctuations" in the circuit serving Room 7 was quietly filed away.
Priority:Low.