The third mark of the Hour of the Tiger. The snow had ceased, but the cold drilled deeper.
In the iron-grey dawn light outside the camp gate, over a dozen figures shivered upon the snow. The elder at their head clutched a coarse sheet of paper in a tight grip, its edges frayed from handling, upon which was clumsily drawn a clay bowl—the very same paper that had been left secretly with the firewood bundle at the camp gate three days before.
The children either curled emptily-eyed in adults' arms or scratched at their own arms with low whimpers, faint red marks visible on their skin. The adults' faces were etched with a clay-fired anxiety, the white mist from their cracked lips trembling with each rapid, shallow breath.
The elder lifted his head, gazing into the silent camp beyond the gate. His Adam's apple bobbed three times before a sound was forced out:
"Honored soldiers… we heard… your place can cure 'the sickness with no name'…"
The voice was parched, like a dry branch snapping in a winter wind.
When Chu Hongying stepped from the command tent, she did not wear her black cloak of authority, only ordinary padded robes. The robe's hem swept the snow, leaving a shallow trail. She halted three paces inside the gate, her gaze slowly sweeping over each face outside—the children clutching clay bowl models, the kiln ash smudged on a woman's hem, the deep brown spots on the elder's frost-cracked hand.
Her gaze finally settled on that paper with the drawn bowl.
Three breaths of silence.
Then she spoke, her voice calm as a deep pool, without a single ripple of promise:
"This place has no doctors, no medicine. Only ordinary days."
The elder's pupils contracted. A faint stir passed through the villagers behind him. A young mother clutching a crying infant tighter flashed a look of despair.
Chu Hongying continued, each word carved into the snow:
"If willing, you may stay three days."
She paused, her gaze passing through the crowd, looking toward the direction of Pottery Kiln Hamlet, where a haze of cooking smoke blurred the distance:
"But remember—we do not cure illness. We only live. If you get better, that is your own fortune. If you do not, do not blame."
The elder turned back, exchanging glances with the villagers. Those eyes held confusion, fear, and the gambler's desperation of those pushed to the absolute brink. Behind them were the children's increasingly vacant eyes. Before them, this camp, silent enough to make the heart clench.
"…Thank you, honored soldiers, for taking us in." The elder lowered his head, took the hand of a boy with empty eyes beside him, and was the first to step across the gate threshold.
The rest followed. Their steps were hesitant, like wading into unknown waters.
Shen Yuzhu stood at his observation point, Mirror-Sigil fully engaged.
His soul-sight perceived: seventeen foreign soul-breaths seeping into the camp's weave—each thrumming with hysteric disturbance, like zither strings plucked to frenzy by a hand unseen. The camp's original three hundred-odd soul-threads self-attuned, not rejecting, not embracing, but forming a permeable boundary: allowing ingress, yet refusing fusion, cradling a fragile autonomy.
Deep within the Sigil, verdigris runes self-inscribed a record:
[Seventeen foreign soul-breaths incoming｜Containing high-frequency disturbance waves, like madly plucked strings]
[Camp soul-web self-adjusting: Admits without merging, maintains permeable boundaries]
[Sigil self-inscription: Not a plea for aid, but a test of our field of being]
[Pivot self-indication: Observe as a mirror. Do not disturb the flow-rhythm.]
Shen Yuzhu closed his eyes, feeling with his right side. Those seventeen disturbed soul-breaths were like seventeen stones dropped into still water, raising concentric ripples in the camp's soul-web. Where the ripples touched, the soul-breaths of the camp soldiers underwent subtle frequency adjustments—not being disturbed, but rather unconsciously attempting to harmonize with this new, dissonant pitch.
He suddenly remembered the Bronze Door's whisper: "The door does not refuse people. It only refuses lies."
What these people brought might be precisely some unspoken truth.
Day One: Silence as a Blanket
The villagers were settled in three empty tents on the west side. Chu Hongying said only one sentence: "Everywhere in the camp, you may go. Just look. Do not ask."
At first, the villagers huddled inside. Children's cries were stifled within the felt wrappings. Until afternoon, a girl of about six broke free from her mother's hand, tottered to the tent flap, and stared outside.
By the well, Zhao Tieshan was drawing water. The pulley creaked, the bucket breaking the surface with a splash of shattered light. The girl stared, forgetting to cry.
Zhao Tieshan noticed the gaze, glanced over. He said nothing, kept drawing water, but slowed his motions—the rhythm of turning the pulley changed from the urgent, staccato "creak-creak" to a deeper, longer "crea—eak—crea—eak—".
The girl unconsciously began to mirror his breath. When Zhao Tieshan inhaled deeply to lift the bucket, her small chest swelled. When he exhaled slowly, a fine thread of white mist escaped her own lips.
One, two… gradually, other children in the tent drifted to the flap. They didn't speak, just watched, their breath gradually finding a shared rhythm—not through effort, but through a silent, natural attunement.
The boy who had cried the hardest suddenly stretched out a frost-reddened little hand, pointing at the frost flowers crystallized on the well rope, shimmering with rainbow colors in the thin afternoon sun.
He walked over, stood on tiptoe, lightly touched one with his fingertip.
The frost melted.
A drop of icy water slid down his finger. He stared at that drop for a long, long time, so long he didn't hear his mother calling from behind.
Shen Yuzhu's soul-sight reflected:
[Synchronization phenomenon begins｜Foreign soul disturbance wave frequency drops approx. one-tenth]
[Pivotal mechanism: Non-verbal mimicry｜Breath rhythm alignment｜Visual anchoring]
[Sigil self-note: This process involves no command intervention, purely the field's natural attunement.]
Day Two: Traces as Mycelium
The villagers began to leave their tents.
They saw the flat stone beneath the west wall, and upon it the unclaimed flatbread, the packet of salt-leaves, the goose-egg stone. A mother stared for a long time, then took from her bundle a hardtack she had baked herself—it was cold and hard, edges cracked and dry. She carefully placed it at the edge of the stone pile, beside those other items, but not touching them.
Then she untied a faded colored thread from her headscarf. The thread had originally held a few copper coins, meant to ward off fright for her child. She gently tied the thread to a piece of dry firewood nearby, making a loose knot.
Other villagers, seeing this, also began to leave small personal objects: a section of polished ox bone, a piece of birch bark with wormhole traces, a few seeds of an unknown grass. No one spoke. No one explained. This was not exchange, nor offering. It was more like saying: We are also here. This is the trace of our having been.
In the afternoon, that mother saw Bo Zhong.
He sat on a wooden stump outside the infirmary tent, his right hand hidden in his coat, but the slight tremor in his shoulder betrayed his pain. The mother crouched not far away, watched him quietly for a moment, then untied her own cotton shawl—one of the dowry items she'd brought from her parents' home, its edges worn to pale warp threads.
She spread the shawl on the snow beside Bo Zhong, patted the smoothed surface, looked up at him, her eyes calm:
"Sit."
Not pity. Not charity. A simple invitation of action.
Bo Zhong froze. He looked at the spread cloth, at the hand-woven diamond patterns on its surface, at the woman's calmly waiting eyes. After a long moment, he slowly shifted his body and sat upon the shawl.
The cloth transmitted a faint residual warmth, reaching his skin through the cold garments. Not a cure. A brief support—like a flat stone that happens to emerge mid-river, letting you catch your breath for a moment before continuing on.
Bo Zhong let out an extremely soft exhale. White mist scattered in the cold air. He did not say thank you. The woman did not wait for thanks. She stood, brushed the snow from her knees, turned, and left.
Shen Yuzhu's Sigil recorded traces:
[Foreign soul disturbance wave frequency drops another two-tenths]
[New interaction mode: Object placement (non-verbal)｜Space sharing (non-intrusive)]
[Camp soul-web shows subtle expansion: Accepting foreign traces as network nodes]
[Sigil self-interrogation: Healing correlates with state: 'forgetting the need to be healed.' (Causality? Correlation? Pending.)]
Day Three, Dusk: Breath Becomes Cloud
The villagers had drifted into the camp's daily cadence as leaves settle upon a stream's surface. No instruction was given, yet they found themselves participating—not by imitation, but by a gradual, breath-deep absorption of the place's unwritten tempo.
Strangest of all was the boy who had suffered the worst hysteria.
He no longer cried or scratched his arms. Most of the time, he just followed his mother quietly, but his eyes were always looking toward the east side of the camp—the direction of East Three Sentry, that region of thick darkness.
At dusk, the camp soldiers as usual walked to the clearing before the orders board and stood quietly. The villagers, without realizing it, followed them over, dispersing among the soldiers. No one organized it. No one spoke.
The white mist of over three hundred breaths rose and intertwined in the cold air, forming a low, shimmering cloud. Snow began to fall again, fine snow-dust settling on shoulders, eyelashes, the exhaled breath-mist. No one brushed it away.
The boy stood beside his mother, his eyes still fixed on East Three Sentry. His fingers unconsciously traced circles in the snow—not random scribbles, but circles. One after another, each trying its best to meet end to end, as if silently mending some invisible gap.
His mother looked down, and tears suddenly welled up, soundlessly tracing her cheeks. She did not wipe them, letting the tears fall, punching tiny, shallow pits into the snow.
Shen Yuzhu's Mirror-Sigil trembled at this moment.
His soul-sight saw: the seventeen foreign soul disturbance waves had subsided to background levels, nearly in sync with the camp's soul-web. More crucially, he "saw" an extremely fine, nearly imperceptible connecting thread extending from the boy's soul-breath line, drifting toward the dark region of East Three Sentry.
The dark region pulsed slightly, as if in response.
The Sigil interface surfaced a new record:
[Empathy field spreading｜Symptom alleviation rate: approx. seventy-five percent]
[Pivotal mechanism: Soul-breath resonance｜Breath rhythm alignment｜Pressure-free presence｜Field co-tremor]
[Sigil self-inscribes new tag: Empathy Field—an unnamed existence's healing resonance generated through pure presence.]
[Sigil note: This alleviation does not create a 'giver-receiver' covenant, only a temporary 'shared-frequency co-breathing' connection. No thread of spiritual debt spun.]
No thread of spiritual debt spun.
Shen Yuzhu stared at this line, suddenly feeling a warm, stinging pain in the thin frost on his left arm. The Bronze Door's whisper rose like an echo from a deep well, this time exceptionally fragmented:
"The bowl… holds water… the water does not belong to the bowl…"
"The bowl breaks… the water flows…"
"One who contains… is also contained…"
He needed to piece together the meaning himself. Was the bowl the camp? The water the villagers? Or the opposite? What did breaking and flowing signify?
Before he could ponder further, another perception flooded in—within the soul-web of his right side, those threads momentarily connected to the villagers transmitted a slight, viscous pull. Not pain. A kind of… weight transfer.
The Hundred-Patch Banner: Gratitude Without Image, Debt Without Name
Dusk of the third day, the villagers prepared to leave.
On the central clearing of the camp, the villagers sat in a circle. From their personal bundles they took out various cloth scraps—hem of a garment, headscarf, wrapping cloth, even a sock patch. Slate-blue, brick-red, earth-yellow, moon-white… coarse materials, mottled colors like assembled memory.
No discussion. No division of labor. The women naturally took out needles and thread, the elders roughly sorted the cloth by size, the children passed them along. Sewing began.
The stitches were rough, but sewn with unusual tightness. A piece of slate-blue homespun abutted brick-red hemp, moon-white cotton pressed against earth-yellow wool edge. No pattern, no text, not even a clear shape—just pieces of cloth sewn together, forming an irregular, multi-colored banner about three feet square.
Halfway through sewing, the old woman—wife of the elder who had first spoken—suddenly drew a sharp breath. The needle tip had pierced her index finger. A bead of blood seeped out, dripping onto the just-sewn slate-blue cloth, blooming a small dot of dark red.
She froze for a moment. She did not wipe it, did not bandage it. She only watched as the bloodstain slowly seeped into the cloth weave, then continued sewing, as if that color belonged there from the start.
When the last stitch was tied off, dusk had deepened.
The old woman stood, holding the banner, and walked toward Chu Hongying, who had been silently observing from the side. Her arms trembled slightly, the banner hanging heavy, steeped in the weight of three days' breath, snow-dust, and silence.
"General," the old woman's voice was hoarse, "do not know what to thank, nor whom…"
She offered out the banner. That dot of dark red on the cloth surface in the twilight resembled a sleeping seed:
"Consider it… the shape of our having been here."
Chu Hongying accepted the banner. It was heavier in her hand than expected. She said nothing, only nodded, then walked to the orders board and hung the banner beside the blank wooden plank. Hemp rope threaded through a cloth loop left at the banner's corner, tied in a simple knot.
The Hundred-Patch Banner lifted gently in the evening wind. The friction sounds of different cloths were as fine as whispers, like many voices softly overlapping, yet never forming a sentence.
The villagers quietly gathered their belongings. The children's eyes were clear again, quietly holding adults' hands. As they stepped out the camp gate, none looked back.
But Shen Yuzhu saw it—those seventeen soul-breaths, upon leaving the camp boundary, did not fully sever. Each left behind an extremely fine thread, still connected to the camp's soul-web, like leaves fallen from a branch still remembering the tree's pulse.
He saw something even more subtle: that boy who had suffered the worst hysteria, the moment he crossed the gate threshold, glanced back once toward the dark region of East Three Sentry. Deep within his pupils, something flashed—not light, but an instant of deeper black, of the same quality as that darkness.
Then they vanished into the snow-haze.
Nightcrow Division: The Taxonomy of the Absurd
That same night, the Observation Pivot chamber.
The young Observation Officer stared at the spirit-trace flow on the water-mirror, brow furrowed. The mirror reflected the residual soul-traces after the villagers' departure, and the camp soul-web's subtle expansion.
"No treatment acts, no medicinal transfer, no ritual enactment—" he murmured, fingers swiftly brushing over the appraisal-disk, "How can physiological indicators improve by seventy-five percent? This violates Medical Canon foundational law three: 'No intervention, no change'…"
The Pivot attempted taxonomic resolution, generating a cascade of contradictory tags—each vying for primacy, each failing to capture:
[Possible classification: Collective Soul-Guide｜Spirit-Fidelity 12%]
[Possible classification: Environmental Soul-Nurturing｜Spirit-Fidelity 8%]
[Possible classification: Coincidental Mass Alleviation｜Spirit-Fidelity 5%]
[Pivot self-debate: Spirit-Fidelity of all existing classification frameworks below 15%.]
The young officer tried manually inputting "Psychogenic Field Effect." The Pivot replied: [This lexicon entry undefined. Create new?]
He hesitated. Creating a new entry meant acknowledging an unknown phenomenon. That required reporting up the chain.
At that moment, the interface condensed into a final archival tag on its own:
[Archive Number: Yi-Jiu-Nameless-One]
[Designation: Non-Therapeutic Healing Power (Pending Resolution)]
[Pivot Note: This phenomenon currently has no matching rational framework. Recommendation: Shelve for observation. Shelving period: Indefinite.]
The senior Observation Officer passed behind him, glanced at the interface. He said nothing, only walked back to his own desk, pulled open a drawer, and took out that paper ledger from the very bottom.
The brush tip dipped in ink, ink made of pine-soot mixed with borneol, its scent clear and bitter. He wrote:
"Some healing occurs where language fails. They give no medicine, only 'containment.'"
He paused, pen held still. He stared at this sentence, suddenly realizing—the word "containment" itself was not standard Nightcrow Division terminology. It was too soft, too vague, too much like… a word the Northern Camp would use.
He picked up the brush, drew a horizontal line through these words. The ink bled, but the characters remained legible.
Then, in the margin, he added a smaller line, script hurried, as if afraid to be seen by himself:
"When sickness cannot be named, healing cannot be classified. This is… a victory of syntax."
Finished, he stared at the five characters "victory of syntax," fingers unconsciously rubbing the page edge. This thought gave him a sense of danger—not danger to the Empire, but danger to his own cognitive framework.
He closed the ledger, locked it back in the drawer. The sound of the lock tongue clicking shut was as light as an admission.
Helian Sha: The Observer's Unconscious Resonance
That same night, a thousand li away, before the ice-mirror.
Helian Sha's figure stood solitary as a dead tree on a cliff. The ice-mirror reflected not a real scene, but the most abstract "presence-momentum diagram" of the Northern Camp, refracted through multiple spirit-pivots. In the diagram, the gray light-point network representing the camp now extended seventeen extremely fine, pale-gold threads drifting toward the direction of Pottery Kiln Hamlet.
Those threads were still there. Unbroken.
Helian Sha contemplated those lingering threads. After a span measurable only by the frost's growth upon the mirror's edge, he breathed:
"This… is not 'healing.'"
Frost formed on the ice-mirror surface, words surfacing in response: "What then?"
"It is infection." Helian Sha said, fingers beneath his black robe lightly touching the mirror surface, cold piercing to the bone. "A benign infection. Concerning how to exist."
Words flowed on the mirror: "Explain."
"The Northern Camp's syntax—the rhythm of breath, the tacit understanding of hesitation, nameless aid, containment without possession—these formless things, through pure presence, permeate the outsiders." A complex light flickered in Helian Sha's eyes. "Not deliberately taught, but breath naturally seeping in. Like walking into a pine forest, one's clothes naturally carry the scent of pine."
The ice-mirror was silent a moment, then new words surfaced:
"Hypothesis of grammatical diffusion: When a mode of existence is sufficiently self-consistent, it disperses like a scent, adjusting the breathing rhythm of those who inhale it. Agree?"
Helian Sha slowly nodded. At the edge of the ice-mirror, he scratched a new hypothesis with a fingernail, the characters trembling slightly from cold and a certain agitation:
"Further hypothesis: This is not a frontier anomaly, but the natural propagation of a mode of existence. All the Empire's observation and classification systems are built upon the premise that 'action must have motive, motive must be classifiable.' But if there is an existence whose motive is existence itself, whose action is breath…"
He halted, searching for the verbal pivot.
The ice-mirror completed it for him: "Then the system fails."
"Yes." Helian Sha took a step back, as if startled by the weight of his own deduction. "What the Empire fears has never been rebels, but a kind of… tender stubbornness that cannot be defeated by weapons."
As he spoke the words "tender stubbornness," he himself paused. This was not his usual analytical language. It was too much like… some poetic description, too much like vocabulary the Northern Camp would accept.
The ice-mirror reflected the slight fluctuations of his soul-breath at this moment—the frequency of those fluctuations had, for an instant, synchronized with the fundamental rhythm of the Northern Camp's soul-web in the diagram.
Helian Sha stared at his own blurred reflection in the mirror for a long time, saying nothing.
On the mirror surface, a final line of words slowly surfaced, so small it was almost invisible:
"Observer, have you too, unconsciously… inhaled their breath?"
He did not answer. Only turned and left. As his black robe brushed the ice surface, his finger inadvertently scratched the ice edge—a tiny crack, not his habitual precise motion.
After the Healing: The Medicine's Weight Begins to Settle
The morning after the villagers left, when the camp awoke, its rhythm had changed.
No bugle, yet everyone still rose at a similar time, walked toward the well, lit cooking fires—not because of orders, but because they "didn't know how else to begin a day."
Their movements acquired a subtle stiffness—a hesitation born not of reluctance, but of a new, careful calculus. Something had shifted. A weight, unnamed, began to sink into the camp's bones now that the healing was done.
Bo Zhong's Thread: The Exemplar Becomes a Cage
Chen hour (7-9 am), a young support soldier—one of the new recruits who had mimicked breath by the well three days prior—carefully approached outside the infirmary tent where Bo Zhong was. The support soldier's hands clenched and unclenched at his sides, Adam's apple bobbing.
"Uncle Zhong…" his voice was thin as a mosquito's hum, "that… the new recruits' camp is practicing bandaging today. The instructor said… if you have time, could you go take a look? No need to do anything, just… watch."
Bo Zhong was sitting on his bedding, right hand hidden and trembling. Old injuries ran most rampant in the morning chill, like red-hot wires traveling along the marrow. He lifted his head, looked at the support soldier.
That child's eyes held something familiar yet strange to him—expectation. Not expectation of skill, but expectation of a certain way of being. As if Bo Zhong was not just an old soldier who could bandage, but a living proof: proof that a person could maintain dignity in pain, could remain whole even when broken.
That expectation was like a mirror, reflecting a "role" Bo Zhong himself had never been aware of. When had he become an exemplar? A benchmark? A reference point others needed to look up to, to confirm "I too might manage"?
Silence spread inside the tent. The support soldier grew increasingly uneasy, his toes unconsciously grinding grass scraps on the ground.
Finally, Bo Zhong spoke. His voice was calm, but each word was like a stone dug from frozen earth, carrying a heavy chill:
"Today, I cannot."
The support soldier was stunned. He opened his mouth, then his face rapidly flooded with terror—not the anger of rejection, but a deeper unease, as if he had offended some intangible boundary.
"My apologies! My apologies!" The support soldier bowed repeatedly, voice trembling, "I shouldn't have asked! I'll leave now—"
He turned and almost ran away, like fleeing a disaster he had unintentionally caused.
Bo Zhong remained where he was, his right hand trembling even more violently inside his coat. But that tremor now had a new source—not physical pain, but a kind of spiritual-chokehold-level suffocation. He suddenly understood:
His "resilience" no longer belonged to him alone. It had become common property, an intangible pressure exerted upon all who gazed at him. Those people needed him to remain resilient, to confirm their own fragility still held hope.
"It's not that I don't want to help…" Bo Zhong whispered to the empty tent, voice hoarse, "I'm afraid that once I help, from then on, all 'pain' must live as an exemplar."
The wind outside the tent moaned, as if in reply.
Chen He's Thread: The Self-Scrutiny of Goodwill
At the same time, Chen He passed by the west wall. The pile of items on the stone had increased—the hardtack, colored thread, ox bone, birch bark left by the villagers, mingling with the camp's original flatbread, salt-leaf packet, goose-egg stone, forming a silent abundance.
He saw a soldier squatting before the stone pile, staring at those items in a daze. The soldier's back was tense, shoulders slightly slumped, a posture Chen He knew well—something on his mind, not knowing how to speak of it.
Chen He instinctively wanted to walk over. His foot moved, then stopped.
An internal scrutiny mechanism activated automatically:
If I ask "what's wrong," will he feel I'm offering condescending concern?
If he answers, must I then "do something" to respond to this trust?
If I can do nothing, will he be even more disheartened?
Even—is this very thought of "wanting to care" itself a kind of arrogance? As if I know better than he what he needs.
Questions tangled like vines. Chen He stood three zhang away, unable to advance or retreat.
In the end, he chose to turn and leave. His steps were placed very lightly, as if fleeing a trial he himself had initiated. Only after walking away did he allow that sentence to surface in his mind:
"It's not that I don't want to help. I just don't know if I can still help… 'without explanation.'"
Shen Yuzhu's Mirror-Sigil captured this scene:
[Observed: Solo soul 'Chen He' — Initiates 'goodwill pre-screening.']
[Behavior: Avoids potential mutual-aid node.]
[Emotional substrate: Not indifference, but fear—fear that goodwill itself becomes new debt.]
[Pivot note: This is a byproduct of ethical evolution. When mutual aid is no longer commanded, its weight transfers to the chooser themself.]
Shen Yuzhu's Thread: The World is Being Re-annotated
Wei hour (1-3 pm), at the observation point, Shen Yuzhu sat alone.
The Mirror-Sigil interface was abnormally calm. No alarms, no decrees. Only a single line of system-autogenerated prompt displayed in ink-green:
[Observed: Ethical pivot… deviation from baseline. Attempting to model… feedback cycle. (Incomplete)]
Below unfolded a stream of fine data, like silent bookkeeping:
*Relationship distance re-calibration: +3 groups loosened (due to exemplar pressure), -2 groups tightened (due to empathy sync)*
Mutual aid frequency: Surface level down 17% (due to self-scrutiny), deep interaction up 9% (due to accumulated trust)
Anticipated pressure index: Overall up 22% (the weight of free choice)
*Soul-web resilience estimate: +5% (verified through external testing)*
[Emergent vulnerability: Goodness… consuming itself? (Metaphor 'auto-cannibalism' logged.) Process initiated when benevolence detaches from command structure.]
Shen Yuzhu closed his eyes, no longer looking at the data. He directly used his soul-sense to "touch" the camp network.
What he "saw" was no longer pain or joy, but relationships being silently rearranged:
Between whom and whom an intangible wall had risen, because one had become the other's "exemplar," the weight of that gaze making equal dialogue difficult.
Who had begun deliberately avoiding whose eyes, afraid eye contact would trigger unnecessary expectation or debt.
Who in silence bore an unspoken "exemplar tax"—having to consistently display a certain state, to reciprocate others' trust.
This was not chaos. It was a finer, more fragile new equilibrium.
Understanding washed over him like ice water:
"This is not an event. It is a state transition." Shen Yuzhu murmured to himself. "Like ice melting into water, never returning to solid form—we can never return to the past of 'simple mutual aid.' From now on, every time we reach out, it will first pass through a gate of self-scrutiny: Will this help become a debt for the other? Will it distort our relationship?"
As he spoke, his right hand unconsciously clenched and unclenched, as if testing some intangible resistance.
The thin frost on his left arm transmitted a warm sting. The Bronze Door's whisper rose, this time even more fragmented:
"Bridge… do you feel it now…"
"The true weight… was never the pull of two shores…"
"But each grain of dust… beginning to realize…"
"Itself is participating in the river's flow…"
"You healed others… and healed a certain 'naivety' within yourselves…"
"The cost is… henceforth you must choose goodness in lucidity…"
Shen Yuzhu drew a deep breath. The air was cold enough to sting the lungs.
"Worth it?" he asked, not knowing if he asked the Bronze Door or himself.
No answer. Only from deep within the camp came an extremely soft, unknown whose sigh.
He looked down at his own right hand. The knuckles were pale from the unconscious clenching. He suddenly felt it in his soul-web: threads connecting to the camp soldiers had grown "viscous"—not severed, but flowing slower, like honey. Each pulse now demanded more energy to travel. This sluggishness had a name. It was weight. It was debt. Nameless, ownerless, but true.
Chu Hongying's Thread: The General's Non-Command Intervention
Shen hour (3-5 pm), inside the command tent, charcoal fire dying out.
Chu Hongying stood before her desk, the camp roster and duty rotation chart spread before her. The sheepskin was dense with names. She held a charred wutong brush, yet hesitated to lower it.
Gu Changfeng stood to the side, silently observing. He saw the General's gaze linger for a long time on certain names—Bo Zhong, Chen He, Qian Wu, Zhao Tieshan, and several soldiers who had interacted most with the villagers these three days.
But she made no changes to the roster.
Instead, she set down the brush and walked out.
First she went to the storage room. Bo Zhong was there taking inventory of old account books—something she had "casually" said to him that morning: "Those old ledgers in the east corner of the storeroom, have time to look them over? No rush."
Bo Zhong looked up, seeing her, and froze.
"How goes it?" Chu Hongying asked, tone as ordinary as asking about the weather.
"…Just started." Bo Zhong's voice was somewhat parched.
"Hmm." Chu Hongying nodded, said no more, turned and left.
Next she went to the west wall. Chen He and Li Si'er were there tamping down a loose stone slab—also something she had "offhandedly" mentioned that morning.
The slab was heavy, the two struggling. Chu Hongying walked over, did not help, just stood watching from the side. When they finally got the slab steady, she spoke:
"Li Si'er, go to the cooking area and help Zhao Tieshan shell beans. Chen He, stay. Sweep this snow."
Her tone was flat, like the most ordinary task assignment.
Li Si'er acknowledged and left. Chen He picked up a broom and began sweeping snow. Chu Hongying stood to the side, watched quietly a moment, then said:
"Sweep clean. But no need to hurry."
Having spoken, she too left.
Gu Changfeng followed behind her, finally speaking in a low voice:
"General, this… counts as manipulation?"
Chu Hongying's steps did not pause, her voice calm:
"Not manipulation. Guidance."
She lifted her head, gaze passing through the camp, looking toward that land digesting three days' ripples:
"When virtue begins to choke virtue—when a person dares not cry out in pain because 'they must be resilient,' when a person dares not offer aid for fear 'it might become a debt'—a General's duty is not to preach more virtue."
She paused, looked toward the direction of East Three Sentry, where the dark region's contour grew visible in the twilight:
"It is to adjust the space for breath. To let the resilient temporarily set down the gaze, to let the scrutinizers meet their kind, to let everyone… still find one mouthful of air they can freely exhale."
She turned, looked at Gu Changfeng:
"Even if that mouthful carries hesitation and fear, it is alive."
Gu Changfeng drew a deep breath, nodded. He suddenly remembered many years ago, the first time he faced a fallen comrade on the battlefield, wanting to rush over but being roared at by an old soldier. That "not helping" back then was for survival. This "guidance" now was for… letting something even more fragile also survive in this world.
"This subordinate understands." he said.
Nightfall: Minute Choices Like Undercurrents
The camp sank into darkness again. But this time, within the darkness, countless tiny "choices" occurred soundlessly, like undercurrents moving beneath ice:
Someone still left half a flatbread by the west wall stone pile, but this time carefully covered it with birch bark, letting no one see who left it.
Someone passed Bo Zhong's tent, stood still at the entrance for three breaths, a small packet of Lu Wanning's special salve clutched in hand. In the end, he did not knock, only gently placed the salve by the threshold, lightly covering one corner with snow.
Someone drawing water at the well saw another soldier's hand frost-cracked, blood seeping. He hesitated twice, ultimately said nothing, only after drawing water took off his own gloves, hung them on the well-post, then turned and left. Did not say "for you to use," only "left here."
Chen He lay on his bedding, staring at a crack in the tent roof. Through the crack leaked a bit of starlight, cold, distant, yet real. He suddenly said an extremely soft sentence, as if testing its weight:
"Tomorrow… I'll try helping once without asking the reason."
Having spoken, he himself froze first. Other soldiers in the tent were asleep, none heard. But the sentence hung in the darkness, like a stone dropped into a deep well. He knew the echo would take a long time to return—but it would return.
Shen Yuzhu deactivated the Mirror-Sigil, watching this camp with naked eyes. His right side, three hundred-odd soul-threads trembled like a spiderweb, each silently adjusting frequency, seeking new equilibrium points. Some threads tightened, some loosened, some tried to extend then retract.
This was not chaos. It was growing pains—a new ethical musculature was forming beneath old skin, the process inevitably accompanied by pulling and discomfort.
The thin frost on his left arm transmitted the Bronze Door's final whisper, this time exceptionally clear:
"The account is recorded. But both creditor and debtor are yourselves."
"Keep breathing. Even if every breath begins to carry the taste of debt."
"This is freedom—not weightlessness, but claiming one's own weight."
Yin hour nearly ended (3-5 am), deepest darkness before dawn, Chu Hongying stepped from the command tent.
She made her final round of inspection, her black cloak nearly invisible in the night. Passing the orders board, she stopped.
The Hundred-Patch Banner lifted gently in the night wind, the friction sounds of different cloths as fine as dream-mutterings. At the banner's corner, that dot of dark red bloodstain, in the faint pre-dawn light, glowed with a deep hue, like a sleeping seed.
Chu Hongying looked quietly a moment, reached out and lightly touched that bloodstain. Her fingertip registered the coarse cloth texture, the slight protrusion long dried.
She did not try to wipe it away.
Turning to Gu Changfeng behind her, she said:
"Starting tomorrow, add one line to the daily brief."
"Add what?"
Chu Hongying looked toward the depths of the camp, where scattered lights glimmered, breathing sounds were long. Her voice in the cold night was clear and steady:
"'Today, containment occurred.'"
Gu Changfeng nodded, noted it down.
They continued the inspection. Passing East Three Sentry, Chu Hongying saw at the edge of the dark region a new stone had appeared—smooth, round, glistening with faint damp light on the snow. Left secretly by that boy who had recovered from hysteria.
Beside the stone, a dry leaf was gently laid atop, as if sheltering it from cold. Left by some passing sentry soldier, unknown who.
What made her pause longer were the traces in the snow beside the stone—two sets of footprints. One set large and deep, an adult's. One set small and shallow, a child's. The two sets walked side by side toward the edge of the dark region, stopped there, then only the large footprints turned and left, the small footprints vanished at the dark boundary.
Chu Hongying stared at those vanished small footprints for a long time, silent.
Finally, she walked to the flat stone on the west side of the camp. Before the villagers left that day, an old woman had silently left a coarse ceramic bowl here, the bowl filled with clean snow.
Now, the snow in the bowl had melted into water. On the water's surface floated an extremely small piece of birch bark of unknown origin, its surface with fine grain, and left upon it—a child's tooth-mark, as if someone had unconsciously bitten it.
In the midnight chill, the water's surface had begun to form a new layer of thin ice. Beneath the ice, the birch bark was frozen in the center, like a specimen in amber.
Chu Hongying crouched, fingers lightly touching the bowl's rim.
The pottery was ice-cold. She held this posture for three breaths, then stood, turned, and walked toward the command tent.
Her footsteps left deep prints in the snow, but freshly falling snow-dust had already begun to drift down, slowly covering those traces.
Day finally broke.
Shen Yuzhu stood at the observation point. Dawn light, inch by inch. Cooking smoke. The well pulley's creak. A soldier's hum, out of tune, giving the cold air a sudden warmth.
The Hundred-Patch Banner turned in the morning wind, its blank side to the camp. On the west-wall stone, among the offerings, a new clay bowl, pinched small by a child's hand, held a single fingerprint at its center. At the edge of East Three Sentry, the dry leaf covering the boy's stone trembled, once, in the wind.
[CHAPTER 143 END]