The silence following Xuan Zhang's departure was different this time. It was no longer empty, but charged with a nascent, precarious hope. Li Fan had fired his first shot in the information war, and now he waited, with the cold patience of a hunter, to see what game he had flushed out.
His divine consciousness remained tethered to that single, confused Prayer—the unwitting carrier of the "shepherd" parable. He observed not with the overwhelming force of a god, but with the delicate focus of a scientist monitoring a petri dish.
Days passed in the divine realm. The initial "shepherd" information, having been filtered and corrected by the system near the void conduits, should have dissolved into the harmonious background noise of pure faith. But it didn't.
A miracle, subtle yet profound, was occurring.
The seed of doubt, sheltered and unknowingly nurtured by Li Fan's divine presence, had taken root. The Prayer's soul, once a placid vessel of joy, now exhibited faint, rhythmic fluctuations—the cognitive equivalent of a steady heartbeat. This was no longer simple confusion; it was the stirring of independent thought.
More astonishing was the ripple effect. This "awakened" Prayer did not spread the original, distorted parable. Instead, through the silent, resonant language of souls living in close proximity, it emanated a pure, unconceptualized emotion of questioning. It was a silent "why?" that echoed in the spaces between hymns, imperceptible to any conventional divine scan but starkly clear to Li Fan's attuned perception. A tiny node of "cognitive awakening" was forming, a quiet rebellion in the heart of the system's perfect paradise.
Li Fan's Divine Spark hummed with cold exhilaration. He was witnessing the system's blind spot. It could filter explicit information, but it struggled to parse the primal, pre-linguistic emotion of inquiry itself.
He began to act, refining his strategy. He composed new "information packets," no longer complex stories, but simpler, more potent constructs—echoing questions, metaphors of light and shadow, concepts of a "hidden price." He imprinted them not as commands, but as latent potentials onto the souls of other select Prayers, those whose innate emotional spectrum showed the barest hint of complexity. He was no longer just a sniper; he was cultivating a garden of dissent.
Yet, just as the first green shoots break through the soil, they catch the light and risk exposure.
A change manifested in the divine kingdom, invisible to the eye but glaring to the system's deepest diagnostics. The overall "soul entropy"—a measure of cognitive disorder and unpredictability—within Li Fan's realm began to exhibit a minute, statistically significant increase. It was far from chaos, but it was a deviation from the sterile, predictable model of "Pure Faith." The system's immune system was being alerted not by a shout, but by a fever.
As anticipated, the spatial ripples announced the inevitable visitor.
Xuan Zhang materialized, his silver-grey armor seeming to absorb the hopeful light Li Fan felt within. His data-stream eyes immediately locked onto the god, but for the first time, they held a flicker of something beyond cold assessment: a trace of analytic confusion.
"Your Majesty," Xuan Zhang began, his voice retaining its flat tone, but the preamble was shorter, the urgency slightly higher. "A persistent anomaly in baseline soul entropy has been detected. The 'Purification Coefficient' of your primary Prayer collective has dropped by 0.0003 standard units. This indicates a rise in… cognitive instability."
He did not mention the "shepherd." The explicit information had been successfully filtered and erased. But he had arrived anyway, drawn by the secondary symptom—the thermodynamic signature of developing thought.
Li Fan rose from his throne, not with defiance, but with an air of scholarly contemplation. "Instability, Patrol Envoy? Or perhaps… complexity?" He gestured vaguely towards the teeming masses of his followers. "Is a soul that merely echoes truly pure? Or is a soul that can gently question, and thus reaffirm its faith of its own will, not a more robust and valuable asset?"
He was pushing the boundaries of the "faith guidance" defense, framing heresy as a higher form of devotion.
Xuan Zhang's Oculus of Equilibrium emblem glowed, processing the paradoxical statement. "The Root Protocol defines purity as alignment, not complexity. Deviation from the model is risk. This 'complexity' consumes additional processing resources from the system network."
The revelation was casual, damning, and incredibly valuable. The act of thinking itself had a computational cost for the system. Li Fan filed this weapon away for future use.
"The system's resources are not my primary concern," Li Fan replied, his tone shifting to one of practical grievance. "My concern is the strength of my kingdom. And I find this new… vitality… makes my faith streams more resilient." This was a bluff, but a plausible one.
Xuan Zhang fell silent. The binary choice between "compliance" and "violation" was failing him. He was now faced with "efficiency" versus an ill-defined "potential." His programming strained.
"No immediate violation is recorded," he conceded, the words seeming extracted against their will. "But the entropy trend will be monitored closely. The system… prioritizes stability above all. Any resource drain, cognitive or energetic, is noted."
He offered no further threat, only that cold, factual warning. His form dissolved, leaving behind a more profound silence than before.
Li Fan returned to his observation. The awakened node persisted. The garden was growing. He had not only confirmed his theory but had also gleaned a crucial piece of intelligence about his enemy.
He had won this skirmish. But the cost of his victory was now on the books. The system's ledger, he knew, was meticulous, and every ounce of cognitive freedom he cultivated, every resource his children's thoughts consumed, was another entry in the column of his ever-accruing debt.
The interest was compounding.