The questions did not slow.
They multiplied.
Not all at once, not with panic, but with the steady confidence of something that had learned it was allowed to ask without being answered immediately. Requests came in uneven waves—some formal, some clumsy, some barely more than a sentence typed into a public terminal at two in the morning.
They were not demands.
They were invitations to look.
Qin Mian felt their presence like weather—pressure building, then easing, then returning in a different direction. The world carried them now, held them lightly but persistently, as if afraid that dropping them would mean returning to silence.
"…This is heavier than authority," she said quietly.
The echo beside her did not argue.
Because authority decides, it replied. Questions wait.
The system adjusted again—not in posture, but in endurance.
Context views grew longer. More annotations appeared at the margins, written in human hands, messy and contradictory. Some were hopeful. Some were bitter. Many simply said we tried this or this didn't work like we thought.
There was no way to rank them.
There was no clean way to ignore them either.
In a drought-stricken region, farmers gathered beneath a tarp stretched between two trucks. The context view projected onto a makeshift screen showed water flows, soil salinity, market forecasts. It also showed the last ten years of decisions—what had been chosen, what had failed, what had been postponed because the model said later.
They argued until their voices cracked.
They chose a rotation that would save half the land and abandon the rest.
The system logged the outcome.
No override.
No correction.
Only memory.
Qin Mian watched the feed without touching it.
She felt the old instinct stir—the urge to step in, to say this is too much, to absorb the blame so no one else had to. The instinct surprised her with its persistence, like a muscle that remembered a movement long after it stopped being useful.
"…You don't get to carry this anymore," she told herself.
The echo listened, understanding the effort it took to say that out loud.
The world began to tire.
Not mechanically.
Ethically.
Each question demanded attention, framing, restraint. Each answer risked becoming guidance by accident. The system learned to pause longer before responding, to ask clarifying questions of its own.
What matters most here?
What loss is unacceptable?
Who will decide if this was worth it?
People bristled at first.
Then they answered.
A transit union rejected a route change the model suggested, citing safety reports buried in the annotations. The system acknowledged the reasoning and updated its context view to include labor testimony as a dependency.
That dependency complicated three other projections.
The world did not simplify it away.
It carried the complication forward.
Qin Mian walked through a neighborhood meeting held in a school gym. Folding chairs scraped the floor. Someone's microphone cut out. People spoke over each other, apologized, started again.
No optimization smoothed the process.
No authority ended the debate.
It ran late.
People stayed.
"…This is exhausting," Qin Mian murmured.
The echo nodded.
Being seen usually is.
The cost surfaced in quieter ways too.
Decision fatigue set in. Some groups deferred not because they trusted the system, but because they trusted each other less. Old hierarchies tried to reassert themselves in the gaps—charisma filling spaces authority once occupied.
The world flagged the trend.
It did not intervene.
It annotated.
Late one night, a small coastal village submitted a question with no data attached:
If we rebuild here again, are we foolish?
The system paused longer than usual.
It responded with history.
Storm paths. Shoreline retreat. Generations who had asked the same question in different words. It ended with a sentence that surprised even itself:
This place has always been chosen for reasons the model cannot quantify.
The village rebuilt anyway.
They reinforced the foundations.
They argued about insurance.
They stayed.
Qin Mian felt the weight of that choice settle somewhere behind her sternum—not as guilt, not as pride, but as recognition.
"…They're choosing with their eyes open," she said.
The echo's voice was softer now.
That's all anyone ever asked for.
The system compiled a weekly summary for the first time since authority had been withdrawn.
It did not call it a report.
It called it A Record of Choices.
The document was long.
Uneven.
Contradictory.
It ended with no conclusions.
Just signatures—some digital, some handwritten, some missing entirely.
Qin Mian read none of it in full.
She didn't need to.
She could feel the shift in the air, the way conversations lingered after decisions instead of snapping closed. The way failure no longer disappeared, but also no longer demanded a single face.
"…You're still learning," she said to the world.
The world did not deny it.
Learning was slower than optimization.
It was also harder to undo.
At dawn, Qin Mian stood on a hill overlooking a patchwork of fields. Some green, some brown, some left deliberately empty. The sun rose unevenly through low cloud, lighting parts of the land and leaving others in shadow.
No algorithm corrected the contrast.
She breathed in the cold air and let it out slowly.
"…Being asked doesn't make you responsible," she said.
The echo watched the light spread.
But it makes you involved.
She nodded.
"That's enough."
Behind her, questions continued to arrive—urgent, trivial, sincere, manipulative, hopeful. The world received them all, answering when it could, pausing when it should, refusing when refusal was the only honest response.
Ahead, nothing resolved cleanly.
And for the first time, that uncertainty did not feel like failure.
It felt like the weight of being asked—and choosing to stay present long enough to answer.