The camp stirred to life in the ash-grey light of dawn's first hour.
No bugle sounded the reveille. No call to assembly echoed. Only the rustle of tent flaps, the crunch of snow underfoot, and—
a rhythm lagging half a beat behind yesterday's.
Not idleness. Deliberation.
Those wondering "what should I do now" found the answer no longer descending from commands, but emerging instead— from: what their companions were doing, what the sounds around them implied, what their own flesh demanded.
Chu Hongying stood outside the command tent, observing it all. Her grip on her spear loosened, then tightened—not from a wish to intervene, but because a decade of military instinct was learning the grammar of silence.
By the west wall, Veteran Wang Wu raised his bamboo whistle to his lips as ritual dictated.
The sharp note pierced the morning mist. He straightened his spine, awaiting the familiar convergence of footsteps.
Three breaths passed. Five.
Only seven men moved on instinct to form up. The rest continued their tasks: some headed to the cook-tent, some knelt to secure their bootlaces, some scanned the sky, assessing the day's wind and snow.
Wang Wu stood frozen. The whistle slipped from his lips and vanished into the snow.
"The rules…" he murmured, "…gone?"
Stooping, he retrieved the whistle, his calloused fingers tracing the years of tooth marks etched into the bamboo. For eight years, from the Youzhou border garrisons to the Chixin Banner, this sound had meant assemble, form ranks, obey.
Now it was merely a hollow tube.
Not far off, the young soldier Li Shuan glanced at his comrades, then at the sky. Yesterday, he'd gone hungry all morning, waiting for assembly only to find the porridge already doled out. Today, he'd learned: eat first.
At the cook-tent entrance, the stove was cold, the cauldron empty. Old Wang the Lame crouched by the woodpile, flint in hand but unmoving—waiting, waiting for a signal that it was time.
Li Shuan didn't speak. He silently crouched, gathered kindling, rebuilt the firebed, pulled his own fire-starter from his tunic.
Hiss—fwoosh.
Flames leapt, illuminating the clouded depths of Wang the Lame's eyes. The old man stared at Li Shuan, lips parting, finally accepting the firewood with a whispered, "...My thanks."
"Ought to be done," Li Shuan said—then caught himself.
Ought to be done? Who decided 'ought'?
In the cook-tent's deepest corner, Fourth Master Zhao stood motionless before the great pot.
Inside, millet porridge, freshly made, still exhaling thin wisps of steam. At fifty-seven, he had been an army cook for thirty-eight years, surviving three border force reorganizations and seven commanding generals. His life had mirrored this pot—placed where told, a fire built beneath; at the call to eat, he ladled; when the call ceased, the fire died.
Simple. Clear. Never a mistake.
This morning he had risen in the dark before the Yin hour, prepared the first batch. Then he'd taken his post before the pot, waiting for that familiar sound.
Waiting for 'Serve the meal.'
Two quarter-hours passed.
A thin skin formed on the porridge's surface. The steam grew feeble.
Fourth Master Zhao remained standing, spine ramrod straight, like a standard driven into the snow thirty-eight winters past. His eyes were fixed on the pot, yet seeing nothing, merely holding the posture of waiting—a posture rehearsed for half a lifetime.
Lu Wanning passed and paused. She observed the pot, then the old man. "Fourth Master Zhao," she said softly, "the porridge will grow cold."
Fourth Master Zhao turned slowly. Those murky eyes held, for the first time, a childlike bewilderment.
"Physician Lu…" his voice gravelly, "today… who gives the order?"
Lu Wanning was silent for a full breath.
"When people are hungry," she said, "they will serve themselves."
Fourth Master Zhao stared.
His lips quivered faintly, as if chewing words from a foreign tongue. He looked down at his own hands—a landscape of burn scars and calluses, capable of serving three hundred men in a quarter-hour without missing a single bowl.
"Then…" he looked up, lost, "what am I supposed to do?"
The words were feather-light.
Light as a falling snowflake.
But Chu Hongying heard them from twenty paces away.
Her grip on the spear tightened convulsively, nails biting into the old calluses of her palm, a sharp, clean pain.
She saw the curve of Fourth Master Zhao's stooped back, the pot of gradually cooling mush, a gear that had turned for thirty-eight years suddenly finding itself without the place a gear belongs.
This was not an efficiency loss.
This was a specific man, on a specific morning, losing the cornerstone he had stood upon for half his life.
Chu Hongying closed her eyes.
When she opened them, she did not walk to Fourth Master Zhao. She did not issue a new command. She simply turned and strode toward the grain depot.
Each step fell heavily.
As if to trample something churning deep within her down into the snow, to bury it in earth, to stop it from ever sprouting.
Before the grain depot, two squads stood in tense opposition.
Five iron spades lay on the ground between them. The last five.
Squad A's captain was a burly man, beard thick, voice grating. "We go first. If that west wall section isn't shored up and collapses tonight, we all die."
Squad B's captain was younger, his face still marred by frostbite scars, his tone unyielding. "The tents are leaking. The wounded will freeze by nightfall. We need to patch shelters."
Silence.
A protracted silence. The wind swept grit between them, as if measuring the emptiness.
Chu Hongying stood within the tent shadows twenty paces distant, her fingers bleaching the color from the spear shaft.
She heard it all clearly. A hundred solutions sprang to mind: by supply priority, the wall took precedence; by the Provisional Border Protocols, fortification materials came first; by her own will alone—she could simply say 'I command.'
But she did not move.
Nails gouged her palm, old calluses protesting with a dull throb. A decade of military instinct screamed in her veins: Inefficient! Chaotic! Correct it now!
She shut her eyes.
When she opened them, she saw Squad A captain's throat work, his voice emerging rough:
"...Then the old spade goes to you. We take the four new ones first." He paused, mouth working around unfamiliar phrasing. "We swap… at noon."
Squad B captain froze. He looked at the other man, at the struggle in his eyes, at the four new spades, then back at his own shivering wounded.
Time dripped by.
Then he gave a single, sharp nod. "Done."
No handshake. No pact sealed. Only the minute slackening of tension in both men's shoulders, as if some invisible weight had been shed.
Squad A hefted the four new spades and left. Squad B captain crouched, picked up the old spade—its wooden handle split, bound with hemp twine. He ran a thumb over the knot, then looked at his men. "We start with the worst leak. We'll huddle. We'll endure."
Chu Hongying remained, the wind snapping her cloak like a banner.
In that moment, comprehension dawned:
When I lay down the knife, I do not lay down responsibility.
I trade 'the responsibility for immediate correctness' for 'the responsibility to let them err, and to learn within the error.'
The latter is the heavier burden.
For it demands of me—to watch them bleed, and not move to staunch the wound.
Noon.
Squad A returned to the appointed spot precisely on time. The ground was bare.
Squad B was absent.
Squad A captain's face darkened. He waited a quarter-hour, then turned without a word, leading his men back to the west wall.
Without spades, they used their hands.
The frozen earth was iron-hard. Four men knelt at the wall's base, digging at snow and ice with fingers purpling from cold, prying at soil with stones, throwing their weight against stubborn rocks. Nails tore and peeled back. Blood welled, dripped onto the snow, blooming tiny, stark crimson flowers.
No one uttered a complaint.
Only harsh breaths and the dull, meaty thuds of flesh and stone against unyielding ground.
Another half-hour passed before Squad B captain came hurrying over, face sheened with sweat, clutching the old spade and two crudely fashioned wooden shovels.
"My fault! All my fault! The damage was worse than we reckoned, we—"
His words died.
He had seen their hands.
They were no longer hands. They were lumps of blackened, purple, shuddering meat. Filth and ice packed the nail beds. Some nails were gone entirely, revealing raw, glistening flesh beneath.
Squad A captain stood, took the proffered old spade.
His hand trembled—not from cold, but from pain. Yet his grip was firm.
"The wall," he said, his voice flat, devoid of all inflection, "is mended. With these."
Squad B captain stood rooted to the spot.
His mouth opened, but all words had turned to ash. He could only watch as Squad A captain turned, as the four silent forms trudged back to their section of wall, as the scattered drops of blood darkened the snow.
That evening, Squad B captain silently placed his own dinner ration—a bowl of thick gruel, half a flatbread—beside Squad A's campfire.
He spoke no word, simply turned and left.
Squad A captain stared at the bowl for a long time. Finally, he pushed it toward the man with the most savaged hands.
"Eat."
The word was chiseled from ice.
The soldier took the bowl, hands shaking so violently some gruel slopped over the side. He bent his head, devouring it, tears falling into the porridge, swallowed down with the meal.
The pact had resolved the conflict over tools.
But it had birthed something else—a debt, heavy and tangible, woven from strands of pain, blood, and salt tears.
The tundra would have to learn to digest this new, bitter nourishment.
---
Cold light flowed across the surface of the bronze mirror.
Shadow Archivist Forty-Two—his number his name, his name his number—observed the scrolling runes. His face, lit by the eerie blue glow, resembled a wax effigy, his pupils mirroring the dense data streams.
[Resource Allocation Directive · Auto-Manifest]
Target Area: Northern Territory Sample Zone (Codename: Chixin Remnants)
Threat Level Updated: A Mid → C Low (Basis: Spirit Peaks Attenuation, Unit Disarray, Aggressive Energy Quelled)
...
His finger hovered above the 'Authorize' rune.
Three breaths. He recalled his morning's other task: feeding the sparrows.
He kept a cage of snow finches on the observation room's outer sill. Each day, he fed them, recording chirp frequency, hop count, feeding speed. This morning, he had halved the millet. Observed.
By noon, chirping had diminished by thirty percent.
Fascinating.
The directive in the mirror was, in essence, a grander 'sparrow-feeding experiment': reduce resources for the northern territory's three hundred and seventy-three subjects by forty percent. Observe the 'collective organism's' response.
Would they turn on each other? Self-regulate? Or… begin to consume themselves from within?
Forty-Two's fingertip descended.
[Directive Authorized · Sent]
[Estimated Arrival: Three Days Hence]
At the same instant, a thousand li to the north, Lu Wanning was taking inventory of her medical chest. Silver-Root Powder was down to the last three doses. Frowning, she noted in her log: "Require replenishment: Silver-Root, Dragon's Blood Resin, Borneol…"
She did not yet know this list would never be fulfilled.
Just as she did not know that, deep within the Night Crow Division's heart, a man she would never meet had just decided, with the same detached curiosity he applied to feeding birds, the scarcity she would face in the coming days.
The system has no faith in tears.
It believes solely in data.
And the data stated: A Class C sample can withstand these losses.
---
When Shen Yuzhu and Gu Changfeng reached the mouth of Blackstone Valley, it was deserted.
Save for a mirror of ice.
A natural ice wall, two zhang high and three wide, its surface polished to glass-like smoothness, reflecting the pallid sky and their own blurred forms. The snow before it lay pristine, untouched—as if the mirror had congealed from the air itself solely to await them.
"Mystical theatrics," Gu Changfeng growled, hand resting on his saber hilt, his gaze sweeping the surrounding cliffs like a raptor's.
Shen Yuzhu stood motionless before the mirror. His Mirror Patterns hummed at low frequency, mapping the spirit-vein structure within the ice—not a natural formation, but a manifestation of law. Every crystal aligned with a severe, geometric logic, a challenge written in frost.
"He is not near," Shen Yuzhu stated.
"Then this mirror—"
"Is an eye." Shen Yuzhu raised a hand, halting his fingertip an inch from the surface. "He watches from elsewhere."
As the words left his lips, the mirror's surface rippled.
A figure coalesced in the ice-depth—Helian Sha, seated upon his dais, a bronze cup in hand, his ice-blue pupils gazing out as if through a window. Distance was annulled by law; he was both here and deep within the valley's heart.
"Punctual," Helian Sha's voice resonated through the ice, layered with a strange echo. "I withdrew the three western sentry posts at dawn."
Gu Changfeng's muscles coiled. "A ploy to lull us?"
"No." Helian Sha took a sip, his movements languid, almost indolent. "I wished to observe how you would utilize a suddenly available tract of stable ground."
He set the cup down, his glacial gaze fixing on Shen Yuzhu.
"Will you expand? Redistribute internally? Or…" a faint, cold smile touched his lips, "will you pretend not to see it, and remain huddled?"
Shen Yuzhu met the gaze within the ice. His Mirror Patterns mapped the flow of principles around the other—an absolute 'Order,' every current of energy ruler-straight, expelling all chaos, all ambiguity.
"The tundra does not 'utilize' territory," Shen Yuzhu replied, his voice even. "The tundra merely grows within it."
Helian Sha's smile widened, devoid of warmth.
He leaned forward, his ice-blue eyes magnifying in the mirror, as if to study Shen Yuzhu's face from inches away.
"I once kept snow foxes."
An abrupt, seemingly irrelevant statement.
"Caged them. Fed them just enough meat to stave off death. Watched to see when they would begin to—"
He paused, selecting the perfect word.
"—gnaw upon their own tails."
"Your patch of tundra…"
His smile turned sharp, teeth glinting coldly in the frozen medium.
"Where will the self-devouring begin?"
Shen Yuzhu was silent.
His Mirror Patterns now fully engaged, dissecting the ice-crystal's purpose: non-aggressive, non-surveillant. A pure measuring instrument. But what it measured—'thermal breath fluctuations'—was in truth the frequency variance of spiritual resonance. Joy elevated the frequency, the 'breath' warmed; fear disordered it, the 'breath' chilled; despair scattered it into silent, cold stillness.
Helian Sha was demanding a log of a living dissection.
"The price?" Shen Yuzhu asked.
"Three wagonloads of winter charcoal. Sufficient to burn until spring thaws."
"Its provenance?"
"My personal stores." Helian Sha reclined, a picture of casual power. "Do not doubt. My interest in watching you survive currently exceeds my interest in watching you freeze."
Shen Yuzhu regarded the ice crystal, the twin glacial orbs observing him.
Five breaths.
He extended his hand—not toward the mirror, but toward a specific point in the empty air before him, as if the crystal physically hovered there.
"Pact formed."
Helian Sha within the ice gave a slight nod. The surface rippled again, the image dissolving, reforming into words etched in frost:
"Marker delivered to Western Boundary Stone. First charcoal shipment: this afternoon."
"Let me witness the tundra's pulse."
The ice mirror shattered.
Not violently, but with a precise, willing dissolution into a million glittering motes, carried away on the wind without a trace.
Gu Changfeng stared at the now-empty valley mouth and uttered a low, vehement curse. "What in all hells does he want?"
"To conduct a trial," Shen Yuzhu said, turning away. "We are his new specimen jar."
"And we simply allow it?"
"The charcoal is real." Shen Yuzhu's gaze was turned toward the distant camp. "And the act of measurement itself… is a form of attention."
He left the rest unspoken: at this moment, with the Night Crow Division downgrading them to 'Class C,' Helian Sha's 'attention' might itself be a perverse kind of shield.
---
The young soldier Chen San was brimming with zeal.
Yesterday, he'd seen Master Shen adjust the sentry rotations. A few lines drawn in the snow with twigs, a murmured "wind shift occurs here, move the post back seven paces," and the west wall's blind spot had vanished.
It was brilliance. Like arcane artistry.
Today, he was tasked with overseeing the southeast watchtower's construction. The plan called for six men. He tallied the available hands: four whole, two lightly wounded.
I'll apply Master Shen's method, he resolved.
He drew his lines in the snow, recalling the steps: calculate load-bearing, assign tasks, factor margin… Then, he made an 'improvement': the two wounded would handle timber passing; the four healthy would split, one pair building the frame while the other simultaneously laid the planks.
More efficient! He was quite pleased with himself.
Half an hour later, the watchtower groaned a warning.
Not a collapse, but a distinct, unsettling list. Three degrees off true—subtle to the eye, but felt by anyone standing atop it, like the deck of a slowly capsizing ship.
Shen Yuzhu arrived on his inspection round as his Mirror Patterns automatically flagged seventeen points of critical stress. Crimson alerts bloomed in his vision, a silent, bloody condemnation.
He found Chen San drenched in sweat, desperately trying to haul a main pillar straight with ropes.
"Master Shen!" Chen San's eyes lit with relief. "I used your method to save manpower, but somehow—"
Shen Yuzhu raised a hand, silencing him. He looked up, his Mirror Patterns painting the entire structure in a web of diagnostic light.
Three breaths.
"Southeast corner, third primary pillar. Burial depth insufficient by one chi, two cun," his tone was clinical, devoid of reproach. "Northern diagonal brace. Angle miscalculated by seven degrees. And—"
His finger pointed to the two wounded soldiers. "Their position blocked your sightline to the crucial load-bearing joint. You could not see the base had shifted."
Chen San's face blanched.
Shen Yuzhu offered no further lecture. He rolled up his sleeves, approached the offending pillar, and placed a palm against the cold wood. Azure light from his Mirror Patterns spiraled down his arm, seeping into the grain, reading the internal stresses.
Then he spoke, his voice quiet, instructional, as if teaching a child to recognize shapes:
"A method is not an incantation. It does not see what you fail to observe."
He guided Chen San and two others to re-excavate the pillar base. He himself adjusted the brace. There were no orders, only clear, precise guidance.
"Pull the rope here. Yes. Feel the wood pushing back? That is the direction in which it 'wishes' to stand."
"Slower. Allow it to find its own balance."
Another half-hour, and the tower stood firm. Flawed, but no longer in imminent danger of toppling in the night.
Chen San wiped his brow, a mix of shame and gratitude. "My thanks, Master Shen… I was a fool."
"Not a fool," Shen Yuzhu said, regarding him. "You merely trusted the 'method' too completely, and forgot the 'nature of the material itself.'"
Chen San nodded, only half-comprehending.
Shen Yuzhu turned to leave.
Three paces.
He halted.
His Mirror Patterns replayed the interaction—Chen San's voice, his expression, his tone, all stored with perfect clarity. But one detail had slipped through.
The young man's name.
Not forgotten. It had skated across the surface of his memory like a droplet on oiled parchment, leaving no purchase, triggering no 'this is Chen San' recognition.
A Mirror Patterns prompt flickered: [Short-term Memory Access Delay: 0.3 breaths | No Physiological Anomaly Detected]
Shen Yuzhu was still for one full breath.
Then he continued walking. He did not turn back to ask.
The name was gone.
Like snow sifting through open fingers.
This was not the first. It would not be the last.
---
Chu Hongying saw the young wounded soldier sitting on a stump outside the medical tent, licking his bowl.
The thin porridge was long gone. The coarse pottery interior was scraped clean, reflecting the hollows of his cheeks. He licked with a focused desperation, his tongue tracing the rim in slow, methodical circles, savoring the ghost of sustenance.
She knew him.
At the Snowwolf Valley rearguard action, this soldier—A'Shi—had held a narrow pass alone with a bow for half a clock-hour against a wolf cavalry vanguard. When she'd broken through with reinforcements, he was propped against the cliff, seven gashes on his body, the bone of his left leg stark white against torn flesh, a broken bow still in his grip.
He hadn't wept. He'd only asked, "General… is the pass held?"
She'd told him it was.
He'd grinned, his mouth a red ruin, and lost consciousness.
Now, the youth who had traded half his life for a strip of mountain pass was licking an empty bowl.
Chu Hongying's knuckles whitened on her spear.
She looked toward the cook-tent. The new 'self-service' rule was in effect: no roll call, no unit quotas. Whoever was hungry came, but one bowl per person only.
The intent was sound: streamline distribution, conserve labor, prevent graft.
The result: the bold and strong shoved forward, took their full share first. The weak, the wounded, the hesitant came last, to find only scant, watery dregs.
A'Shi was not alone.
Four other wounded men sat nearby, holding identical empty bowls, heads bowed in mute acceptance.
At the cook-tent entrance, Wang the Lame's hastily scribbled notice flapped in the wind. A burly soldier glanced at it and snorted. "Trying to scare us, old gimp? You wouldn't dare!"
He shouldered past a wounded man on crutches, reaching for a second helping.
Wang the Lame raised his heavy soup ladle high.
The confrontation teetered on a knife's edge.
Chu Hongying's foot shifted. One step, two—a decade of instinct screamed at her to march over, to command, to correct, to use the weight of rank to crush this injustice flat.
Then she stopped.
Stopped three paces behind A'Shi.
The wind brought her the drumbeat of her own heart, the roar of blood in her ears, the accumulated dogma of ten years shouting: Inefficient! Unjust! Intervene!
But beneath it, she heard Lu Wanning's voice from that morning:
"Every time you correct them, they lose a chance to learn to correct themselves."
She closed her eyes.
When she opened them, she did not walk toward the cook-tent.
She saw Gu Changfeng already striding over.
He didn't draw his blade. He simply planted himself before the burly soldier, looking down from his greater height, his shadow engulfing the man.
Three breaths of pure, oppressive silence.
Then Gu Changfeng spoke, his voice a low rumble. "I'm hungry. Give me your food."
The soldier flinched. "B-Boss Gu, I…"
"Give. It."
Trembling, the man handed over his still-full bowl.
Gu Changfeng took it, walked to the five wounded men, and spooned a portion into each of their empty bowls. When he was done, his own bowl was empty. He tossed it back at the bully's feet.
"Now you're hungry too," Gu Changfeng stated, his tone flat as slate. "Go to the back of the line."
The soldier's face paled, then flushed. Finally, he ducked his head, retrieved his bowl, and slunk to the very end of the queue.
The conflict was resolved.
Resolved by another, cruder form of authority.
Chu Hongying stood her ground, watching Gu Changfeng's broad back, and understood:
When I refuse to be the only blade, other blades will emerge, their edges forged from rougher stock.
My task is not to endure a world without a blade.
It is to endure—
A world where blades take shapes I do not recognize.
That evening, she still walked to A'Shi's side. She crouched, broke her own flatbread in two, and gave him half.
A'Shi took it, his hand trembling violently, tears splashing onto the bread.
Chu Hongying did not watch him eat. As she stood and walked away, she heard the sound behind her—muffled, wet, the ragged sobs of a wounded young animal.
She did not look back.
She simply walked faster, as if she could outpace the sound, leave it to be swallowed by the wind, buried in some distant place where she would never have to hear it again.
---
Helian Sha stood before the second ice mirror.
This one was larger, its surface flowing with dark-gold data streams—the live feed from the 'Frost-Sentinel' marker.
The mirror did not show images, but a graph.
The horizontal axis marked the hours from Mao to You. The vertical axis charted 'Thermal Breath Fluctuation,' a metric of spiritual resonance intensity.
The line rose and fell.
Mao hour (5-7 AM): Flat, low. (The confusion of waking.)
Chen hour middle (9 AM): A sharp plunge. (The spade dispute.)
Si hour beginning (9-11 AM): A slight, tentative recovery. (The agreement reached.)
Post-noon: A deep, precipitous dive. (The empty bowls. The licked rims.)
Shen hour end (5 PM): A steady, determined climb, breaking above the baseline. (The notice posted. The petition signed.)
Helian Sha's fingertip came to rest on that final, ascending curve.
It was ice-cold, nearly the same temperature as the mirror itself.
"Observe here," he said to the shaman standing behind him, a rare tension threading his voice.
The shaman was ancient, back bent, face a web of indigo tattoos, eyes milky. "They… are mending themselves?"
"No." Helian Sha's ice-blue pupils held the reflection of that stubbornly rising line. "They are growing new organs. From within the pain itself."
He withdrew his hand, folding his arms across his chest. The fur of his wolf-pelt cloak gleamed with a cold sheen in the chamber's blue light.
"Each descent is a laceration," he murmured, as if reading sacred script. "Each ascent… is the new flesh that knits the wound closed."
The shaman was silent for a long moment. "My King," he rasped finally, "is this a thing to be revered, or a thing to be feared?"
Helian Sha did not answer immediately.
He watched the graph, the way it always fought its way back from each fall, that raw, inelegant, tenacious vitality.
At last, he spoke, his voice so quiet it was almost lost in the breath of the ice.
"They are learning, through hurt, how not to be hurt."
"That… is more formidable than any treatise of war."
He turned, moving toward the deeper recesses of the ice chamber.
"Prepare the second marker."
The shaman shuffled after him. "Where shall it be placed, my King?"
Helian Sha did not break his stride.
"Place it where they are most likely to trample one another."
---
Shen Yuzhu knelt on the icy felt mat in his tent.
His Mirror Patterns were fully unfurled, azure light swirling soundlessly, laying out the day's repair logs, error margins, cost ledgers across his mind's eye.
A silent, spectral audit.
Then, the crimson warnings erupted.
Not at the periphery. They detonated at the very center of his vision, the color of fresh blood:
[Essence-Preservation Alert]
Self-Contour Definition: 22%
Daily Attenuation Acceleration: 5 hao
Projected Time to 30% Threshold: 16 Days
[Symptom Prognostication]
Recent Memory Shedding (Onset within 72 hours)
Emotional-Response Blunting (In progress)
Capacity for Self-Narration Loss (Triggers at 25%)
[Recommendation] Initiate Identity-Anchor Protocols Immediately:
Recite Own Name (10 repetitions daily)
Handle Personal Artifacts (With strong affective imprint)
Practice Utterances Employing 'I' as Subject
Shen Yuzhu observed the words calmly.
They seared themselves onto his consciousness, each character a brand.
Three breaths. Five. Ten.
He raised a hand, his fingertip tracing a sealing sigil in the empty air.
[Alerts Suppressed]
[All Advisories Overridden]
[Resume Standard Observation Mode]
His vision cleared. Only the camp's schematic remained, three hundred and seventy-three points of light breathing in the darkness, seventeen tagged with [Latent Mirror-Puppet Potential].
All was as it should be.
Shen Yuzhu lowered his head. From an inner pocket, he drew forth the old command token.
The bronze was warm from his body heat, yet its core retained a lingering trace of coolness from Chu Hongying's hand. The red cord was rough, the knot unyielding.
He clenched it, the edges biting into his palm.
Then, he spoke aloud, his voice a whisper in the dark tent:
"Shen Yuzhu."
A pause. The wind shrieked outside.
"...I am Shen Yuzhu."
Another, longer pause.
"I…"
He opened his mouth to continue. I am a former Night Crow Division strategist. I am the supervisor of the Chixin remnant forces. I am…
The words lodged in his throat, amorphous, meaningless.
Mirror Patterns feedback: [Self-Definition Attempt: Failed]
He closed his eyes.
When he opened them, he simply pressed the token against the cloth over his heart, focusing on that faint, borrowed warmth.
Then he leaned forward and extinguished the oil lamp.
Darkness swallowed the tent.
Only the small, stubborn warmth against his chest continued to pulse.
Once. And again.
Like the one watchful eye that refuses to close in the depth of night.
---
In the third watch of the Yin hour, the blackest moment before dawn.
Four distinct gazes were fixed upon the same stretch of tundra.
Deep within the Night Crow Division Archives, a bronze mechanical arm retracted with a final, soft click. The day's last report was filed. The cabinet door sealed.
The tag read:
Northern Territory Tundra Sample · Day Two
Status: First confirmed observation of 'Self-Corrective Mechanism.'
Note: Correction process is inextricably linked to communal emotional injury. (See attached case: Post-Spade Pact Manual Trauma.)
Next Phase: Initiate 'Resource-Severance Precipice.'
In the Blackstone Valley ice-mirror chamber, Helian Sha still stood before the graph. The line had settled, but his fingers kept tracing, again and again, the specific arc of the 'posted-notice' rise.
A low monologue echoed off the ice:
"If pain can generate growth… what of fear? Betrayal? Despair?"
"How many times can a tundra be cut… and still find a way to spread?"
There was no answer.
Only the mirror, reflecting in its depths the first flicker of something new in his ice-blue eyes—uncertainty.
By the camp's west wall, Shen Yuzhu stood beside the third foundation stone.
The sentry post was secure, the blind spot eradicated. Mirror Patterns registered zero structural variance.
Yet he did not leave.
His fingertips brushed the stone's surface, not feeling temperature, but tracing a fresh scar.
A shallow groove, left by a soldier's careless spear-tip during the repairs. Uneven, accidental, like a scab still forming on skin.
His finger followed its meandering path.
And he understood:
This is the mark of the ruler.
The scar left by the world's measuring rod upon us, and the groove we inadvertently carve into ourselves as we grow.
They have fused.
Inside the command tent, Chu Hongying had not slept.
The lambskin ledger lay open, the ink dry. At the margin, her hand had idlessly sketched a tiny symbol: 🌱
A sprout. Crude, lopsided.
She stared at it.
For a long, long time.
Then, she raised her index finger and slowly, deliberately, smudged the drawing into an indistinct blur.
Not a rejection.
A refusal to let anyone—even herself—define it too soon.
Outside, the sky began to lighten.
The camp's collective breath seemed heavier than the day before.
As if something ponderous—those ruler's marks, those errors, the taste of licked bowls, the cold porridge, the uncertainties reflected in ice, the looming precipice of severed supplies—
Was being slowly digested within the rhythm of three hundred and seventy-three pairs of lungs, absorbed, transmuted into…
A different kind of ballast.
The night the first ruler's mark was etched, no one died.
Only an old soldier forgot his purpose,
A strategist forgot a young man's name,
And five wounded men, before learning to reach out and grasp,
First learned the taste of an empty bowl's edge.
This is how it grows.
Growth that begins from a fracture, carrying the metallic tang of old blood and rust.