The instrument-like sensitivity from the night before had not faded with dawn. If anything, the aftermath of last night's "pain-anchoring" had honed it further, settling into a low, constant burn in Shen Yuzhu's meridians. When he opened his eyes in the third watch before dawn, the darkness outside his tent was the same profound black as midnight, but the air now held a viscous tension—as if three hundred and seventy-three breaths had simultaneously held themselves in their sleep, and sighed out in unison.
Now, the textures of breath were joined by other details: the specific grain of wood in the tent pole, the minute unevenness in the frozen ground beneath his feet, the unique pitch of each soldier's stomach-grumble from thirty paces away. Data, not yet meaning. A cacophony of sensation waiting to be deciphered.
His fingertips retained the exact warmth and pressure of Chu Hongying's palm when she passed him the tiger tally—a memory preserved as physical sensation. His ears echoed the minute prick of Lu Wanning's silver needle piercing skin. His temples throbbed with the wind pressure of Gu Changfeng turning his back. These pains were like nails, temporarily fixing him to the name "Shen Yuzhu."
Yet when he tried to recall the face of the soldier who had secretly scattered breadcrumbs by the stone crevice yesterday, all that surfaced was a pair of trembling hands smudged with charcoal ash. No features, no name.
Only "a pair of guilt-ridden hands."
Outside the tent came the lowered voice of his guard, its tone unnaturally flat and tense: "Overseer, ration distribution has begun."
The sky was grey-white like old bandages. A line had already formed at the ration station, no one speaking, only the soft clink of ceramic bowls and wooden ladles, occasionally broken by a cough forced back into the throat. Shen Yuzhu paused in the tent's shadow twenty paces away, his gaze sweeping over the scene: the millet gruel was thinner than yesterday, the small spoon by the salt jar replaced by a shallower bone ladle, steam from the medicinal broth bucket in the wounded soldiers' line was faint, the scent of herbs almost gone.
He saw A'shi at the end of the line. The young soldier still hung his head, fingers gripping his empty bowl so tightly his knuckles were white, the black mud from the previous day's wall-building packed under his nails. An old soldier with a limp ahead of him took his gruel, turned, caught sight of A'shi, his lips moved soundlessly, but in the end he averted his face and hurried away—as if avoiding a mirror reflecting his own hunger.
No fighting, no complaint.
Only a kind of quiet more grinding than any shout.
Shen Yuzhu's fingertip unconsciously pressed against the edge of the old token in his robe, the pain sharp. At that moment, the azure light of the Mirror Patterns in his eyes suddenly deepened, reflecting a line of script:
[Peripheral spiritual vein disturbance identified. Matches previously calculated pressure gradient—Night Crow Division "Alpha-Seven" Protocol activated: Gradual Resource Constriction, Observe Autonomous Choice. Remaining Time: Seventy-two marks.]
It had come. The deliberate slope they were being pushed toward.
He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them and walked toward the base of the west wall. The grass should have woken with the morning dew.
Lu Wanning was there before him.
She crouched before the crevice, her heterochromatic eyes slowly tracing patterns, her fingertip suspended half an inch above the grass blade. The Serenity Grass still lived, its pale blue flower trembling in the cold wind, the edges of its petals frosted with the same delicate, cruel rime that had coated spear tassels and forgotten blades throughout the camp. But Shen Yuzhu's overloaded senses caught the anomaly: around the grass roots, that ring of mixed charcoal ash, silver powder, and breadcrumbs—the "protective ring"—now bore several sets of disorderly footprints. Someone had lingered here for a long time last night, their boot soles repeatedly trampling, grinding the offerings into mud and snow.
"The third one," Lu Wanning said without turning, her voice calm as taking a pulse. "After midnight last night, one person remained here for over a mark. Breathing shallow and rapid, stomach empty and groaning, left hand pressing against an old wound on the right abdomen—cramping from hunger-pain."
Shen Yuzhu looked at her.
"Li Shuan." Lu Wanning stood, drawing her Treatise on Meridian Syndromes from her sleeve, opening to a new page. "Enlisted in the ninety-sixth year, arrow wound on left shoulder not fully healed, received less than sixty percent of a full bowl of gruel yesterday. He muttered here, words fragmented, but three terms were clear: 'Old Wang the Fifth,' 'pain,' 'boil it.'"
Boil it.
The two words pierced Shen Yuzhu's overloaded hearing like an ice spike. He suddenly "heard"—not current sounds, but fragments of whispers from all over the camp, unintentionally recorded by the Mirror Patterns last night:
"...Can that grass really substitute medicine?"
"Physician Lu mentioned it, calms the spirit, eases pain..."
"But it's the grass that 'survived'..."
"Survived? I'm afraid Old Wang the Fifth won't survive tonight..."
Voices overlapped, mixed with suppressed gasps and the hollow gurgling of empty stomachs. Shen Yuzhu pressed his temples, the Mirror Patterns' light dimming slightly, but the words were already branded into his perception. He looked at Lu Wanning. "Old Wang the Fifth's condition?"
"Arrow wound festering, high fever, only enough Silver-Root powder for two more doses." Lu Wanning closed her notebook, her heterochromatic eyes meeting his directly. "Without a substitute, delirium will set in before midnight tonight."
Silence spread like frozen earth.
From afar came Gu Changfeng's furious shouts, muffled but violent, like a trapped beast's roar. Shen Yuzhu knew it was toward the cookhouse—someone had been caught secretly scooping the millet dregs settled at the bottom of the pot. No argument, only Gu Changfeng's unilateral berating and a single sob pressed into a palm.
"What begins here," Lu Wanning said softly, her tone like dissecting a lesion, "is a search. When there's not enough to go around, 'sharing' first curdles into 'shame.' And shame, when it starves, starts looking for something to sacrifice—to buy a little more life with."
Shen Yuzhu felt the token's edge bite deep into his palm. The pain anchored him, and also allowed him to see with cruel clarity: that grass was no longer just grass. It was becoming a scale—on one side, the agony of the most fragile lives among the three hundred and seventy-three; on the other, the fragile thing they all needed to look at when the night came.
And he, the strategist who advocated letting the camp swallow its own consequences, stood at the center of that scale.
As he turned away, the wind carried a faint, familiar scent—the metallic tang of frost and old blood. It came from the direction of the east wall, where a lone figure stood guard against the dawn.
Chu Hongying had stood on the east wall the entire night.
The Wind-Hunting Spear stood planted in the snow beside her, its tassel heavy with frost. She watched the camp steep from darkness into pale grey. Watched the cooking smoke thin from three columns to two. Watched the changing sentries exchange only silent nods—each observation a weight added to the scales of her silence.
Everything still functioned, even more "orderly" than before. But this order carried a weight that tasted of rust, pressing down until the Blood Lock patterns on her arm went numb—not a burning pain, but a dull sensation of gradually freezing.
Gu Changfeng approached, his tread crunching on snow, face grim. "General," his voice was hoarse, "if this 'self-determination' goes on, people won't starve to death, but they'll be worn hollow."
Chu Hongying did not turn. "You want to change the rules?"
"This subordinate doesn't know!" Gu Changfeng suddenly roared, his fist striking the wall brick, snow powder shaking loose. "This subordinate only knows—Old Wang the Fifth is burning up and raving, Li Shuan was shivering crouched by the wall at midnight, and those two pups on west wall kicked each other's legs black and blue over who should stand an extra half-watch, all in silence!"
He drew a ragged breath, his voice suddenly collapsing: "They don't fight anymore, General. They don't even dare to fight."
Chu Hongying's fingers dug into the old scars on her spear shaft. She remembered her father's words: Make the troops learn to march forward even in your silence.
But her father never said: if the path "forward" forces them to yield to each other their last breath of air, their last bit of warmth, their last shred of courage to speak—is this silence itself not another kind of blade?
She looked toward the base of the west wall. The figures of Shen Yuzhu and Lu Wanning stood before the crevice like two silent steles. Then she saw Shen Yuzhu suddenly press a hand to his chest, his spine trembling almost imperceptibly—it was the suppressed reaction of his cold poison flaring, but now it looked as if invisible thorns had coiled around his throat.
"General," Gu Changfeng asked quietly, "are we... wrong?"
Chu Hongying gave no answer.
She only pulled the Wind-Hunting Spear from the snow and turned to descend the wall. The spear tip dragged a deep furrow in the snow, like a hesitant, heavy gash.
When Shen Yuzhu returned to his tent, the Mirror Patterns in his eyes had already cast the previous night's "uncorrected errors" onto a screen of shifting azure light.
Chen Ping's snow blindness, Zhang San's concealed fever, Old Wang Tou's harsh food distribution rule... Beside each record floated its consequences: gaps in watch, extra medicine consumed, the weakened strength of the lightly wounded. He had insisted on preserving these errors, letting the camp taste the consequences themselves, so they might learn to correct.
But now, when he tried to simulate the alternate path of "what if I had intervened and corrected immediately," the scenes reflected by the Mirror Patterns made cold sweat bead on his palm—
If he had pointed out Chen Ping's miscalculation of the wind angle, snow blindness could have been avoided, but the young soldier would thereafter fear making his own judgments, delaying three subsequent watch adjustments by nearly two marks.
If he had forced Zhang San to accept treatment, the fever could have been suppressed, but three other soldiers in the same tent, feeling "watched," would have hidden their own minor injuries, accumulating into a cluster of illness three days later.
If he had abolished Old Wang Tou's distribution rule, the wounded might have been better fed, but the stronger men would have resented the "privilege," eventually leading to three hidden conflicts, requiring Chu Hongying to crush them with her authority.
Every kind of "correctness" bred new, more hidden fractures elsewhere.
And what he had believed was "letting it heal itself," on this ever-thinning ice of dwindling supplies, was gradually revealing its cruel nature: perhaps this was not healing, but teaching this body to learn how to slowly curl in upon itself as it bled out, until it became a desiccated husk that still breathed.
The Mirror Patterns' light flickered faintly, revealing a line of minute, dark-gold script—a mark etched into the Mirror Seal's foundation by the Night Crow Division, now surfacing on its own:
[Your "letting them choose for themselves" aligns with the intent of the "Alpha-Seven" Protocol by over sixty percent.]
Sixty percent. A subtle, humiliating, yet undeniable figure.
Shen Yuzhu suddenly clenched the token, its edge cutting his palm, beads of blood seeping into the wood grain. The pain sharp as an alarm bell exploded into a moment of terrible clarity within his overloaded senses—
He saw the truth:
What the Night Crow Division wanted was never the camp's collapse.
What they wanted was for the camp to spontaneously grow, under increasing pressure, a set of "elegant, self-devouring order."
And he, with his deductions, was watering the roots of that order with rationale.
Outside the tent came hurried footsteps, his guard's voice strained: "Overseer! Li Shuan and Zhao Shi are arguing at the west wall base—it's about that grass! Captain Gu is already there!"
Shen Yuzhu swept the tent flap aside and stepped out. The cold wind carried shreds of distant words stabbing into his hearing:
"...You can bear to watch Old Wang the Fifth rot?!"
"That's everyone's grass! Touch it, it's like touching our heart's breath..."
"Can heart's breath bring down a fever?! Can it?!"
The sound of their breathing wove together, a heavy net in the cold air, and at its center—the grass trembled.
Several dozen people had gathered in a silent half-circle at the base of the west wall. Li Shuan's face was wet with tears, his trembling finger pointed at the crevice; Zhao Shi crouched on the ground, hands desperately shielding the grass's trampled "protective ring," his back arched as if about to break.
Gu Changfeng had Li Shuan by the collar, fist raised but not falling, eyes bloodshot. Lu Wanning stood at the edge of the crowd, her heterochromatic eyes coldly mirroring this "symptomatic episode." Chu Hongying approached quickly from the other side, the Blood Lock patterns beneath her sleeve a dark crimson, her gaze meeting Shen Yuzhu's for an instant—within it was a kind of near-painful interrogation.
"Li Shuan!" Gu Changfeng rasped. "Say that again?! You want to touch this grass?!"
"Am I wrong?!" Li Shuan yelled back, then seemed to choke on his own voice. A beat of silence, filled only by the wind, before he continued, raw-voiced: "Old Wang the Fifth's left shoulder is rotten to the bone! Last night he grabbed my hand and said: 'Shuanzi, give me a clean end...' Did you hear that?! This grass can make a broth to ease pain! It can make him suffer less! All for a blade of grass—"
"This isn't grass!" Zhao Shi jerked his head up, voice tearing like cloth. "This is... this is what we saw that morning after the snow stopped—the first proof that something could still live here! Physician Lu said it found warmth in the stone crack, found light! It lived the way we want to live! You boil it, and in the future... in the future when we stand watch at night, what will be left in our hearts to look at?!"
He ripped open his own robe, exposing a not-yet-healed arrow wound on his chest—taken days before shielding a comrade on patrol. The edges of the wound were an ominous dark red.
"I hurt too. I wake up—hurting every night. But when I look at this grass, I think: if it can live, maybe I... can last one more day too..."
Several among the watching soldiers turned their faces away. Shen Yuzhu's overloaded senses could "touch" the sobs caught in their throats, could "smell" the churning hunger, guilt, despair in the air, and the grass's weak, stubborn vitality.
He walked into the center of the crowd.
All eyes fell upon him. Those gazes held expectation, resentment, bewilderment, and the last, wavering thread of trust.
"Li Shuan," Shen Yuzhu began, his voice not loud but cruelly clear in the surrounding stillness, "last night you had three bouts of stomach pain, the longest lasting half a mark. If this grass is taken for medicine, it can brew roughly three bowls of calming broth. It could ease Old Wang the Fifth's delirious fever, but it will not cure the festering arrow wound."
He turned to Zhao Shi. "The old chill in your right leg has entered the bone. The pain peaks every midnight, and you endure it by silently repeating 'something is still alive.' This grass has been your spiritual anchor these past seven days."
Finally, his gaze swept over every face present. "And all of you—everyone who has secretly come here to add ash, scatter crumbs, or pray in silence—each has placed a part of your 'hope' upon it. If it is plucked, what shatters is not a blade of grass. It is the proof each of you holds in your heart that 'perhaps things can still get better.'"
Silence spread like tundra, broken only by the wind whipping grit of snow against the stone wall.
Shen Yuzhu raised his hand. The self-inflicted cut on his palm still seeped blood. He smeared the blood onto the old token; the bronze drank the color, glowing with a somber light.
"I will not judge," he said, his voice revealing a kind of weary lucidity. "I will only reflect."
The azure light in his eyes intensified, spreading like tidewater, projecting onto the snow a shimmering map of flowing spiritual veins—the currents of breath, the distribution of wounds, the dwindling supplies, the turbulent emotions of everyone in the camp, all woven into a trembling web. At the web's center, the spiritual gleam of the Serenity Grass was a faint, stubborn spark, connected to dozens of thin yet tenacious threads of "hope."
"If the grass is taken," Shen Yuzhu's fingertip lightly touched the air, ripples spreading across the map, "Old Wang the Fifth gains three bowls of relief, but thirty-seven people will lose their spiritual anchor. The weight of their despair will grow, heavy enough to break a few more who are already hanging on."
"If it is not taken, Old Wang the Fifth enters delirium tonight, his suffering deepens, but the 'symbol of hope' remains. The group's will to endure holds for now—until the next 'Old Wang the Fifth' appears."
He lifted his eyes, his gaze sweeping over each frozen face:
"This is not about right or wrong. We are past that. Now it is a barter in the dark—and the only currency left to us is the weight of our pain against the lightness of our hope."
"Now, choose."
The wind whipped up snowflakes, stinging their faces. No one moved. Li Shuan's tears froze on his cheeks. Zhao Shi's fingernails dug into the frozen earth guarding the grass roots. Chu Hongying's spear tip was buried deep in the snow, the Blood Lock patterns spreading across her neck like cracked porcelain. Lu Wanning's brush tip paused on paper, ink blooming into a small, silent stain of grey.
And high above, where they could not see—
The Night Crow Division's mirror array silently recorded this scene of "deadlock at the precipice," dark-gold script flowing like cold water over stone: *[Virtue-Sacrifice Threshold Test: In Progress. Collective Guilt Index: 61. Sustained.]*
Before the ice mirror in Blackstone Valley, Helian Sha's fingertip lightly traced the grass's reflection, a sliver of cruel fascination passing through his ice-blue pupils. "Eat hope, or eat each other? Or perhaps..."
He chuckled softly, his breath frosting the mirror's surface:
"Let the one who measures all things by pain—
be the first to tear this question open?"
Far away, atop the Star-Gazing Terrace in the depths of the Imperial City, the young Emperor stood with hands clasped behind his back, a chart of spiritual veins flowing like a river of stars behind him. Gazing toward the dim light-spot representing the "tundra sample" in the northern frontier, he whispered to himself:
"A measurement begins."
"Let us see how long a stubborn patch of green endures... before it learns to bend to the wind."
Dusk approached, twilight heavy as iron, pressing down upon the snowy plain.
The Serenity Grass in the stone crevice shivered, its pale blue petals clutching the rock fissure, clinging to the last unbroken thread of life.
And the three hundred and seventy-three breaths, in the deepening night, grew heavy and slow—
as if counting together the remaining inches before an unseen precipice reached its end.