The snow stopped in the deepest hour of the night, ceasing as abruptly as if the world itself had held its breath.
At dawn, a gray-white light seeped through cracks in the clouds, illuminating a camp that had died and was now struggling back to life. Soldiers woke in their tents, their first instinct not to rise, but to lie still, eyes open, confirming they still remembered their own names. Some mouthed soundlessly, repeating names over and over; others lifted their hands before their faces, splaying then clenching their fingers, as if confirming this body still obeyed.
The air held the lingering aftershocks of last night's psychic toxin—an invisible, marrow-chilling ache.
But this time, there were no horns, no commands.
Old Chen moved first. His one good arm was inconvenient, so he nudged the boot of the young herdsman Amur beside him with his foot. "Lying there waiting to die?" Old Chen's voice was rough, like sandpaper on frozen wood. "Snow's stopped. The wall's not finished."
Amur turned to look at him, his gaze blank for a moment. Then he jerked upright, grabbing the stone that had fallen by his bedding last night.
Then came a second, a third—
Some silently mended tents torn by the wind, thick needles piercing tough hide, thread pulling with a zhi-zhi rasp. Some set up iron pots, shoveled in snow, struck flint three times before lighting damp firewood that crackled and spat pungent smoke. Some walked over to comrades who had broken down weeping last night, saying nothing, simply handing over half a piece of buckwheat cake hard as rock.
No comfort. No explanation.
Only movement.
The camp was like a body that had just suffered cardiac arrest, its heart now beating again, blood beginning to flow on its own—sluggish, clumsy, but stubbornly pushing toward the extremities. The Heartfire Banner hung limp in the dawn breeze, its dark crimson patterns emitting a faint, breath-like flicker of light. It wasn't blinding, just a warm, fragile red like the last ember in a charcoal brazier on a deep winter night, about to die but not yet gone.
Lu Wanning pushed aside the medical tent's coarse hemp door-flap and saw this scene. Her Resonance Symptom Notes were still open, the latest page recording the seventh amnesia case. But the slow, self-initiated order in the camp made her fingertip, holding the brush, pause slightly.
"Meridian self-healing phenomenon…" she murmured to herself, her heterochromatic eyes flashing with a complex pattern in the morning light. "The human heart is harder to predict, and more stubborn, than any pharmacological chart." She turned back into the tent, adding a line in small script at the end of the notes.
By the morning hours, Gu Changfeng leaped onto the half-finished high platform on the east wall. The wall, only started yesterday, was made of uneven stones, gaps filled with frozen earth mixed with snow, crude as a child's mud fort. But people had spontaneously gathered below—soldiers to the left, herdsmen to the right, an awkward gap between them like a dividing line. But at least no one was fighting over who moved stones first.
Gu Changfeng swept his gaze over the crowd. Three breaths of silence.
Then he drew his blade—not the Cloud-Edge Saber that had followed him seven years and drunk the blood of twenty-seven Northern Barbarian centurions, but the standard-issue military horizontal saber at his waist. Its sheath was worn leather, the hemp cord wrapped around its hilt saturated with sweat-stain and blood-rust.
Shing— The blade left its sheath with a dull, northern-forged ring.
Gu Changfeng turned his wrist, point down, toward the frozen earth at his feet—
And drove it in.
Thud. A muffled sound. The blade sank half a foot, standing on the platform like a black boundary marker, its hilt trembling slightly in the morning wind.
Everyone looked up at him.
"Last night's chaos," Gu Changfeng began, his voice not loud, but carried clearly to every ear by the natural diffusion of his wind domain, "was not your crime." He paused, his gaze sweeping over faces still shadowed with panic. "But if there is no order—next time, you won't even get a chance to fight for your lives."
The wind whipped up snow-dust, stinging faces like fine needles. No one spoke.
Gu Changfeng began reciting, word by word, like driving stakes into snowy ground: "One. Argue if you must, but no hands. If you want to fight, wait for the Night Crows to come, then fight them."
"Two. Kill enemies if you must, but not your own. Whoever raises a blade to a comrade, I'll cut them down first."
"Three. If you don't know something, find someone who does—don't pretend you do." As he said this, his gaze swept toward the distance—Shen Yuzhu was crouching beneath the ruined tower, gesturing over a cowhide map spread on the snow, the indigo glow of his mirror-pattern flickering faintly in the morning mist. Gu Changfeng glared at him. Shen Yuzhu seemed to sense it, looked up, his mirror-pattern flickered once, then he lowered his head and continued drawing his defense lines.
"Four. Everyone—" Gu Changfeng's voice deepened, his grip on the saber tightening. "Must laugh at least once a day."
Complete silence.
The sound of wind, breathing, the distant bubbling of snowmelt boiling in a pot—all became piercingly clear.
After a few breaths, Old Chen was the first to burst out laughing. The laugh was coarse, rasping, like rusty gears forced to turn with brute force, creaking and groaning. "General Gu! You're not setting military rules, you're forcing us to live!"
Laughter was contagious. The second was Amur, clutching his stomach, tears almost bursting out as he laughed. "I—I almost thought I was a horse yesterday… still wondering where the fodder was…" Then a third, a fourth—some laughed until tears came, some wiped their faces as they laughed, some squatted down, shoulders shaking. Laughter mingled with sobs, with aftershock, with the pitiful relief of surviving catastrophe, colliding together over the camp.
Gu Changfeng stood on the platform, watching this suddenly animated camp, the corner of his mouth lifting ever so slightly. The curve was brief as a snowflake landing on a blade's edge, gone in an instant.
He pulled the saber free, jumped down from the platform, the blade tip scoring a shallow line in the frozen earth. Passing Chu Hongying, his steps didn't pause, he just threw out a low sentence: "Foundation's laid. Next, we build the walls."
Chu Hongying nodded. She wasn't wearing armor this morning, just ordinary thick robes against the cold, her Storm-Piercing Spear planted beside her, its tassel scattering in the wind like blood-mist. "The use of the wind domain," she said, a rare note of recognition in her voice, "you understand it better than I."
"Not me," Gu Changfeng said as he passed, his words carried by the wind. "It's that wind should lift people up, not cut them."
Chu Hongying watched his back as he headed toward the east wall, was silent a moment, then turned to look at the western snow-forest. It was quiet there, not even birdsong. But the blood-lock binding on her arm, beneath her sleeve, was faintly warm.
Before noon, three wooden plaques were hung outside the medical tent. Newly carved, the planks rough, the characters written by Lu Wanning with a charred stick, strokes hard as knife-cuts.
A line formed from the tent entrance to the base of the east wall, crooked but without jostling. Lu Wanning sat behind the tent's only wooden table, a table nailed together last night, planks still bearing bark. Her notes lay spread before her, the palm-sized "Meridian Reflection Mirror" beside her hand, its surface occasionally flashing with silvery light-patterns, like flowing water.
"Name, injury, psychic toxin residual symptoms." Her tone was flat, emotionless, like stating herb properties.
The first to enter was Li Shuan—the young soldier who last night, under the toxin, saw his mother buried by an avalanche and cried out to go save her. The hemp cloth wrapped around his left shoulder seeped dark red, his face pale, but his eyes clearer than yesterday's. "I'm Li Shuan, arrow wound on the shoulder… last night dreamed my mother called me to eat, woke up thinking it was real, almost walked into the snowfield…" His voice grew smaller.
Lu Wanning noted it down, simultaneously raising her hand—whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Three silver needles almost simultaneously pierced the Tianrong point at his neck, the Yintang point between his brows, the Neiguan point at his wrist pulse. The needle-tails vibrated, emitting a faint hum.
Li Shuan stiffened all over.
"Needles stay for half a quarter-hour." Lu Wanning withdrew her hand, her gaze already moving to the next line in her notes. "During that time, recite today's camp passphrase. One mistake, needles stay an extra quarter-hour."
Li Shuan froze. "P-passphrase?"
"Today's passphrase is 'Heartfire'," a wounded soldier helping sort herbs whispered from the side. "General Gu said it this morning. Forget, just look at the banner."
"Heart… Heartfire…" Li Shuan began reciting, voice trembling. "Heartfire… Heartfire…"
Lu Wanning didn't look at him again, turning to the next. An elderly herdsman, frostbite ulcers oozing pus on his hands, yet insisting he was fine: "I just wanted to ask… last night I kept hearing sheep, but my sheep… froze to death last year…" Wanning was silent, took his wrist, fingertips pressing the pulse point. The pathways of her meridian analysis flowed in her heterochromatic eyes. Three breaths later, she released. "Psychic toxin echo." She noted it down. "Take a packet of calming herbs, steep in hot water before sleep. Report again tomorrow." The old man mumbled thanks, stepped aside.
In one morning, the medical tent treated seventeen severe injuries, recorded thirty-four cases of psychic toxin aftereffects. Three sets of silver needles were used up, half a sack of calming herbs distributed. The tent was filled with the bitter smell of herbs and blood, mixed with the damp mist of steaming snowmelt.
When the last person left, Lu Wanning finally straightened up. She raised a hand to rub the back of her neck, fingertips touching stiff muscles there, pressing gently.
From outside the tent came a sound—not orderly, even somewhat clumsy, but clear enough: "Thank you, Physician Lu—"
She lifted the flap to look. Over a dozen soldiers already treated for injuries stood lined up in the snow, bowing to her. The motions were awkward, bows uneven in depth, some wincing as wounds pulled. But no one laughed.
Lu Wanning watched them quietly for three breaths, then let the flap fall. Inside the tent, the light was dim. She walked back to the table, began washing the used silver needles. The water in the copper basin was cold; her fingertips trembled slightly as she immersed them. Washing the third needle, she murmured very softly, as if to herself: "A physician is not your mother. If you can't stand steady, lean on the wall, not on me."
The people outside seemed to hear. A moment of silence, then several stifled, chest-deep chuckles.
In the afternoon, Shen Yuzhu was surrounded.
He had been deducing weak points in the west wall defense from a sheltered spot below the ruined tower—there was a vulnerable point there, last night his mirror-pattern resonance had detected abnormal earth-pulse flow, suspected to be an old-era "rift" easily used by the Night Crows to implant mirror-traps. His map was spread on the snow, held down by stones at the corners. He knelt beside it, fingertip tracing imaginary lines in the air, the indigo light projected by his mirror-pattern weaving into complex three-dimensional networks in the air, marking seventeen potential risk nodes.
Then shadows fell over him.
Over a dozen people, soldiers and herdsmen mixed, silently forming a semicircle. They still carried yesterday's psychic toxin fatigue, but their eyes burned with a kind of stubborn fire—a "don't want to be bullied inexplicably again" fierceness.
At the front was Old Chen. His empty sleeve was tucked at his waist, his other hand holding a coarse flatbread, chewing as he spoke: "Strategist."
Shen Yuzhu looked up, his mirror-pattern flickering.
"That ghost-thing last night," Old Chen swallowed bread crumbs, voice gravelly, "what exactly is it? Why could we forget our own names?"
The question was blunt as a dull axe splitting wood. Shen Yuzhu was silent. He was accustomed to analysis, deduction, bearing risks alone. Stripping complex laws into language ordinary people could understand? That wasn't in his survival repertoire of the past twenty years.
"Psychic toxin," he finally uttered two words. "The Night Crows' emotion-stripping technique."
"How to break it?" A young herdsman pushed forward—Amur. His face still bore frostbite redness, but his eyes were frighteningly bright. "Next time it comes, we can't always rely on the General and you risking your lives, right? We also need to… to understand something."
"Right, Strategist, teach us!" "Even just how to know if we're hit!"
Voices clamored, yet pointing to the same thirst. Shen Yuzhu's fingertip unconsciously pressed the edge of the map. The paper was tanned cowhide, texture tough and rough, edges already worn fuzzy. He looked at those faces fixed on him—those eyes holding the dregs of fear, but also the stubbornly igniting fire of wanting to "understand."
He inhaled very lightly, then slowly exhaled. White mist scattered in the cold air.
"Yuzhu."
Chu Hongying's voice came from behind the crowd.
She stood there, having arrived at some unknown time, the blood-lock binding coiled on her arm, the Storm-Piercing Spear slung across her back, its tip wrapped in thick hemp cloth to prevent glare. The wind stirred the stray hairs at her forehead, revealing those eyes forever calm as still water—now reflecting snow-light, and also this crowd surrounding the strategist.
"Sit down," she said. Not a discussion, not a suggestion. An order. "Teach."
Shen Yuzhu looked at her. Three breaths. Then he sighed very softly—a sigh almost inaudible, circling once in his chest before dissolving into even fainter white mist. He put away the map, rolled it up, tied it with hemp cord. His motions were slow and steady, as if giving himself time to adjust some internal "mode."
"One incense stick's time," he said.
The crowd moved immediately. Without orders, they spontaneously sat on the ground, forming a crooked circle on the snow. Some took off outer robes to sit on, some sat directly in the snow, pants instantly soaked but oblivious. All eyes fixed on him.
Shen Yuzhu found a half-buried stone stump to sit on. The stone surface was icy cold, the chill seeping through his clothes, yet he seemed not to notice.
His mirror-pattern flowed autonomously. Indigo light spilled from his eyes, weaving and stretching in the empty space before him, condensing into a flowing luminous diagram. This diagram wasn't as intricately complex as his usual tactical deductions, but simplified—lines thicker, nodes fewer, colors starkly contrasted.
"The principle of psychic toxin is emotion-stripping," he began, his voice still carrying the mirror-imprint's characteristic calm detachment, but his pace slowed, as if carefully choosing words. "The Night Crows pollute the 'law pathways' in the environment, implant 'cognitive viruses.' The poisoned go through three stages."
His fingertip traced the empty space, the light patterns transforming accordingly, splitting into three side-by-side patterns: "One, memory blur—like suddenly forgetting the name of a comrade you see daily, or forgetting what you ate this morning." "Two, logic collapse—confusion over simple cause and effect. Like 'why is snow cold,' 'why do people breathe.'"
He paused, looked at the crowd. "Third, self-cognition disintegration." The light pattern twisted abruptly, becoming a chaotic blotch of colors: "Start doubting the reality of those around you. Think parents, wife, children are illusions, think comrades are enemies in disguise, even think yourself… are not yourself."
Under the shelter, dead silence. Only the sha-sha of wind-whipped snow-dust scraping the tent.
Old Chen asked hoarsely, "Then… how to break it?"
"Anchor," Shen Yuzhu said.
He raised a hand, fingertip pointing in the air. The light patterns converged, condensed into three simple icons: a fluttering banner, falling snow, a wisp of exhaled white breath. "Use the simplest, most undeniable facts to anchor reality," his voice was low and clear, like water flowing under ice. "For example—the banner flaps." "Snow falls." "Your breath steams." With each sentence, the corresponding icon brightened. The light wasn't blinding, gentle as lamplight in morning mist.
"Remember these," Shen Yuzhu's gaze swept each face. "When you break down, first confirm these three things. If that still doesn't work…" He stopped.
The crowd held its breath, waiting. Snow settled on their shoulders, hat brims, no one brushed it away.
Shen Yuzhu was silent a long time. So long that Chu Hongying thought he wouldn't continue, was about to step forward to speak—he looked up, his gaze passing through the crowd, landing on that wildly flapping Heartfire Banner in the distance. The banner unfurled under the gray-white sky, dark crimson patterns pulsing like blood vessels.
He spoke the words he originally would never, should never, could never say: "If you even forget your own name…" He paused, voice light as falling snow. "Think of this banner." "The banner holds last night's heartfire, today's order, the will of everyone fighting desperately to live." "It remembers who you are."
The moment the words fell—outside the shelter, that Heartfire Banner—Hua-la! The banner-face snapped taut, the dark crimson patterns abruptly blazed alight! Not the faint pulsations from before, but a clear, warm crimson flow of light, shooting up from the banner pole's base, rushing along the patterns to the tip, like blood forging new vessels.
The light lasted only three breaths. But everyone saw it.
The seated soldiers stared blankly at the banner, then slowly turned to look at Shen Yuzhu. Some eyes reddened, some lowered their heads wiping faces, some clenched fists so tight fingernails dug into palms.
Old Chen was the first to stand. With one arm inconvenient, he pressed his good hand to his chest, bowed deeply to Shen Yuzhu—waist bent so low his forehead almost touched his knees. "Thank you, Strategist," his voice choked.
Then a second, a third—Amur followed, bowing awkwardly but earnestly. Li Shuan came running from the direction of the medical tent, silver needles still in his shoulder, also bowed. Over a dozen people, on the snow, toward that blue-robed, snow-dusted mirror-imprint bearer on the stone stump, bent at the waist.
Shen Yuzhu sat on the stump, watching these people bowing to him. Deep in his mirror-pattern came fine, unfamiliar palpitations—not pain, not alarm, but something softer, more surging, like a school of fish suddenly leaping beneath a frozen lake's surface. He forcibly suppressed those palpitations, stood up, prepared to leave.
"Strategist!" It was Li Shuan. He chased two steps, face still pale from the needles, eyes blazing. "Then… can we come listen tomorrow?"
Shen Yuzhu's steps halted. He didn't turn around. Snow fell on his shoulders, on his hair, on his mirror-pattern. That pattern now flowed faintly, reflecting the lingering light on the distant banner.
Very lightly, he nodded. Then stepped forward, into the wind and snow.
In the late afternoon, the setting sun leaked through cloud-seams, plating the snowfield a layer of tarnished gold, like old bronze polished to a corner's shine. The lesson crowd had dispersed, each returning to their posts. Old Chen led people to continue wall-building, Amur went to feed the few remaining skinny horses, Li Shuan returned to queue outside the medical tent for needle removal.
Chu Hongying stood by the banner pole. The pole was a hastily felled pine, bark not fully stripped, rough and prickly. Last night's heavy snowstorm had loosened the base's frozen earth, the pole leaning slightly. She was reinforcing it with thick hempen rope soaked in animal fat—one hand pulling the rope, the other bracing the wooden pole, her forearm muscles taut as a drawn bowstring in the twilight. The rope bit into her palm, old calluses grating against new rope, emitting a faint zhi-ya creak.
She worked with focus, not even noticing someone had been watching her a long time. It was Bayar, Amur's younger brother, the fourteen-year-old herdsman boy who had fled with his tribe. He held a bundle of gathered dry firewood, standing ten paces away, eyes unblinking as he stared at her.
He watched a long time, so long the sun sank another notch.
Then the boy spoke, voice not loud, even somewhat timid, yet like a stone dropped into still water: "General!"
Chu Hongying's movements stilled. She didn't turn immediately, only slowly straightened, released the rope. The rope's end fell, flicking up tiny snow-spray on the ground. Then she turned. Her face showed no expression, still that habitual, calm-as-water countenance. Only the speck of crimson deep in her eyes, under the slanting sunset, burned fiercely, like the one piece of charcoal refusing to die on a deep winter night.
Bayar's face flushed red, lips moving as if to retreat, but he gritted his teeth and stood firm. He gathered courage, called out again, this time louder: "As long as the General stands, our hearts won't be unsettled!"
Silence. The wind swirled snow-dust, sweeping from one end of the camp to the other.
Then another voice rose—Li Shuan. He'd just emerged from the medical tent, needle-pricks on his shoulder still seeping tiny drops of blood, but his back was straight as he shouted: "We'll listen to what the General says!"
A third voice came from the wall-side—Old Chen. He dropped a stone, waved his lone arm, laughing to show yellowed teeth: "General! The Heartfire Army's General!"
Like sparks falling into dry tinder. A fourth, fifth, tenth—soldiers stacking stones by the wall stopped work, injured men queuing outside the medical tent turned their heads, herdsmen feeding horses set down fodder, all looking toward that figure by the banner pole.
Voices scattered then converged, hesitant then firm: "General!" "General!" "General—!"
Not obeisance, not slogans, not fear of authority. Those voices were rough, hoarse, mixed with various accents, even cracking. But each one bore something heavy—the fear from last night's psychic toxin, today's self-initiated clarity, the fierceness of "not wanting to be slaughtered anymore," the slim yet stubborn hope pinned on this banner, this person, this camp. They were using their voices, pushing these heavy things, all at once, clumsily, before her.
Chu Hongying stood in place. The hand holding the rope tightened, bit by bit. Knuckles whitened, skin beneath old calluses grooved deeply by the rope, the pain sharp and clear. But she didn't loosen her grip, instead clenched tighter, as if anchoring herself with this pain.
She heard her own heartbeat. Thudding in her chest, once, again, heavy as war drums beating in an empty city. The sound so loud it drowned the wind and snow, drowned the shouts, drowned all the cold, hard defenses she had built over twenty-plus years.
Behind her, the banner snapped wildly, its face slapping the pole, Pa! Pa! crisp, as if answering.
In this moment, she was not the "General Chu" enfeoffed by military merit, not the "Northern Frontier Commissioner" appointed by the court, not the orphaned daughter of the annihilated Chu family bearing a blood-debt who must live to seek vengeance. She was the one pushed forth by these people on this snowfield who were barely clinging to life—using fear, using clarity, using struggle, using choice, jointly raised up—"General."
Shen Yuzhu stood in the ruined tower's shadow at the crowd's periphery. He had been organizing the "civilian cognitive weak points" recorded by his mirror-pattern during the day's teaching, preparing to deduce corresponding protective formations for the evening. But when the shouts arose, he lifted his head.
His mirror-pattern flowed autonomously. Indigo light flickered deep in his eyes, like a night-sky star-chart automatically unfurling. Every face's expression—Old Chen's grinning laugh, Li Shuan's tear-glinted eyes, Bayar's flushed face, the women's tightly clenched fists—every subtle muscle twitch, pupil change, breathing rhythm, was captured, analyzed, filed by the mirror-pattern.
Then, the image froze on Chu Hongying's back. She stood straight, yet her shoulder line trembled slightly. That tremor was minute, so minute only the mirror-pattern's "micro-perception" could capture it—like the almost invisible vibration of a bow-stave pulled to its limit.
Shen Yuzhu watched that tremor.
Then, he felt—deep in his chest, that lump of warmth that had lingered since Chu Hongying left his tent, now suddenly pulsed violently. Not the earlier fine palpitations. A clear, surging beat—like a seed frozen under ice finally breaking through a crack, struggling toward light.
[Warning: High-concentration emotional spiritual resonance detected.]
[Source: Collective will recognition ritual.]
[Associated individual: Chu Hongying.]
[Suggestion: Activate mirror-imprint isolation protocol to prevent emotional erosion of rational substrate.]
The mirror-imprint instinct ejected icy analytical results, blue light-characters flashing at the edge of his vision.
Shen Yuzhu closed his eyes. Forced deletion. The light-characters vanished.
But that lump of warmth in his chest could not be deleted. It pulsed, with the distant shouts, with Chu Hongying's trembling shoulder line, with the Heartfire Banner's wild snapping, once, again, growing clearer. Like a second heart. Like something that should not exist, yet was already rooted—a bond.
After the evening meal, the camp grew briefly quiet. People gathered around campfires sharing the two snow-hares hunted today—meat scarce, boiled into soup, each person could only get half a bowl, but with wild vegetable roots floating in it, steaming hot.
Chu Hongying didn't go to get soup. After inspecting the last sentry post on the west wall, returning to the main tent area, her steps paused, then turned toward that small tent pitched in the ruined tower's wind-shadow. The tent's location was Shen Yuzhu's own choice, thirty paces from the main tent, twenty from the medical tent, fifteen from the east wall—a point from which, no matter from which direction trouble came, he could reach or withdraw fastest.
She lifted the flap. He was kneeling on a felt mat, revising west wall defense lines on a spread cowhide map. The tent held only one small oil lamp, its wick trimmed short, the light dim and yellowish like a sick person's eyelid, barely illuminating ink lines on paper. He didn't look up, the mirror-pattern's indigo glow in the dimness the only clear light source, flowing along his profile, vanishing into his collar.
Chu Hongying didn't speak, just placed a still-warm oil-paper packet beside his hand on the mat. The packet gave off a faintly charred bread scent, mixed with a very faint meat smell.
Shen Yuzhu's movements halted. Finally, he looked up. The oil lamp's light flickered, casting fragmented shadows on his face. The mirror-pattern's glow reflected in his eyes, making those always overly calm eyes now show a rare—wavering.
"Today," Chu Hongying began, voice very low, almost drowned by the wind outside the tent, "you spoke well."
Shen Yuzhu lowered his head, avoiding her gaze: "Just basic recognition. To truly counter the Night Crows' advanced psychic toxins, a more systematic—"
"I know," she cut him off, tone placid. "But what they need now isn't 'systematic,' it's 'something they can understand.'" She paused, added: "You gave that."
Shen Yuzhu was silent. He looked at the oil-paper packet by his hand, at the tiny oil-stain seeping through the paper's crevices, at the snow-grains brought in by her boot-soles on the mat, already melting. The oil lamp's light still flickered, casting their shadows on the tent cloth, stretching, distorting, occasionally overlapping.
Chu Hongying looked at him a moment, turned to leave.
"Hongying," he suddenly called her.
She stopped, didn't turn.
Shen Yuzhu raised his head, the mirror-pattern's glow flowing faintly in the dimness, like an under-ice underground river finally breaking a sliver of sky-light: "When they called you 'General,'" he asked, voice soft as if afraid to wake something, "what were you thinking?"
Chu Hongying, back to him, was silent three breaths. Outside the tent, wind howled, distant campfires gave sporadic laughter, the night watch's footsteps came regularly from far to near, then near to far.
Then she said: "I thought I cannot die." "At the very least, I cannot die before them."
Finished, she lifted the flap and went out. A gust of cold wind poured in, making the oil lamp sway violently, the flame almost extinguishing. Shen Yuzhu reached to shield the lamp flame, fingertip touching the hot copper cup, trembling slightly. By the time he steadied the lamp, the tent was empty. Only the oil-paper packet's residual warmth remained, and the half imprint of her boot on the mat, gradually blurring.
Midnight, the camp entirely asleep. Shen Yuzhu meditated alone in his tent. The cold toxin unresolved, Lu Wanning had instructed him to cycle his mirror-imprint energy through three full circuits daily, using the meridians sealed by her acupuncture needles as guides to drive the frost-toxin to the extremities, slowing its erosion of the heart meridian.
First cycle, steady. Second cycle, mirror-pattern quivered slightly, but controllable. Midway through the third cycle—he suddenly "saw." Not hallucination, not memory, but a memory fragment autonomously replayed by the mirror-pattern and reconstructed in "high-resolution analysis" mode:
Afternoon teaching, Li Shuan asked "Can we come listen tomorrow?", the moment he nodded, the light that abruptly ignited in Li Shuan's eyes. That light wasn't candle-flame, not starlight, but something more primal, clawing its way from despair's depths—hope. The mirror-pattern even provided data analysis.
Immediately, the scene jumped. Evening, the whole camp shouting "General." The mirror-pattern's "micro-view" captured image: Chu Hongying's rope-holding hand, knuckles white, skin beneath old calluses grooved deeply by the rope, fine blood beads seeping from callus-edges, dyeing the rope strands red. But her shoulder line trembled. The tremor's frequency, presented by the mirror-pattern as a waveform.
The two scenes began alternating. Faster and faster. Li Shuan's eyes' light, Chu Hongying's trembling shoulder, light, shoulder, light, shoulder—
The mirror-pattern emitted a faint, nearly buzzing vibration. Red alerts popped at the edge of his vision.
Shen Yuzhu closed his eyes. Forcibly halted the mirror-imprint circulation.
"Ungh—" A groan squeezed from his throat's depths. Cold sweat slid from his temple, down his cheekbone, dropping onto the felt mat, soaking dark spots. He pressed a hand to his chest, where a strange, surging beat came—not pain. Something more dangerous, scalding resonance. As if a heart not his own, separated by flesh and ribs, beat in sync within his chest. That heartbeat's rhythm he knew… it was Chu Hongying's blood-lock pulse, the camp's collective will ripples, the Heartfire Banner's recorded "wanting to live" will of all, mixed together, boiling like magma.
These things, through the mirror-pattern and banner-pattern resonance, through the invisible "dual-imprint binding" between him and her, were seeping bit by bit into the depths of his soul-veins, originally belonging only to "analysis" and "reason."
Could not delete. Could not isolate. Because the Heartfire Banner fluttered thirty paces away, Chu Hongying rested in the main tent, the breaths of over three hundred people rose and fell on this snowfield, their fears, hopes, struggles, all woven into an invisible "field." And he lived within that field.
Shen Yuzhu lowered his head, opened his palm. Moonlight leaked through a tent seam, an extremely narrow, clear-cold band of light, slicing diagonally across his palm. In his palm were old wounds—scar from a blade in Wolf-Owl camp training, burns from the implement during mirror-implant, calluses from years holding brushes for deduction. But in this moonlight, he seemed to see… between the lines of his palm, an extremely faint, crimson phantom image surfaced. That phantom had no substance, like a reflection in water, swaying slightly with his breath. Shape distorted, hard to discern, but could vaguely be seen—some kind of coiled chain pattern.
Blood-lock's reflection. The embryo of a bond.
He slowly clenched his fist. The phantom vanished. But deep in his palm, that beat not belonging to the mirror-imprint, scalding, still persisted.
At the end of midnight, Gu Changfeng finished his last guard shift. He didn't return to his tent immediately, but circled to the ruined tower's platform—best view there, could see the whole camp, also see that unsettling darkness deep in the western snow-forest.
Leaping onto the platform, he found two people already standing there. Chu Hongying looked up at the banner, profile in moonlight like a silent stone carving. Shen Yuzhu stood three paces behind and to her side, looking down at something in his hand, but Gu Changfeng glimpsed his fingertips unconsciously rubbing the paper's edge—not reading at all.
Gu Changfeng didn't speak, just walked to Chu Hongying's other side, crossed his arms, looked out over the camp.
A moment later, footsteps came from the medical tent direction. Lu Wanning walked onto the platform holding her Resonance Symptom Notes, snow-dust still on her shoulders not brushed off. She silently stood beside Shen Yuzhu, opened the notes, recorded today's last entry by moonlight.
The four stood like that. No one spoke.
Below, the camp slept deeply, scattered campfire embers like scattered red pupils. The night watch paced with lanterns, light tracing dim yellow arcs on snow. From the injured tent came occasional muffled coughs, muted, as if stifled under thick blankets. In the distant snow-plain, wind howled, whipping up snow-fog, churning heaven and earth into chaotic gray-white.
But on this ruined platform, it was still. Only the banner snapped wildly, cloth slapping pole, Pa, pa, pa, regular as a heartbeat.
Until Gu Changfeng, chewing a dried grass blade plucked from who-knows-where, muttered vaguely: "Looks like an army."
Lu Wanning's brush-tip didn't pause, adding tonight's final observation record at the notes' end, blandly added: "Looks like people."
Shen Yuzhu slowly put away the scroll he hadn't actually read a word of, looked up, at that Heartfire Banner unfurling in the night wind. He looked a long time. So long Chu Hongying glanced at him, so long Gu Changfeng spat out the grass blade, so long Lu Wanning closed her notes.
Then he said very lightly, voice somewhat scattered by the wind: "Looks like an answer."
The moment the words fell—the banner-face, those dark crimson patterns, suddenly blazed alight together! Not the faint pulsations from before, not the crimson flow from afternoon. Four colors. Crimson as blood, rushing up from the banner-pole's base—that was Chu Hongying's blood-lock resonance. Indigo as ice, branching along the patterns spreading—that was Shen Yuzhu's mirror-imprint remnant echo. Silvery as the moon, weaving a meridian grid between crimson and blue—that was Lu Wanning's meridian analysis traces. Bluish-gray as wind, coiling around the banner-tip, lifting the banner-face—that was Gu Changfeng's wind-domain flow.
Four light-streams like living things, like vines, on the banner-face interlaced, coiled, merged, weaving a brief yet complete totem—that totem hard to name, not flower nor beast, more like some ancient contract rune, each stroke flowing with different-natured law-power.
The light lasted—one second. Two seconds. Three seconds. Then simultaneously faded.
The banner returned to normal, silently fluttering in the night wind, dark crimson patterns returning to dullness, as if nothing had happened.
But all four knew. Something, from this moment, had truly taken form. Not structure, not military rules, not medical order, not defense lines. Something more foundational, more stubborn, growing from each of their four shattered destinies, yet intertwining into a brand new pathway—
"Four Poles Field."
Gu Changfeng turned first, leaped off the platform, his figure disappearing into camp shadows. Lu Wanning gave Chu Hongying a very slight nod, gathered her robe tighter, walked toward the medical tent. Chu Hongying took one last look at the banner, another at Shen Yuzhu still standing there, ultimately said nothing, took her spear and left.
On the platform, only Shen Yuzhu remained. He looked up, at the banner. Deep in his mirror-pattern, that crimson phantom image surfaced again, clearer this time—no longer chains, but an extremely fine, crimson pattern, spreading from his palm, along his wrist, vanishing into his sleeve, finally connecting to that lump of warmth in his chest.
He closed his eyes. Wind and snow beat against his face.
Later that night, snow began falling again. Fine snow-grains tapped the tent, sha-sha rustling, like countless hands lightly scratching hide.
Shen Yuzhu lay on the felt mat, eyes open. Meditation done, cold toxin temporarily suppressed, mirror-pattern returned to calm. But that lump of warmth in his chest remained—not scalding, not violent, just persistently, stubbornly beating, like a second heart implanted outside his body, rising and falling with his breath.
He suddenly remembered many years ago. In the Wolf-Owl camp's underground third-level "purification chamber," the Night Crow sorcerer responsible for implanting the mirror-imprint, while adjusting the implement piercing his neck's angle, had said in that icy tone, as if stating iron law: "A mirror-imprint bearer does not need emotion." "Emotion is noise, is error, is impurity that must be filtered out." "Your reason for existence is to become the Empire's sharpest eye, coldest blade. Eyes cannot wet, blades cannot warm, understand?"
Back then, he lay on the cold iron bed, his neck pierced by the instrument, pain blurring his vision, throat restricted by sorcery, unable to speak.
But he remembered nodding.
Because that was the only way to survive—become a tool, to transform from "potential threat awaiting purification" into "valuable instrument."
But now… now he lay on the northern frontier snow-plain, tent worn and old, felt mat thin enough to grind bones, wound poison not healed, surrounded by survivors on the verge of collapse at any moment, ahead the Empire's most sinister and cunning Night Crows, behind endless wind, snow, and long night. And in his chest beat a lump of something that could not be analyzed, deleted, or isolated—"noise."
Outside the tent came extremely light footsteps.
Shen Yuzhu opened his eyes. On the tent cloth was projected a familiar figure—upright, sharp, shoulder line straight, spear-sack at her waist. Chu Hongying, on night patrol, paused a moment before his tent.
She didn't lift the flap. Didn't speak. Didn't deliberately lighten or加重 her steps. Just paused three breaths. As if confirming something. As if silently saying: "I'm still awake, the camp is still steady, you… can keep sleeping."
Then the footsteps continued forward, gradually fading away, merging into the wind-snow howl.
Shen Yuzhu closed his eyes. This time, he fell asleep quickly.
In the dream, there were no Wolf-Owl camp's underground tunnels, no Night Crows' observation mirrors, no mirror-guards' vacant eyes. Only one banner. On the boundless snow-plain, snapping wildly. Below it stood four people, back to back, facing darkness and snowstorm surging from all directions.
And on the banner, dark crimson patterns slowly spread, grew, interlaced, from simple veins into complex roots, from scar marks into supporting bones—like the heart growing its own, stubborn, unbreakable bones.