The first effect was not immediate.
Lin Ye noticed it several hours after leaving the Major Derivation Point, when the landscape began to lose a quality he had never before questioned: continuity. It wasn't that the world was broken, nor that things changed abruptly. It was something more unsettling. Transitions were no longer smooth. A valley ended abruptly. An ancient road vanished without erosion. The sky shifted from one hue to another without the natural progression of the day.
The world was correcting around his absence.
"So this is how you pay…" he murmured.
The fragmented clock floated within his awareness, stable but silent. It no longer issued constant warnings—not because danger had vanished, but because it could no longer be localized in the same way. The system was no longer trying to guide him. It was only recording.
"Autonomous state active."
"Persistent warning: external compensation intensifying."
Lin Ye kept moving.
Arkhavel did not accompany him beyond the boundary of the ruins. There had been no formal farewell. There was no need. Custodians like Arkhavel did not walk toward the future; they remained behind, guarding doors the world preferred to forget. Lin Ye, by contrast, was moving toward a region where consensus still held—and therefore, where adjustment would be more violent.
He didn't have to look long.
From the crest of a ridge, he saw an expansive plain crossed by active trade routes. Caravans. Columns of smoke. Improvised watchtowers. Life.
Too much life.
The fragmented clock vibrated with a low, grave frequency.
Not immediate danger to him.
Danger to them.
Lin Ye descended cautiously. As he drew closer, he sensed a diffuse pressure—not centered on a single point, but spread across the entire region. As if an invisible hand were slowly tightening, trying to eliminate irregularities… without much discrimination.
He heard the first scream before he saw anything.
Then the second.
Then silence.
When he reached the plain, the sight froze his blood.
A caravan had been stopped. Not by bandits. Not by soldiers. By space itself. Part of the road had collapsed inward—not like a landslide, but like an omission. The carts were split, not broken. As if they had never been whole to begin with. People lay scattered on the ground—some unconscious, others worse.
"Collateral correction…" Lin Ye whispered.
There was no clear anomaly to justify it.No traveling echo.No phase-displacement container.
Just too many variables clustered together.
The world had chosen a fast solution.
Lin Ye moved among the wounded.
Some were breathing.
Others were not.
A child cried, clinging to a woman who no longer responded. The sound was not piercing. It was… hollow. As if even pain were being dampened to leave as little trace as possible.
The Silent Thunder vibrated faintly—not to cut an external intent, but in response to the absence of intent. There was no enemy. No human decision to interrupt.
"Damn it…" Lin Ye murmured.
He knelt beside the child. He didn't try to use power. He didn't steal time. He simply placed a hand on the boy's shoulder.
The child looked up at him with red, unfocused eyes.
"My mom…?" he asked.
Lin Ye didn't answer right away.
Not because he didn't want to.
But because the world was listening.
"Your mother isn't in pain anymore," he said at last. "That's something I can tell you."
The child pressed his lips together and nodded, as if that answer were enough… or as if he lacked the strength to demand another.
Lin Ye stood.
Around him, other survivors were beginning to react. They stared at the missing section of road, the absent pieces of reality, with a mix of fear and resignation. No one shouted accusations. No one searched for someone to blame.
That was the worst part.
"So this is your answer…" Lin Ye thought. "If you can't touch me, you touch everything else."
The fragmented clock vibrated sharply.
A new option presented itself.
It was not a dead instant.
It was something more dangerous.
An act of fixation.
If Lin Ye intervened here—not to save everyone, but to mark this event as significant—the world would not be able to discard it so easily. But doing so would mean assuming direct responsibility. Not as a passive anomaly. As a causal agent.
That would draw immediate attention.
And consequences.
Lin Ye looked at the omitted road. Looked at the people trying to gather themselves. Looked at the child, now silent.
He took a deep breath.
"No," he said quietly. "I won't allow this to be just a statistic."
He closed his eyes.
He didn't steal time.
He didn't create space.
He did something else.
He named the event.
Within his consciousness, the fragmented clock responded in a new way. It didn't turn. It didn't vibrate. It aligned.
"Unanticipated action."
"Forced registration in progress."
Lin Ye opened his eyes and pressed his palm to the ground, right at the edge of the omission. He didn't try to close the void. He couldn't. Instead, he allowed his own existence to become the temporal anchor of the event.
For one eternal heartbeat, the world resisted.
Then it yielded.
Not by repairing the road.
But by remembering it.
The omission stopped expanding. The collapse halted at that point. Automatic corrections ceased, as if something had been marked as non-replicable.
The people felt it.
They didn't know what had happened, but the air grew heavier—more real. Pain returned with force. Cries became sharper. Life began to hurt again.
Lin Ye dropped to his knees.
The price arrived immediately.
Not in blood.
In memory.
Another fragment of his past blurred away. This time, something more important. A place. An early home. He could no longer recall the face of the one who had once waited for him there—though he knew they had mattered.
He clenched his teeth.
"I accept it…" he whispered.
The fragmented clock vibrated with a clear signal.
Not a warning.
A confirmation.
Very far away, in the deep layers of the correction system, the Core reacted.
Not with elimination.
With focus.
The region was marked.
The event was registered.
And the name Lin Ye—no longer present in standard predictions—appeared in a new section of the model:
Active Singularity FactorsStatus: Non-correctableRecommendation: Direct Observation / Delegated Intervention
The world had tried to compensate with blood.
Lin Ye had answered with meaning.
And in that silent exchange, a dangerous truth began to take shape:
As long as there were people who remembered an event,the world could not pretend it had never happened.
The war was no longer about power.
It was about which things deserved to remain real.