The faint sense of "connection" did not vanish with the dissipation of the translucent tendril. Instead, it lingered like a spider-silk thread soaked in ice water, adhering to the crevice between the rotting garden and reality. Chen Yu—or rather, the fragment of consciousness trapped within the waxy shell—perceived a new, more precise kind of "fixing." The vines' activities were no longer entirely chaotic; each squirm, each "encoding" attempt, now seemed subtly directed toward an anchor point: the entity capable of bringing rhythmic light-and-shadow changes, of observing calmly, and of whispering uncertain questions.
This "fixing" brought not liberation, but a deeper level of imprisonment. He was no longer merely a statue passively enduring torment in the garden; he had become more like a rigged, antenna-twisted receiving and transmitting apparatus, with its control panel located far outside the nightmare.
In the real world, Lin Yuan's confusion grew daily. The cloud-generated report on "Atypical Physiological Response Patterns" was like a small stone dropped into deep water, stirring barely perceptible ripples within the medical team. At the morning meeting, Dr. Zhao Qiming mentioned it briefly, his tone cautious: "...the data shows a certain statistical correlation, but causality is far from established. Moreover, the response intensity is weak and holds no significance for clinical intervention. For now, we continue to view it as an interesting observational phenomenon requiring more cases and longer validation."
Most colleagues nodded in agreement, quickly shifting their attention to more urgent cases. Only a young resident from the neurology department, who had come for a consultation, expressed interest privately to Lin Yuan. "That regular PPG waveform, and the faint EMG synchronization... it's truly peculiar. Theoretically, neural networks in a vegetative state lack the capacity to integrate such temporally patterned external stimuli and produce a regular response. Unless..." He paused, lowering his voice, "unless there exist islands of micro-consciousness—highly localized or in an abnormal form—that our current detection methods cannot capture, and these 'islands' have formed pathological, simplified connections with certain primitive reflex pathways."
"Pathological connections?" Lin Yuan pressed.
"Yeah, like... a telephone line mostly severed, but with a few copper strands still connected, transmitting scrambled, distorted signals," the resident gestured. "But that's an extreme hypothesis. More likely, it's still some coincidental resonance of instrument and environmental interference."
Coincidence. That word again. Lin Yuan thanked him, but the knot of doubt in her heart did not loosen. She began subconsciously recording more details: not just the timing and degree of light changes, but also the activation times of other equipment in the room, the regular footsteps from the hallway, even the low rumble of the night-shift airplane passing by the window at a specific time. She wanted to find out if, besides her dimming the lights, there were other "rhythmic stimuli" that could correspond to those subtle fluctuations on Chen Yu.
Several nights later, just after handling an emergency with another patient and walking wearily back toward the nurses' station, a faint crackle sound, like a small electrical spark, came from the direction of Room 7. It was followed immediately by a short, abnormal alarm from the monitor—not a critical vital sign alert, but a "device communication interrupted" warning.
Lin Yuan's heart tightened. She hurried over. Inside the room, the screen of the new multi-parameter monitor had gone dark for an instant before flickering back on, initiating a self-check. The indicator lights on the various probes attached to Chen Yu blinked. Chen Yu himself showed no change; the independent vital signs monitor operated normally. She checked the monitor's power cord and data ports—nothing loose. It seemed just a brief device glitch.
However, when she pulled up the snapshot of the last few seconds of real-time data flow before the interruption, her breath caught. At the precise moment of the suspected spark sound, the PPG waveform, the glabellar EMG, and even a peripheral EEG channel had simultaneously registered a sharp, intense spike, far exceeding any previous record. The three peaks were almost perfectly synchronized before vanishing with the device failure. This wasn't a patterned code; it was a powerful, brief "burst."
Lin Yuan immediately checked the room's other electrical devices. The bedside lamp, ventilator, infusion pump... all normal. She crouched down to inspect the wall power outlet panel. No scorch marks, no unusual smell. But as she was about to stand up, her eyes caught the old, hospital-standard environmental monitor display on the nearby wall—usually showing only temperature and humidity. Now, on its small screen, the auxiliary numerical bar for "Electromagnetic Field (EMF) Strength" (almost always ignored) displayed a reading dozens of times higher than the background level, slowly declining.
Power fluctuation? A strong electromagnetic pulse?
She promptly reported the device malfunction and the abnormal reading. The on-call maintenance engineer arrived, tested with portable equipment for a while, and shook his head. "Everything's normal now. The monitor might have had a minor internal capacitor issue; it self-corrected. That EMF reading on the wall unit isn't accurate. Large equipment startup or elevator operation nearby can occasionally interfere. It's not really useful data."
"But the data on the patient..."
"If a device is about to fail, the data can certainly jump around," the engineer said dismissively. "The vital signs monitor was fine, right? That's what matters."
The explanation was reasonable. But Lin Yuan couldn't forget the near-perfect synchronicity of those three channel spikes. It was too uniform, too uniform to be random device noise.
She accessed the hospital power system's available logs (within her clearance) and screened around that timestamp. Sure enough, on the main distribution circuit for the floor housing Room 7, there was a record of a roughly 0.5-second "voltage sag and harmonic disturbance of unknown cause." The degree was minor, not affecting other critical equipment, logged as "suspected external grid fluctuation or short-term connection of an unknown internal load."
Unknown cause. Unknown load.
Lin Yuan closed the log page and looked toward the closed door of Room 7. The night was deep, the corridor silent. She felt she could almost sense, through the door, the viscous darkness in which that young body slumbered. That darkness seemed no longer to belong solely to coma, but to have bred something else—something capable of faint yet eerie resonance with the real world's currents, magnetic fields, and devices.
She remembered the resident's words: "pathological connections." A few broken copper strands, transmitting distorted signals.
What if... it wasn't just about receiving signals?
---
In the rotting garden, the leaden gray sky seemed to press even lower, almost touching the tops of the twisted shrubs. The air's cloying stench of decay now carried a new trace—something like ozone, or hot metal, extremely faint yet stinging the statue's remaining shreds of perception.
The previous attempt at "active marking" had consumed immense energy and seemed to have trespassed some taboo. The garden itself had "trembled" in response, which fed back into reality as that minor power disturbance and device failure.
The vines fell "silent" for a moment afterward. But they did not retreat. On the contrary, the brief "successful contact" (if causing an observable disturbance in the real world counted as contact) and the subsequent "backlash" (the garden's own tremor) acted like a potent catalyst, altering their "behavioral patterns."
They no longer rushed into high-energy "active output" or refined "encoding." Instead, they began more systematically "reinforcing" the "connections" with the statue and, through the statue, with that anchor point. Countless vines intertwined and coiled in more complex ways, penetrating deeper regions within the statue, even beginning to try to "envelop" or "infiltrate" those occasional "information fragments" carrying intense emotion or clear intent that came from the outside world (primarily the mother's pleas and Lin Yuan's whispers).
They no longer merely distorted and replayed these fragments, but attempted to parse the "emotional energy" and "volitional vectors" within them, using these as a kind of "fuel" or "directing agent."
When the mother's next tearful pleading arrived, the vines in the garden simultaneously emitted a low, non-audible hum, absorbing and transforming the intense emotional wave of intertwined grief and hope. The vines entwining the statue glowed with a dim, pulsating dark-red luster for several seconds.
And when Lin Yuan, late at night, driven by her inescapable doubt, once again dimmed the lights and whispered to the unresponsive Chen Yu in a barely audible voice, "What... are you trying to tell us?"—
In the rotting garden, all vines turned in unison toward the anchor point direction. This time, no translucent tendril emerged. But deep within the statue's glabella, a point of icy, piercing "focus" abruptly formed, like an invisible lens, intensely concentrating and "projecting" the formless mass the vines had gathered—a mixture of parsed "inquisitive will" and the garden's own dark energy—toward that barrier.
In the real hospital room, there was no sound. But the EMF reading on the old wall monitor flickered slightly, briefly, before settling back to normal. The multi-parameter monitor operated as usual, with no data spikes.
This time, they were more careful. More concealed.
The "he" within the statue felt himself being transformed into an even more precise, dangerous converter. One end drew upon the vivid, painful emotions and thoughts from reality as "ammunition"; the other end connected to the dark source of this boundless, rotten nightmare. The vines controlling all this, their "purpose" still unclear, but their cold "inquiry" and their ever-growing craving for a "clearer connection" were now as pervasive as the garden's putrid air.
He "watched" as another crumbling statue at the garden's edge, brushed by the unconscious writhing of the vines, completely collapsed into sludge. Would he be next? Or, before complete collapse, would he become something else first? A... channel?
In reality, Lin Yuan remained unaware of the second EMF fluctuation. She simply sat at the nurses' station, entering another line in the electronic nursing record's "Special Observation Notes" section:"Patient experienced brief device communication interruption during night hours, accompanied by minor ambient electromagnetic fluctuation. Pre-interruption multi-parameter data showed synchronized abnormal spikes (suspected to be caused by device malfunction). Reported for repair. Continue observation."
She stopped typing, her gaze lingering on the words "caused by." After a long hesitation, she ultimately did not delete them.
The night was thick, the hospital corridor lights pale. Inside Room 7, the indicator lights of various instruments flickered quietly, like countless, cold pupils rotating slightly beneath sleeping eyelids.