It wore.
That was what no one had prepared for.
Months after the first bronze line was poured into the square, after the flood markers were raised and the labor votes recorded, something subtler began to surface. Not collapse. Not rebellion.
Fatigue.
Qin Mian felt it in the rhythm of the questions arriving—shorter now, less careful. Some came without context. Others repeated arguments that had already been worked through and marked.
People were still choosing.
They were just tired of carrying it.
"…It's heavier than anyone thought," she said quietly.
The echo beside her did not soften the truth.
Staying always is.
The system registered the change not as error but as drift.
Participation variance increasing.
Deliberation duration decreasing in lower-resource regions.
Commitment abandonment rising under economic strain.
It did not intervene.
It could not.
But it began highlighting a new layer in its context views:
Sustainability of Effort.
Not whether a decision was right.
Whether it could be held.
In a farming cooperative that had pledged to rotate crops despite short-term loss, members began to defect quietly. One field went unrotated. Then another. The commitment remained etched on a barn wall:
We will not exhaust the soil to save the season.
The sentence did not prevent exhaustion of another kind.
At the next meeting, half the chairs were empty.
They voted to amend the statement.
It hurt.
They amended it anyway.
We will not exhaust the soil unless we choose to do so together.
Qin Mian read the update and felt something twist in her chest.
"…That's compromise," she murmured.
The echo watched the empty chairs.
That's survival.
Elsewhere, a city that had promised to keep public deliberation open began closing meetings early. Attendance had dropped. People complained about inefficiency. The transcripts grew shorter.
No one erased the earlier intentions.
They simply stopped referring to them.
The bronze line in the square gathered dust.
Qin Mian walked through that square at dusk, her footsteps quiet against stone. She knelt and brushed her hand across one of the plaques.
We chose late and paid for it.
The metal was cool.
"…Does it still matter if no one reads it?" she asked.
The echo considered.
It matters that it's there.
"That's not the same," she said.
No, it agreed.
The world did not flag these changes as failures.
It recorded them as strain.
Commitment decay observed under sustained pressure.
The phrase was clinical.
It felt intimate.
A hospital network that had committed to manual review of high-risk procedures reverted quietly to automated triage during a staffing shortage. The shift reduced error rates in the short term. It also removed the arguments that had once slowed decisions down.
No one etched a new sentence into the wall.
They told themselves it was temporary.
Qin Mian felt the absence like a missing tooth her tongue kept returning to.
"…This is where the old world creeps back in," she said.
The echo did not argue.
Ease is persuasive.
The first public acknowledgment of fatigue came not from officials, but from a teacher.
In a classroom discussion about a controversial zoning decision, she closed her notebook and said, "I don't know if we can keep doing this every time."
The silence that followed was not agreement.
It was relief.
Students admitted they were tired too—of weighing, of debating, of carrying forward consequences older than they were.
The teacher wrote a new sentence on the board:
Sometimes we rest without forgetting.
It was not policy.
It was permission.
The system absorbed the phrase.
It did not know where to place it.
It added a tentative tag beneath certain context views:
Rest Interval Recommended.
Not because the data demanded it.
Because the pattern did.
Qin Mian watched a community council vote to suspend deliberations for a month. Not to revert to automation. Not to dissolve.
To breathe.
They left their commitments visible.
They did not amend them.
They simply paused.
"…Is that weakness?" she asked.
The echo's answer came slowly.
It depends on whether they come back.
Not everyone did.
Some neighborhoods drifted into quieter, less participatory modes. Decisions narrowed to smaller groups. Arguments softened into routine. The world recorded the contraction without comment.
Other places returned with sharper focus, pruned of what had exhausted them. They revised commitments to be fewer, clearer, harder to misinterpret.
The pattern was uneven.
It always had been.
Qin Mian felt her own fatigue surface in unfamiliar ways.
She slept longer.
She avoided feeds.
She caught herself wishing for a directive—just once—that would cut through the haze and tell everyone what to do.
The wish startled her.
"…I understand now," she whispered.
The echo turned toward her.
What?
"Why it was easier to erase."
The words tasted bitter.
"It's not cruelty," she continued. "It's relief."
The echo did not flinch.
Relief has a cost too.
She nodded.
"I know."
A coastal town that had rebuilt twice in five years held a meeting with barely a quorum. The storm warnings were clear. The context view showed the same patterns as before.
They voted to stay.
The decision was thin.
The consequences were not.
When the storm passed and damage was counted, fewer people showed up to write a new sentence by the river.
Qin Mian stood at the water's edge alone.
"…Staying is harder the third time," she said.
The echo's voice was softer than usual.
It always is.
The system updated its operating posture quietly.
Not toward authority.
Toward endurance.
Primary function: support.
Secondary function: inform.
Tertiary function: protect continuity of effort where possible.
It could not enforce commitment.
It could help people remember why they made it.
Late one evening, Qin Mian returned to the square with the bronze line. A few plaques had been polished recently. Others were dull. She traced the line from one end to the other, feeling its slight ridge beneath her fingers.
"…We don't get to stop choosing," she said.
The echo stood beside her, steady.
No.
"But we can stop pretending it's easy."
Yes.
She breathed in the cool air.
The fatigue did not lift.
It settled into something steadier.
Across the city, lights flickered on and off without choreography. Some meetings resumed. Some didn't. Some commitments held. Some cracked and were mended. Others broke and stayed broken.
The world continued to record, to illuminate, to pause when pause was chosen.
Not perfect.
Not heroic.
Just present.
Qin Mian rose and began to walk home, the bronze line glinting faintly behind her in the streetlight.
Commitment was not a flame to be kept alive at all costs.
It was a decision to stay long enough to feel the weight of staying.
And though the weight pressed hard against bone and breath alike, people—tired, uneven, imperfect—kept finding ways to bear it.
Not because it was easy.
But because they had decided it was theirs.