CHAPTER 121｜THE SPECIMEN AND THE SILENCE OF MANY BODIES
The third mark of the Hour of the Tiger.
Lin was not awakened by sound.
He was pierced awake by the world's excessive clarity.
Outside the tent, Soldier Zhao Si was sharpening a knife. To Lin's ears, the noise was not the rhythm of "clang—clang—", but the minute shifts in angle between blade and whetstone with each stroke, the countless fine reverberations of metal-qi grinding, the meeting of stone dust's falling trajectory with every mote of dust in the wind. The tent canvas billowed in the wind—not a "flapping" sound, but the complete process of cold air twisting, swirling, and freezing into ice crystals within each fiber's crevice—he could "see" the instant when seventeen ice-crystal vortices simultaneously formed, grew, and decayed.
A perfect, simultaneous death.
He curled up in his fur bedding, hands pressed tightly over his ears.
Useless. The sounds burrowed in from deep within his bones, from the frequency of his blood flow. At the edge of his vision, the Mirror-Sigil's patterns shuddered violently, glowing with a dark-red hue like blood about to clot—a sign of sensory overload. An icy thought pierced directly from the depths of the Spirit-Pivot into his consciousness: Auditory perception expanded by nearly threefold, visual perception increased over three-and-a-half fold, spiritual senses wide open, no means to close. The Mind-Quieting Ritual he once used to guard his spirit and filter interference was now completely jammed and scattered. A colder directive from the Pivot surfaced: Initiate forced shutdown for twelve marks.
He stared at the thought. Shutdown meant twelve marks of blankness and ignorance, meant utter dereliction of duty. He was a Recorder, the Seventh Recorder of the Night Crow Division's Northern Observation Hub. His very existence was to record, in this testing ground labeled "Paradox Garden," all that could and could not be recorded.
He rejected the directive.
Chose to bear it consciously.
This was his final, and only, loyalty to his own duty.
| HOUR OF THE DRAGON · BEFORE THE RECORDING DESK |
Lin held the brush, its tip trembling above the paper for the Morning Summary of Camp Sentiment. He should write down the phenomena observed since last night: the collective shock like frozen solidity after the military report arrived, the eight characters on the orders board carved as if by knife and axe, the heavy trail left by Chu Hongying's black cloak when she walked alone to the western wall fissure, the nearly tangible mist of collective guilt that pervaded the soldiers, and the consequent behavioral mutations.
But he could not write. Every character he formed was like a trigger.
"Collective guilt pervades"—as soon as these six characters took shape, his mind autonomously reconstructed a complete, spirit-mirrored reenactment of the seven deaths at Frostbite Gap. Not vague imagination, but a cruel, hyper-detailed mental simulation triggered by sensory overload: the arc and spray of Zhao Tiegut's blood when his old shoulder wound burst, the final, voiceless tremor of eighteen-year-old Li Xiaoshu's vocal cords before the barbarian's curved blade opened his throat, the layered muffled thuds of the other five falling, bones breaking at varying distances.
A symphony of collapse.
Simultaneously, the emotional frequency spectra of the entire camp's over three hundred men were forcibly superimposed: the fiery red aura (actually extreme muscle tension and abnormal concentration of carbon-fire in breath) around veteran Zhao Tieshan, the regular pulse of fear (three peaks per second) within young soldier Zhou Zhun's compulsive knife-sharpening friction, the stagnant numbness of the old head cook (body temperature below normal, pupil light reflex delayed by nearly half a breath).
"Behavioral recalibration"—he "saw" the brief, finger-snap delay as soldiers deliberately avoided fingertip contact when passing water buckets; he "heard" the sigh veteran Zhao almost dissolved into the wind when stuffing wool socks into a new recruit's hands, mixed with a voiceless prayer of "May you not die." Numbers and codes lost meaning, transforming into scenes carrying body heat, scent, sound, and emotional weight, brutally flooding his every sense.
"Lin, your face looks like you've been buried in snow for three days." The voice of his fellow recorder, Zhang, came from the left.
Lin did not turn. His hearing had already autonomously analyzed: the tense frequency of vocal cord vibration, the minute saliva particles carried in the mouth's airflow (hinting at mild dehydration), the complex sentiment behind the words—30% worry, 50% confusion, and a subtle, 20% distancing born from Lin's abnormality.
Lin opened his mouth. He wanted to say "The world is too loud." What came out was: "… It is nothing. Only… the Ledger is too heavy." Unconsciously invoking the heavy imagery from last night's orders board. He heard his own voice: each word felt like coarse sandpaper scraping his throat bones, parched like the cracks of a long-drought land.
Zhang was silent for two breaths, patted his shoulder, and left.
Lin stared at the residual, invisible temperature gradient left by that hand in the cold air until it completely dissipated into the camp's chill. Then he continued hovering the brush. The paper still only had six characters: "Collective guilt pervades." The ink seemed to writhe on the coarse paper, like a wound refusing to scab.
| HOUR OF THE SNAKE · MEDICAL TENT |
Lu Wanning was not preparing medicine.
She was calculating probabilities.
Spread on the table was not a medical record, but a rough charcoal sketch of the camp layout, covered with arrows and notes, its lines cold and hard, intersecting like an ominous net. She was performing "mental calculation of non-combat casualty probability": based on the spirit-reflection patterns of the Frostbite Gap incident, terrain features around camp, and the soldiers' silently spreading emotional states (this perception… had it faintly been tainted by Lin's uncontrolled psychic overflow?), attempting to forecast the most likely window of time and location for the next "injury or death due to hesitation."
Her fingertip hovered above the line of calculation: "Southeast sentry tower downslope, Hour of the Monkey to Hour of the Rooster." The probability of a patrol's delay due to averted gaze or hesitant steps was marked "increase 34%." Estimated casualty scale: one to three. Beside it was her hesitant countermeasure: "Propose adding illumination and warning markers there."
She was resisting her own calculation. Was this truly "preventing disaster before it happens," or another, deeper kind of "sowing fear" that pressed upon the soldiers' spirits, almost a death forecast? She thought of A'Ming's accelerated healing, inexplicable by medical principles, that mysterious "vitality resonance" which now seemed a poignant irony—the flesh seemed to be learning rapid healing, while the spirit was slowly hollowed by this intangible, collective guilt.
From outside the tent came a suppressed, chest-muffled cough.
Lu Wanning's fingers twitched slightly. Finally, she crumpled the sketch fiercely and threw it into the dying brazier. The paper ball touched the embers, hissed into a brief, bright flame, then curled, blackened, turned to thin ash. She watched quietly until the last trace of red glow died completely. She chose not to exercise this "right of foresight." But her medical instinct, twisted by this heavy collective guilt, had become a cold, almost divinatory calculation. She was no longer merely healing visible flesh wounds, but trying to predict invisible spiritual peril. And this calculation itself was another deep scar carved into the medical principles she had believed in for years.
| EDGE OF THE TRAINING GROUND |
Gu Changfeng was not training soldiers.
He was alone, repeating the most basic, most rigorous chopping motions. Each swing's angle, force, breathing rhythm, even the arc of the blade cutting air, was exactly identical, precise to the point of suffocation. No imaginary enemy. What he chopped was "that ten-breath gap," that "blank of possibility" that swallowed seven lives. The blade-wind split the stagnant cold air, emitting short, sharp hisses. Snow dust was swept up by the force, forming regular, uniformly sized vortices around his feet.
Veteran Zhao Tieshan watched, arms folded, for a long time, then spoke hoarsely: "Commandant, a blade ground too sharp… breaks easily."
Gu Changfeng's movements did not stop, his blade steady as an ancient bell's pendulum, chopping down again: "A blade uncertain of its own sharpness, unaware where its edge points… differs not from blunt iron."
His words finished, the blade tip dropped to the ground, stably piercing the frozen earth. He exhaled long, the white breath condensing into almost perfectly straight pillars in the bitter cold. He turned his head, gaze west, past the tents, toward the western wall fissure—where Chu Hongying had personally anchored the seven ice stars last night. "They died in the blank of 'possibility.'" His voice was steady as bedrock, yet carrying a weight like rusted iron sinking to a riverbed. "We who live… must practice this 'possibility'… into the memory of muscle and bone, into unthinking instinct."
His "burden" was to transform the intangible, mountain-heavy moral pressure entirely into an extreme, nearly cruel demand on his own body and will. He was using the "precision" and "flawlessness" of flesh and blood to oppose the world's increasingly thick "ambiguity" and "uncertainty."
Zhao Tieshan was silent, looked down at his own prominent-veined hands that had once trembled with rage to smash the fence. He suddenly felt that the silently chopping blade in the Commandant's hand, and the iron hammer he himself had gripped, perhaps struck the same anvil—that anvil named "regret" and "fear," already tempered countless times by blood and fire.
| BEFORE NOON · THE TOOLSHED'S SHADOW |
Lin fled the recording desk that seemed to nail him down, stumbling into the narrow shadow cast by the western toolshed. Light was sliced to pieces by the disorderly woodpile. He curled up in the deepest, darkest corner, no longer vainly covering his ears, just hugging his knees, empty gaze fixed on a nonexistent spot on the ground.
Useless.
He "heard": in the medical tent three hundred paces away, the rustle of Lu Wanning turning pages, each interval over three breaths—nearly half a breath slower than usual, she was hesitating. In the command tent, the rhythmic, unconscious tapping of Chu Hongying's knuckle on the hardwood desk, about seventy-two times per minute, the third tap always slightly heavier—a habit that leaked when she suppressed intense emotion. In the camp's eastern area, the thump-thump of Gu Changfeng chopping firewood, the layered cracking sounds of each blade entering wood fiber, clearly distinguishing the softness of earlywood from the hardness of latewood—the wood he chose this morning was on average a full ten percent harder than usual. He was deliberately picking harder-to-split logs.
And more vast, more suffocating: the camp's oppressive silence was no longer quiet. It was a sea of white noise mixed from over three hundred different frequencies and textures of painful spirit-sounds, an acoustic map woven from guilt, fear, anger, numbness, confusion—constantly refreshing, roaring, echoing in his mind, never ceasing.
Slowly, he pulled out his dagger. The blade reflected a faint, cold sliver of white light in the shadow. Not seeking death, but a thought born from extreme pain, clear and terrifying: he wanted to perform the most precise dissection. To point the blade tip at the temporal side of his own skin—beneath it was a physical interface protrusion where the Mirror-Sigil connected with flesh and blood, feeling like a small, metal-iron mole embedded under the skin.
"If I can carve this out, the Spirit-Pivot connection might be temporarily severed and restarted. I might… regain a moment of peace, continue my recording duty." The thought was cold, rational, without the slightest tremor.
The blade tip pressed against skin, pushed down, cut. Warm blood beads immediately seeped out, slowly sliding down his cheek; in his hyper-acute perception, the sensation magnified, translated into a burning stream. However, the interface was internally embedded in the spirit patterns, deeply entwined with nerves and blood vessels; physically, it was impossible to separate. This act was like trying to carve out a constantly screaming poem from his own mind with a mortal iron blade.
He ignored it, kept pressing. The blade tip scraped bone, producing a faint, teeth-grating sound only his abnormal hearing could capture.
The tremor in his skull peaked at this moment, his vision's edge exploding in crimson warning patterns: Observer ███, Behavioral Adjudication—Self-Harm. Spirit Pattern Connection Subject to Illegal Severance Attempt. Bodily Damage: Epidermal Layer Rupture, Minor Blood Loss. This Phenomenon Has Been Directly Reported to Night Crow Division Northern Hub.
At this same instant, the Mirror-Sigil observation spirit-web in the camp's west side suddenly collapsed. Not from enemy invasion, but due to the violent mutual interference and chaos in the local spirit-reflection patterns triggered by the abnormal high-frequency tremor and self-harm intent of this key "node" (Lin), precipitating a monitoring failure. The spirit-reflection record later retrieved by the Hub showed: at the time of the incident, from the third mark to the sixth mark of the Hour of the Snake, Node ███ anomaly resulted in the clarity of the western sector spirit-web's reflection dropping by ninety-two percent. Consequence: a newly formed ice crack (width one palm, depth three feet) failed to be reflected and warned in time. Direct casualties: Soldier Wang Five, sprained ankle; Soldier Li Six, elbow abrasion. Associated Adjudication: Observer ███'s cognitive anomaly has infected spirit-web operation, resulting in a procedural incident.
When Lin staggered out from the toolshed's shadow, his fingertips still stained with his own not-yet-dried, slightly sticky blood from his temple, eyes unfocused like mist over a winter river, he ran head-on into a group returning. Two soldiers supported Wang Five, whose right ankle was swollen and pale; Li Six followed beside, coarse cloth at his elbow already stained dark by seeping blood.
The group stopped. Li Six saw Lin, especially the blood on his cheek and his vacant eyes, paused, and blurted: "Recorder Lin? Just now, a sudden ice crack in the west… the spirit-web gave no warning at all."
The words were light, but in Lin's ears, each character carried physical weight, crashing into his already overwhelmed consciousness.
He laughed. The laughter was dry, like broken ice scraping back and forth on cast iron: "Warning?" He raised a finger pointing to his still-bleeding temple. "I find even the sound of my own heartbeats too loud and piercing."
"I can tell you now—Zhang Three will surely cough in about half a mark, because phlegm has gathered deep in his lungs; Li Four's stomach growls emptily, hunger-fire burning secretly; Zhao Five's spirit was unsettled last night, his breathing about fifteen percent shallower than usual."
"But the ice crack?" He stopped, gaze passing over Li Six, drifting toward that dark western wall fissure in the distance, as if seeing through tents, seeing the silent ice stars within.
"My apologies."
"This body, this awareness… is already full, no room left."
"It can no longer hold distinct 'danger,' only forced to contain… the entirety of all existence's minute details."
"You all live in the world."
"And I…" His voice suddenly dropped, almost a breath: "…live within the world's unedited, every-word-barbed… original manuscript."
Finished, he turned and walked toward the recording desk. His steps were unnaturally steady—the final false calm before a spirit stretched to its limit, about to snap.
Empty beat. Three full breaths. No one replied, no one moved. The soldiers holding the injured stood frozen, watching Lin's thin yet bizarrely straight back, exchanging glances filled with profound confusion, faint fear, and a trace of sorrowful understanding. The cold wind swept up fine snow from the ground, moaning past, trying to fill the icy vacuum torn by the words. Within the wind, the phrase "every-word-barbed manuscript" seemed to linger, scraping the eardrums and hearts of everyone present.
| AFTERNOON · THE RECORDING DESK |
Dragged back to the recording desk by intangible duty, Lin faced an uncompromising icy directive from the Mirror-Sigil: per the Parallel Observation Guidelines and Structural Ambiguity Parameter Collection Requirements, his current state was adjudicated as: [Erosive Observation of Ambiguous State on Calibrated Mind].
A new duty pressed down: Autobiographical Record of Cognitive Overload State. Required to detail in writing: anomalies in sensory acuity, most intrusive perceptual content, attempted coping methods and their efficacy, self-assessment of "ambiguity" tolerance. At the directive's end, a calm, cruel note: "Your experienced pain holds reference value. Please continue your duty."
Lin stared at the last line. Your pain holds reference value.
He let out a very light scoff from his throat, devoid of joy, only utter absurdity. Then picked up the brush, dipped ink, began writing. The tip still trembled, but the content was surprisingly analytical, cold as a medical record:
text
Hour of the Horse, Mark Zero · Self-Record I Sensory State: Unfiltered holographic influx. Continuous. Most Intrusive: Acoustic parsing of collective guilt-spectrum. Zhao Tieshan's rage: 85-120 ppm. Zhou Zhun's fear: 3 peaks/sec. Attempted Coping: Physical severance (failed). Selective filtering (failed). Choice requires categories. Categories are lost. Self-Assessment: Tolerance threshold breached. Status: Conscious endurance of sensory torture. Meta-Query: If the directive orders me to record my collapse, and the collapse is caused by the directive's own experiment… am I signing my own spiritual death warrant?
Finished writing, he set down the brush. Thick ink gathered on the coarse yellow paper, slowly spreading, like a silent, unanswered question.
| HOUR OF THE GOAT · THE TOOLSHED SHADOW AGAIN |
He curled up again in the shadow outside the toolshed, no longer struggling vainly, just hugging his knees, gaze fixed on an illusory point in the snow.
Footsteps approached. Very light, but Lin "heard" them—not footsteps, but the minute counting of millions of ice crystals simultaneously fracturing, collapsing as boot soles compressed snow. About forty-seven fractures per second. Stride even, each step about seventy-eight shun.
Shen Yuzhu stopped three paces before him. The hem of his black robe hung still, motionless; his exhaled breath condensed into fleeting, hazy shapes in the frigid air, then dissipated.
"What are you searching for?" Shen Yuzhu spoke, tone flat, without ripple, like snow on ice.
Lin did not look up. "The off-switch." His voice dry, cracking. "… Where is it?"
Shen Yuzhu was silent for three breaths. The Mirror-Sigil flowed with steady, non-human light at his vision's edge, but beneath his left scapula—that old battleground that had borne the brutal tear between "numbers" and "names"—came a familiar, faint burning pain. The cold "seven" from the military report and that sweet-potato-stealing "Li Xiaoshu" surfaced at the edge of consciousness for an instant.
Then he said: "We do not endure."
"We choose, what to hear, what not to see."
Lin jerked his head up, unfocused eyes trying to lock onto Shen Yuzhu's face: "How choose?! Tell me how choose?! It seeps everywhere, all rushes in! No door, no window! No switch!"
Shen Yuzhu looked at him. His pupils clearly reflected Lin's pain-twisted face. Deep within the Mirror-Sigil, extremely briefly—perhaps only half a breath—flashed a near-self-doubt ripple of spirit-reflection, instantly corrected, smoothed by deeper pivot principles.
"Then, let those ice chips melt right inside." Shen Yuzhu's voice remained calm, yet carrying a rust-iron texture. "Let them turn into cold water you can still swallow."
He paused slightly, letting the sentence sink into the frozen air around them.
"Or,"
"let them freeze you dead directly."
"These are the only two paths left."
Lin froze, tears abruptly welling, sliding down his icy cheeks, yet his facial muscles remained blankly numb.
Shen Yuzhu said no more, turned to leave.
After two steps, his foot paused slightly. Without looking back, only a breath-light sound like snowflakes landing drifted away in the wind:
"Upon the bridge, there is no off-switch—"
"only bearing weight, until the other shore;"
"or,"
"collapse."
Footsteps faded, gradually inaudible.
Lin sat dazed, lips moving silently, chewing the words: "No switch… only bearing weight…"
Suddenly, he began a clumsy, near-self-deceptive attempt. He forced himself: no longer counting ice-crystal fracture frequency, only perceiving the event "a foot steps on snow." No longer parsing soldiers' complex emotional frequency spectra, only "seeing" the vague outline "figure moves." No longer tracking each airflow vortex simulation in the wind, only "knowing" "wind is blowing."
The pain did not lessen one bit. But within the continuous, overflowing flood of perception, he struggled to carve out an extremely narrow slit. A slit where his nearly annihilated consciousness could barely catch half a breath. Like a weak but real reed stalk accidentally touched by a fingertip in the abyss of a devouring blizzard.
He desperately, with all his remaining willpower, grasped it.
| HOUR OF THE ROOSTER · BEFORE THE RECORDING DESK · DUSK |
Lin picked up the brush, wrote the final record of the day:
text
Hour of the Rooster, Mark One · Self-Record III Tactic: Perceptual Translation. Auditory input → rhythm. Visual input → composition. Efficacy: Pain unchanged. Cognitive load altered from continuous overflow to intermittent peaks. Functional window extended to ~1 mark. Self-Positioning: No longer observer. Prisoner of own senses. Also the warden. Plea: If 'ambiguity' is the future state, prepare a shade for those of us scorched by 'excessive clarity.'
Finished, he set down the brush, looked toward the tent entrance. The dusk light was seeping from iron-gray darkness into a murky, dust-mixed orange-yellow hue. If it were his former self, what his eyes would see now would be the precise distribution of light wavelengths, complex models of atmospheric particle scattering, smooth curves of brightness decay over time.
Now, he closed his eyes. Silently counted three breaths.
Then, opened them.
Tried, not to parse.
He "saw": light, like a warm, slowly flowing amber river, seeped through gaps and holes in the felt tent, gently spilling over the uneven snow surface.
No numbers. No formulas. No patterns.
Only pure "color," and the motion of "flowing."
This was the first time since his complete perceptual collapse that he "saw" things again, rather than "parsing" phenomena.
This rare, near-luxurious state lasted about the time of three full heartbeats. Then, the bone-deep parsing instinct, with a more violent counterattack, surged: precise light refraction index, density and composition of airborne particles, specific effects of cloud thickness on color temperature… countless cold spirit-reflection data and deduction patterns again drowned his momentarily clear awareness. That gentle amber river shattered instantly, reassembled into a lifeless collection of measurable, calculable optical phenomena.
Lin closed his eyes.
No longer resisting, only wholly accepting. He no longer hoped to return to that "three-heartbeat" illusion. He merely engraved that brief "seeing" deeply into memory.
Almost simultaneously, a synchronous record generated deep within the Spirit-Pivot: [Observer ███, completed first day Autobiographical Record. Spirit-reflection characteristics: Pain description clear, adaptive attempts nascent. Archive path: Ambiguous Mind Erosion Reference · Individual Observation ███. Final note: Observer alive, continues observation. Pain value assessment: High. Reference value assessment: Extremely High.]
At the same instant, the Night Crow Division Northern Hub's internal spirit-message quietly updated: [Based on spirit-reflections provided by Observer ███ (Lin), preliminary tolerance threshold of individual mind for 'ambiguity' has been calibrated. Anchor-point network now shows pressure evolution branching: Physician (Lu Wanning) trending toward compulsive prediction, Warrior (Gu Changfeng) displaying behavioral rigidity, Recorder (Lin) falling into perceptual collapse, Commander (Chu Hongying) bearing silent vessel. This phenomenon indicates the heavy pressure of 'moral debt' is being distributed and transformed within the pivot network, not dissipated.]
*[Experiment Escalation Preview] Next stage: 'Orderless State.' Purpose: Measure, after removing all external command frameworks, whether the self-generated patterns of this group trend toward 'efficient collaboration' or 'internal-consumption collapse.' Risk assessment: Based on current bodily fissures, internal-consumption probability risen to 65%. Execution opinion: Proceed as scheduled. True resilience can only be verified at the edge of collapse.*
And three hundred li away, deep within Blackstone Valley's absolutely silent Hall of Ten Thousand Mirrors, an almost imperceptible ripple spread across the surface of a seemingly ordinary ice mirror.
A gaze traversing distant tundra and endless wind and snow silently descended, precisely fixing upon that young figure in the northern border camp, curled before the recording desk, back thin and trembling.
Helian Sha's ice-blue pupils, deep as eternal cold abysses, clearly reflected Lin's trembling brush tip and the despair-soaked, struggling characters beneath it.
He spoke extremely softly, almost a sigh, voice dissipating in the absolute silence, leaving no echo:
"Another… child whose soul is scorched by excessive clarity."
"Will you become the next Chen Lu,"
"or…"
"the next to be completely archived, retaining only reference value…"
"Specimen?"
The ice mirror surface smoothed, flawless as before, as if nothing had happened.
| THAT NIGHT · THE CAMP |
Within the camp, no one held any ritual for Lin's collapse, or offered a single gentle word. Because in this new world stumbling to embrace "ambiguity," the first "clarity" to be eliminated was "the uniqueness and incommensurability of individual pain."
His scream was archived by the Spirit-Pivot as analyzable spirit-reflection patterns. His struggle became cold parameters for calculating risk in the group experiment. And he, this living, still-panting-in-pain person, was still required to sit before the recording desk and perform his duty.
—This was the most standard, most ruthless method of disposal this newly forming world gave to those "maladapted" who could not adapt: not destruction, not relief, only eternal, non-human observation.
Lin slowly exhaled a long breath. White mist drifted upward, slowly expanding, thinning, finally vanishing into nothingness within the tent's last flickering, dim light. He no longer counted water-essence numbers in the mist, no longer parsed distribution patterns of condensation nuclei, no longer tracked each micro-ice-crystal's growth rate. He just quietly watched it exist, expand, until completely gone.
Then, in a breath-voice so light only he could hear, he murmured to himself:
"This day…"
"…is finally over."
He maintained his sitting posture a moment longer, gaze toward the world outside the tent now completely devoured by thick night. Fine snow began falling again, soundless, incessant.
He waited for tomorrow. Waited for the next time the world would still rush at him with that excessively clear, cruelly detailed clarity, screaming. And waited for the next time, within the gaps of endless spirit-reflection floods and sensory torture, to again search for, grasp that reed stalk named "choice"—fine as gossamer, yet holding his last shred of clarity.
Far away, inside the command tent, lamplight was sparse.
Chu Hongying sat alone before the desk, fingers unconsciously rubbing the black stone personally dug from the western wall fissure. The stone was long warmed by her body heat, no longer piercingly cold, but the chill from deep within the earth's veins remained sedimented at its core, seeping through the rough stone skin into her fingertips.
She suddenly lifted her head, gaze seemingly penetrating the heavy felt tent, looking toward the recording desk. Her handsome brows inadvertently furrowed slightly.
As if sensing a silent, subtle, yet heart-gripping sound of fracture.
But ultimately, she did not speak, did not move. Only gripped the black stone in her palm tighter, until that hardness and coldness, through her deerskin glove, deeply imprinted into her palm's lines.
Outside the tent, precisely then, came the sound of Bǒ Zhōng's limping, yet steady as an ancient pendulum, night patrol footsteps, approaching from afar, then fading again.
Chu Hongying focused, listened for three breaths.
Then she leaned over, blew out the oil lamp on the desk.
Inside the tent, instantly swallowed by a pure, thick, gentle darkness.
Only beyond the camp, the seemingly eternal wind and snow continued tirelessly drifting, falling. Covering fresh footprints of the day, burying uncleared bloodstains, gently, evenly, gathering all unspoken collapses, struggles, screams, and silences into its white, silent embrace.
As if this indifferent world, with its most vast whiteness, quietly buried another insignificant story of "maladaptation" and "cost."
And fissures had indeed sprouted, like fatal patterns silently spreading beneath ice, quietly extending toward every body and spirit in this camp, silently bearing weight, trying to survive in this new-and-old alternating bitter winter.
[CHAPTER 121 END]