- Night Mooring on the Yellow River
Zi hour. The boat anchored in a nameless river bend.
Zhang Nu said it was to shelter from the wind, but beyond the porthole the river surface lay as placid as a bolt of black silk. The true haven was fifteen li downstream. Here, sheer cliffs rose on both banks, so steep that even moonlight could not penetrate.
"Astronomer Qian, we'll rest here for the night." Zhang Nu's voice came from outside the cabin door. "Tomorrow we cross Ghost-Leap Rapids. Need to conserve our strength."
Qian Yiyan did not reply.
She sat cross-legged on the low couch, her left hand pressed to her shoulder. The corrosion patch radiated a dull heat, as if a burning coal were embedded beneath her flesh. The closer they drew to the Old Gentleman's Furnace, the fiercer the Burning sensation became.
On the table lay the iron cylinder from Cao Yan, its wax seal already broken, the scroll opened to the page marked in red—the three characters "Lü Gongchuo" like three drops of blood. Beside it rested the brocade pouch bestowed by the Empress Dowager. The imperial yellow silk gleamed faintly in the darkness; within, the Wind-Steadying Elixir pulsed a sluggish warmth through the fabric, pressed against her waist like a tiny, beating heart.
A blade in one hand, shackles in the other.
She closed her eyes, her right hand reaching into her bosom.
The jade pendant met her fingers, warm and smooth.
This was the only thing that belonged to no one else—the only thing that belonged solely to Qian Yiyan. The star dial was destroyed, the official seal was the court's, even this mortal shell was now being inch by inch invaded, corroded, transformed by the elixir's surveillance and the rust-mark.
Only this pendant remained.
Her fingertip traced its surface. The jade was fine-grained. On the obverse, a simplified star chart; on the reverse… she turned it toward the oil lamp for a closer look.
Those patterns she had always taken for natural cloudy inclusions now, under the stimulus of the burning pain in her shoulder, twisted and reorganized—
Into the outline of a door.
Minute. Utterly simple. The door was slightly ajar, and from the crack something seemed about to spill forth.
Qian Yiyan's breath caught.
She recalled a line from her father's manuscripts: The jade is a key—not to unlock material locks, but to open the abyss of the heart.
The abyss of the heart?
She stared at that door, her left hand unconsciously clenching. A sharp pain shot through her fingertips—her nails had dug deep into her palm, drawing blood. A bead of blood slipped down and fell upon the pendant.
The jade surface silently absorbed the drop.
Like a beast long starved.
The next instant—
*Huummm. *
Not a sound. A vibration. It exploded from the pendant's core, racing along the meridians of her fingertips and slamming into the depths of her skull. Her vision was instantly flooded with a viscous, dark-red suffocation; in her ears a thousand inhuman whispers overlapped, fragmented, twisted, carrying a scalp-numbing… hunger.
Qian Yiyan's eyes flew open.
The cabin was as before. The oil lamp cast its dim yellow light; the river lapped gently against the hull.
But the pendant in her palm now radiated a faint yet unmistakable… cold.
As if she had plunged her hand into a starless void, touching only nothingness that devoured all heat.
At the same moment, the rust-mark on her left shoulder erupted in a searing spike of agony.
She grunted, her right hand gripping the table edge for support. Cold sweat soaked her inner robe; darkness swam before her eyes. And in that darkness she saw—
The depths of the riverbed.
Beneath the turbid silt, within the fissures of the rock, something… stirred.
Not the movement of a living creature, but the infinitesimal calibration of some vast, cold, intricately structured mechanism, roused from long slumber by the scent of a familiar, cognate trace.
Then a gaze fell upon her.
Icy, indifferent, freighted with assessment and… appetite.
Qian Yiyan clenched her teeth. Astral force surged wildly through her meridians, forcibly severing that thread of注视. But in that single instant of contact, she had already sensed it—the hunger of that thing, and the burning pain of the rust-mark on her shoulder…
They were resonating.
- Old Gentleman's Furnace Camp · 3:07 AM
Lu Baoyi felt as if his brain were being boiled down to sludge.
He had been staring at the writhing, shape-shifting dark-red spectrogram on the screen for six hours. The thing seemed alive, its frequency hovering around 17.3 Hz with small fluctuations, occasionally bursting into a string of sharp pulses before sinking back into dead silence.
"Boss, coffee." Lin Wan shoved a cup of instant coffee within his reach, her dark circles pronounced enough to pass for smoky eye makeup. "If you keep staring like that, I'm afraid your eyeballs will fall onto the screen."
"Fine by me." Lu Baoyi took it and gulped, scalding his tongue. "This thing's better than any horror flick—and it's an immersive 4D experience."
"Found anything?"
"Yeah, and it's fucking weird." He pulled up a comparison of two waveforms. "Look, the Rust-Sound's base frequency is 17.3 Hz. These are all the anomalous pulse timestamps from nine last night till now."
Lin Wen leaned in. Dozens of red markers dotted the timeline.
"The intervals… irregular?"
"Right. But if you overlay this—" Lu Baoyi tapped the keyboard, bringing up another dataset. "—the real-time flow vibration frequencies from three hydrological stations upstream on the Yellow River."
The two datasets overlapped.
Lin Wan sucked in a sharp breath.
The red markers appeared at times that almost perfectly matched the peaks in the flow vibration frequency.
"It's breathing." Lu Baoyi's voice dropped. "When the flow accelerates and vibration intensifies, its activity rises. This isn't a passively emitted sound. It's… using the entire Yellow River as a resonating cavity, listening to what's happening outside. "
The tent fell silent for a few seconds.
The equipment fans hummed.
"Holy…" Lin Wan rubbed her arms. "You just gave me goosebumps."
"And there's more." Lu Baoyi called up a third interface—a real-time decoding matrix built on the Liu Ren algorithm, black screen with green text, data streams cascading like waterfalls. "Using the structure of the greeting code, I reverse-engineered the encoding logic it might understand. Guess what I found?"
"Stop cliffhanging!"
"Its response pattern shows learning ability." Lu Baoyi opened a log. "First greeting code: no response. Second attempt: fifteen-second delay, returned gibberish. Third attempt: seven-second delay, repeated structures appeared in the gibberish. And just now—"
He pulled up the latest record.
Five minutes ago, he had sent a chaotically encrypted test pulse. The Rust-Sound, three seconds later, returned an extremely short but structurally clear pulse sequence.
Lin Wan's eyes widened. "It's… learning from us?"
"More than that." Lu Baoyi lowered his voice further. "It's learning how to talk to us. The learning speed is terrifying—if this AI took an exam, it'd probably crush a whole room full of programmers."
Before he finished, a sharp alarm blared from the main console.
Both turned.
On the screen, the red spectrogram had exploded without warning.
The energy level across the entire band shot up vertically, the waveform morphing from gentle ripples into a Frenzy tsunami, the peak hitting the screen's upper limit. Simultaneously, the six sonar arrays along the bank returned piercing overload warnings.
"Fuck!" Lu Baoyi slammed the control keys. "All arrays reduce power! Lin Wan, record the peak waveform!"
"On it, on it!"
The alarm didn't stop.
Then every screen in the tent—the main monitor, the secondary screens, Lin Wan's laptop, the old surveillance display in the corner—all distorted simultaneously.
Not a frozen screen. Something weirder: the images seemed seized by an invisible hand, violently stretched, twisted, torn. Then, between every shattered pixel, dense, burning red noise burst forth.
As if the screens themselves were bleeding.
It lasted two seconds.
Then everything returned to normal.
Only the mountain-shaped waveform on the spectrogram, slowly subsiding after its peak, proved it hadn't been an illusion.
Lu Baoyi sat in his chair, his right hand pressed to his temple. It throbbed wildly; at the edges of his vision, a strong red afterimage lingered.
"Boss, your eye…" Lin Wan's voice trembled.
Lu Baoyi waved a hand, looking down at his own right hand.
Pressed to his temple moments before, the back of his hand had been marked by the headphone cable with a red line. Now, that line was rapidly turning an ashen, dead white.
More than just a color change.
The skin in the ashen area had lost all texture, becoming smooth and flat, like frosted glass. When he held his hand up to the light, the surface of that patch faintly reflected the distorted outlines of the surrounding equipment.
As if his skin were being transformed into some kind of… non-human interface.
"Log it." Lu Baoyi's voice remained steady. "Beijing time 03:07. Unprovoked energy burst from Rust-Sound source, accompanied by full-device synchronous visual contamination, duration two seconds. Subject Lu Baoyi exhibits localized greying, loss of texture, and specular reflection anomaly on right hand dorsum, suspected direct modification of biological material by rule-based contamination. Contamination response speed… zero latency. "
Lin Wan's fingers shook as she typed furiously.
At that moment, the tent flap was pushed aside.
Zhou Keran entered, carrying a plate of cut fruit, her face wearing precisely calibrated concern. "Engineer Lu, Sister Lin, I heard the alarm outside. Everything okay?" Her gaze swept the screens, then landed on Lu Baoyi's hand. A flicker of barely perceptible scrutiny passed through her eyes.
Lu Baoyi casually lowered his hand. "Fine. Equipment overload. Just leave the fruit there, thanks."
"Of course." Zhou Keran set down the plate but didn't leave immediately. "Engineer Lu, I was checking the external equipment logs and noticed that thirty seconds before the burst, the sonar arrays received a very strange background noise. Shall I transfer it to you?"
Lu Baoyi and Lin Wan exchanged a glance.
"Send it over."
Zhou Keran nodded and operated. Soon, an audio file appeared on the main console.
Lu Baoyi played it.
At first, normal water-flow noise. At the tenth second, a barely perceptible, nearly submerged metallic tremor surfaced in the background.
Not mechanical. More like… the low, almost infrasonic hum of some massive metal structure, deep underwater, plucked by an invisible force under immense pressure.
Lu Baoyi's pupils contracted.
The frequency signature of that sound was identical to the resonance he had felt in the greyed skin of his right hand during the energy burst.
- Blood as Key, Jade as Gate
Qian Yiyan wiped the froth of blood from her lips.
The backlash from forcibly severing the connection with the riverbed gaze had hammered her internal organs. A coppery sweetness rose in her throat; darkness swam before her eyes; the murmur of inhuman whispers still lingered at the edges of her hearing.
But she did not stop.
Her left hand pressed against the burning pain on her shoulder. Her right hand tightened again around the pendant. Blood still seeped from the wound in her palm, trickling along the jade's veins, slowly filling the outline of that door.
Her father had said: The jade is a key.
If it was a key, there must be a lock.
And if the hunger of the thing beneath the river resonated with her rust-mark—
Then she would use that resonance as the keyhole.
Astral force rose from her dantian, surging through her meridians, forcibly compressed and refined into an extremely fine, razor-sharp needle. The needle's tip aimed at the point of greatest pain in her left shoulder's rust-mark. Then—
She thrust it in.
Not a physical thrust. A penetration at the level of perception.
In that instant, agony detonated.
Qian Yiyan's vision blanked; she nearly fainted. But she bit through the tip of her tongue; the rusty taste of blood exploded in her mouth, forcing a thread of clarity to remain. The needle of astral force pierced the rust-mark, precisely capturing the frequency of that cold hunger, identical to the riverbed's.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
Then, she channeled that frequency—along the conduit of astral force and blood—into the pendant.
The jade surface seared.
The burn of red-hot iron on flesh. The skin of her palm hissed with a scorched odor, yet she clenched her fist, unmoving.
The pendant began to glow.
A dark, viscous halo of red, like congealed blood. The glow seeped from the jade, spreading up the meridians of her arm. Where it passed, the veins beneath her skin bulged and pulsed, suffused with the same dark red.
Simultaneously, the oil lamp in the cabin—
Its flame core abruptly froze.
Not extinguished. Frozen. The dancing flame, mid-flicker, was paused,定格 into an eerie orange-yellow crystal. Then the crystal collapsed inward, igniting the entire candle in reverse, exploding into a fist-sized, silently burning pale white flame.
The flame radiated no heat.
Instead, the cabin's temperature plummeted. The table edge, the cabin walls, even Qian Yiyan's eyelashes instantly crystallized with a fine layer of white frost.
Qiuyan, stationed outside the cabin door to record events, was in the midst of writing "Astronomer Qian rests quietly in cabin, breathing steady" when a wave of cold struck her face. She looked up, saw through the crack the pale white cold flame within, gasped, and dropped her brush, ink smearing the record.
Qian Yiyan was oblivious to all.
Her consciousness, following that needle, along the conduit forged by the pendant and her blood, plunged deep into the riverbed.
Darkness.
A darkness so thick it seemed almost material.
And then she saw.
Thirty zhang beneath the riverbed silt, within the deep fissures of the rock, lay embedded a massive, irregular polyhedral structure. Its surface was thick with rust, but the rust formed eerie, flowing red patterns—like blood vessels, like ancient incantations.
And this structure, through countless invisible tendrils—composed of twisted magnetic fields and anomalous information flows—was rooted in the entire Yellow River bed, like an inverted metal tree.
The tree's rootlets quivered faintly.
Each quiver triggered resonance in the riverbed rock, transmitted to the surface as the unceasing 17.3 Hz Rust-Sound.
And at the tree's core, inside that polyhedral structure—
Was empty.
No—not empty. Something far more terrifying: there was no matter, no energy there, only an absolute void of craving. A craving vast enough to devour the entire river, greedily sucking in every tremor transmitted from the surface—the vibration of boats, the stirring of fish, even… the unconscious emission of existential presence from approaching humans.
The moment Qian Yiyan's consciousness drew near, that craving lunged at her like a shark scenting blood.
*Hungry. *
*So hungry. *
*Give me… *
Not language. A primal impulse slammed directly into her consciousness. Icy, brutal, freighted with naked malice that sought to dismantle her entire existence, absorb her as nourishment.
Qian Yiyan grunted. Astral force reversed wildly through her meridians in a desperate attempt to withdraw.
But the pull was too strong.
Like falling into a whirlpool, her consciousness was slowly dragged toward that void core. She could even feel her memories, her emotions, her cognition being peeled away, layer by layer, sucked and chewed by that thing…
*I'm going to die. *
The thought was terrifyingly clear.
But just as her consciousness was about to be utterly engulfed—
*Huummm. *
Another tremor.
Not from the riverbed. From… her bosom.
No—not from her bosom. From somewhere deeper, farther, as if from across some incomprehensible dimension, slamming toward her along that invisible channel within the pendant.
- Data Torrent and the Geek's Anchor
Lu Baoyi stared at the spectral analysis of that metallic tremor, the taut string in his mind stretched to its limit.
Thirty seconds ago, the greyed area on his right hand had begun to burn. Not surface heat, but a deeper pain, as if a red-hot wire were stirring in his marrow. At the same time, on the real-time spectrogram, the Rust-Sound's activity index rocketed vertically, breaching the safety threshold.
Then, the audio file Zhou Keran had transferred began automatically looping.
Not a device malfunction. The moment he clicked it, the audio file itself had embedded like a virus into the system's底层, replicating and playing itself. Lin Wan tried to force-delete it; the system returned File in use, cannot perform operation.
"It's contamination!" Lin Wan's voice tightened. "That audio carries a rule-level information virus!"
Lu Baoyi said nothing.
The burning in his right hand and the frequency of the metallic tremor in the audio were resonating. Each resonance felt like a chisel hammering against his skull; the red afterimage at the edges of his vision grew denser.
Stranger still, hallucinations began before his eyes—
Flowing red data streams cascaded down like waterfalls from the top of his visual field. The structure of those streams was unlike anything he had seen: not binary 0s and 1s, but a more ancient, more twisted symbol system, a hybrid of oracle bone script and circuit boards.
Amidst this chaotic data waterfall, he glimpsed the outline of a door.
The door stood slightly ajar; from the crack, thick dark-red light seeped.
"Boss!" Lin Wan cried. "Your hand!"
Lu Baoyi looked down.
On the greyed area of his right hand, clear red patterns, isomorphic to the hallucinated data streams, were now emerging. The patterns were alive, crawling and spreading under his skin, slowly consuming the surrounding normal skin tone.
This thing is rewriting my biological code.
The realization sent a chill down Lu Baoyi's spine.
But he had no time for fear.
Because the next second, every screen on the main console exploded again. This time not visual contamination, but genuine data overload—torrents of unparsable gibberish flooded in through every port, firewalls shredded like paper, system resource usage instantly hit 99%.
"It's reverse-penetrating!" Lin Wan's fingers flew across the keyboard, leaving afterimages. "Trying to hack into our main database!"
"Dream on!" Lu Baoyi cursed, typing a string of commands one-handed. "Initiate Iron Wall Protocol, physically cut all external ports! Lin Wan, use the Liu Ren algorithm to build a temporary firewall, structure must be chaotically nested, lead it through a maze—this game is starting to look like an open world, gotta clear the map first!"
"On it!"
The clatter of keys fell like Dense rain.
Sweat beaded on Lu Baoyi's forehead. The burning in his right hand had spread to his forearm; the red patterns bulged and pulsed like blood vessels. The hallucinations worsened; he could barely see the screen, operating by muscle memory alone.
In the chaos, he glimpsed the surveillance monitor.
It displayed a night-view of the camp's perimeter—the river placid, the opposite cliffs dark and looming. But at the edge of the frame, the flap of Zhou Keran's tent stirred slightly.
Someone coming out? Or…
No time to ponder.
Because at that moment, a completely alien perception brutally forced its way into his consciousness along the conduit formed by the patterns on his right hand.
Not data. Not images.
Something more primal—cold, dark, hungry, and a bone-deep loneliness, the feeling of being abandoned by the entire world.
Lu Baoyi froze.
This feeling… was way too fucking familiar.
Not because he had experienced it, but because he had perceived it in someone else. In the spectral remnants of the jade pendant from that night of Resonance without physical contact, he had captured a barely visible trace of emotional residue belonging to Qian Yiyan.
That same loneliness.
The loneliness of being evaluated as a tool. The loneliness of being shackled. The loneliness of knowing the path ahead was a cliff yet having to walk it step by step.
And now, into that loneliness, something far more terrifying had mixed—the despair of dying.
Like someone sinking slowly into the depths, reaching toward the surface but grasping only void.
"Fuck…"
Lu Baoyi swore aloud. Not from fear, but from something far more Intense—anger.
Anger at this goddamn fucked-up world. Anger at that piece of shit lurking beneath the river, treating humans as food. And for Qian Yiyan, who at this very moment was facing all of that alone across a millennium… a pang of something dangerously close to protectiveness.
He had no time to analyze where this feeling came from.
He only knew: he couldn't let her die.
At the very least, she shouldn't die alone.
"Lin Wan!" Lu Baoyi roared, his voice hoarse. "Divert all computing power to the Liu Ren matrix! I'm sending a big package over!"
"What package?!" Lin Wan didn't look up.
"The Anchor Protocol! " Lu Baoyi typed the final line one-handed—his trump card: a composite protocol based on the Chiyou framework his father Lu Yuan had left behind, blending modern chaotic encryption with ancient astral algorithms. Its sole function: to forcibly define an absolutely stable coordinate within a chaotic rule environment.
The cost was immense. The success rate unknown.
But right now, he couldn't care less.
Command entered. Enter.
For an instant, the entire camp's lights dimmed. All equipment fans accelerated wildly, emitting a piercing whine. The Liu Ren matrix on the main console began to overload; the green data streams almost凝成实质.
At the matrix's center, an immensely complex coordinate package, encrypted and nested in countless layers, was being compressed and encapsulated. Then—
Along the conduit formed by the red patterns on his right hand, it was violently hurled toward that dying consciousness he perceived.
Lu Baoyi attached no words.
He merely branded at the core of that coordinate package a single, simplest pulse, composed purely of will:
*Coordinates locked. *
*I'm here. *
The instant the protocol activated, a strange throbbing came from beneath the skin of his right hand. As if countless cold, non-Euclidean geometric symbols were washing back along the channel, rewriting the arrangement of cells beneath his skin. Not destruction—the overlay of another order. The greyed area grew faintly warm; beneath its smooth surface, the flowing dark-red patterns became more distinct, like some ancient yet futuristic circuit board branded into his flesh.
- Cold Fire and the Reflection
Qian Yiyan's consciousness sank into darkness.
The hunger of the thing beneath the river clutched her with a thousand hands, dragging her deeper. Memories began to fragment—the rain on the day her father fell, the Empress Dowager's icy smile as she bestowed the elixir, Cao Yan's two soft taps on the iron cylinder, the ever-burning pain of the rust-mark on her shoulder…
All of it would be devoured.
Even Qian Yiyan herself, as an existence.
Just as she was about to abandon the struggle—
*BOOM. *
Not a sound. Something far more fundamental.
From deep within the pendant, it exploded, traveling upstream along the conduit of blood and astral force, slamming violently into her nearly dissolved consciousness core. That impact contained no language, no images—only a single, brutal, unwavering, soul-scalding proclamation of existence.
But beneath that proclamation's外壳, Qian Yiyan's敏锐 perception caught something deeper: the light's essence was a string of icy, precise coordinates spanning dimensions. Yet at its core, wrapped within it, was a defiant human will.
Like an embrace written in mathematical formulas.
Like a promise constructed in code.
Contradictory, yet undeniably real.
Qian Yiyan's dilating pupils abruptly contracted.
Astral force, like oil touched by a spark, exploded. She no longer retreated, no longer resisted. Borrowing that anchoring force roaring from the other side, she condensed her entire consciousness into a single point and then—
Thrust it back toward the hunger-core of the riverbed thing.
Not an attack.
Something cruder… a brand.
Wrapping that coordinate information from the other side in astral force, she stamped it like a seal onto the surface of that void of craving.
In that instant, the thing beneath the river jerked.
Not a physical tremor. A existential-level bewilderment. It seemed unable to comprehend—why had this prey, about to be devoured, suddenly turned into… a nail?
A burning nail driven into its stomach, bearing the mark of coordinates from another spacetime.
Seizing that moment of bewilderment, Qian Yiyan's consciousness yanked back.
The needle withdrew from the rust-mark. Astral force severed. The channel to the pendant closed.
She opened her eyes.
The pale white cold flame still burned in the cabin, silent, illuminating the space like an ice cave. The oil lamp on the table had long died; the oil had solidified into white wax. The cabin walls, the floor, even her own hair were coated with a thin layer of frost.
And the pendant in her palm—
At its center, the outline of that door now radiated a faint yet steady dark-gold halo. The halo was no longer viscous, but clear and warm, like autumn sunlight filtering through a window lattice.
The door remained slightly ajar.
But what seeped from the crack was no longer icy hunger, but… a faint, almost imperceptible warmth, tinged with a geek's sardonic humor.
Qian Yiyan looked down at the pendant. For a long time.
Then she exhaled, very slowly, very softly.
White mist crystallized into frost in the frigid air.
Outside the door came Qiuyan's stifled gasp and Zhang Nu's low, questioning voice. But she paid them no heed.
She simply raised her left hand and gently brushed her fingertip across the glowing door on the pendant.
The corner of her mouth moved, almost imperceptibly.
As if it were a smile.
Or a response to some clumsy yet burning algorithm-embrace across a millennium.
At the same moment, the Old Gentleman's Furnace camp.
Lu Baoyi slumped in his chair like a fish just hauled ashore.
The burning in his right hand had subsided; the red patterns had slowly faded, leaving only a patch of smooth, greyish skin slightly paler than the surrounding area, like a birthmark. The hallucinations vanished, the data waterfalls receded, the system gradually returned to normal.
Only the automatically generated log line on the main console screen proved that what had just happened was no illusion:
【03:21:47】Rule-Contamination Event Logged: Detected high-dimensional information impact. Anchor Protocol deployed as countermeasure. Protocol execution successful. Target coordinates marked. Cost: Irreversible localized rule-based modification to subject Lu Baoyi's right hand dorsum.
Lin Wan leaned in to read, sucking in a sharp breath. "Irreversible?!"
"As long as I don't die, it's fine." Lu Baoyi waved a hand, his voice weary. "Any… other anomalies just now?"
"Yes!" Lin Wan pulled up the surveillance log. "Look at this—"
The screen displayed a close-up of Zhou Keran's secondary monitor. At the exact second Lu Baoyi had launched the Anchor Protocol, that screen clearly flashed a single frame of an extremely eerie reflection:
Not a modern scene.
An old, ancient street—bluestone pavement, shops with lanterns on both sides. At the frame's center, a peddler was closing his stall; on one of the lanterns hanging from his shoulder pole, the character "Cao" was distinctly visible.
The reflection lasted only 0. something seconds.
The surveillance footage clearly captured that, in the instant that frame flashed, behind Zhou Keran's glasses, her pupils contracted almost imperceptibly. But the rhythm of her typing did not falter for an instant. Almost in the same frame the reflection vanished, her left hand had already pressed a custom hotkey—not to clear the screen, but to trigger a preset spectrum-noise generation program, drowning any residual data traces in white noise. Simultaneously, her right hand slid across her tablet, logging an encrypted entry.
The entire motion was fluid, taking less than a second.
Lin Wan lowered her voice: "She saw it. And she handled it… way too professionally."
Lu Baoyi stared at the frozen frame, his gaze growing colder.
"Boss, this…" Lin Wan hesitated.
"Pretend we didn't see." Lu Baoyi closed his eyes. "But encrypt the log, classification set to maximum. From now on, all data she touches must be run through a silent sentinel. This game just went from single-player to multiplayer—gotta watch out for cheaters."
"Understood."
The tent fell quiet.
Only the equipment fans hummed.
- Epilogue · Dawn Mist in Bianjing
A thousand kilometers away, a thousand years earlier.
The third quarter of the Yin hour. Bianjing Imperial City, Ruyi Hall.
Empress Dowager Liu awoke early. Or rather, she had hardly slept at all.
Past fifty, wielding power for nearly a decade, she had long grown accustomed to reviewing memorials late into the night and pondering her chess moves before dawn. As the palace maid combed her hair, her eyes were closed, but behind her lids, a rapid succession of names, numbers, and Complicated and intricate webs of interest flashed through her mind.
Qian Weiyan, Cao Liyong, Lü Yijian, Fan Zhongyan, Bao Zheng…
Canal transport, frontier garrisons, mining taxes, river conservancy, and the rumors hidden in the shadows—about portents, about the Mandate of Heaven.
Every piece must be placed where it would serve best.
"Your Majesty, Chunying has sent a confidential report." The attending maid spoke softly.
Empress Dowager Liu opened her eyes. "Read it."
The maid unrolled a small slip of paper: "Qian Yiyan moored overnight at a bend in the Xingzhou river. At Zi hour, cold fire appeared in her cabin, lasting a hundred breaths; frost formed from the chill. Her vital signs did not weaken but rather solid; external intervention suspected. Lü Gui has made contact as planned; the travel permit has been delivered. However, Chunying added a comment: Qian Yiyan's aspect of solitude bears, she said, 'a certain resemblance to Your Majesty in former days.'"
The Empress Dowager was silent.
After a long moment, she slowly raised a hand, signaling the maid to stop combing.
In the bronze mirror, a face still beautiful but now etched with fine lines looked back. In those lines were stored too many late-night deliberations, Too many choices, leaving no alternative, too much… loneliness that could not be spoken.
"Like me?" she repeated softly, the corner of her mouth lifting in a faint, almost self-deprecating arc. "She is luckier than I. At least… she has someone across a thousand years who can throw her an anchor."
The maid dared not respond.
The Empress Dowager closed her eyes again.
"Transmit my decree." Her voice was calm, but freighted with unassailable finality. "Qian Yiyan has performed meritorious service in her thorough investigation of river works. Bestow upon her one hundred bolts of silk and fifty taels of gold. Furthermore, reflecting upon her orphaned state and solitary struggles since her father's early death, I graciously bestow upon her marriage to Cao Yan, the legitimate son of the Cao family. Order the Imperial Astrological Bureau to calculate an auspicious date immediately; the wedding must take place within ten days. Issue the decree publicly, so that all may know."
The maid trembled. "Within ten days?! Your Majesty, the Bureau… Astronomer Qian herself is its Director. This decree would pass through her hands…"
"It is precisely because it will pass through her hands." The Empress Dowager opened her eyes; in the mirror, her gaze was as cold as a blade. "I want it fast. Fast enough that she has no time to react, fast enough that the Cao family has no time to demur, fast enough that those lurking in the shadows who wish to exploit these portents have no time to scheme."
She paused, her voice growing colder. "As for the Astrological Bureau… how many of her colleagues truly accept a woman as their Director? Let this decree fall, and I shall see who panics first—her or them."
"Your servant understands."
"And add this to the marriage decree," the Empress Dowager added. "Qian Yiyan shall retain her post as Director of the Astrological Bureau after marriage, with special responsibility for investigating riverine anomalies. I am curious to see whether the Cao family would rather have a daughter-in-law who bears sons, or a Director of the Astrological Bureau who can pacify the Yellow River."
The maid bowed. "As you command."
Her hair dressed, her phoenix crown secured, the Empress Dowager rose and walked to the window.
Beyond, the dawn mist lay thick, shrouding all of Bianjing in Hazy grey-white. The distant eaves of palaces, the nearby vermilion gates of the palace walls—all were reduced to vague outlines.
Like a chessboard whose situation was unclear.
The Empress Dowager stared into that mist for a long time.
Then she turned to the maid. "Retrieve that memorial Fan Zhongyan submitted the day before yesterday—the one requesting a rigorous investigation into corruption in river works. I intend to grant it publicly at this morning's court session."
The maid was again startled. "Your Majesty, that memorial directly implicates Chancellor Lü's protégés…"
"I am aware." The Empress Dowager cut her off, a sharp light flashing in her eyes. "Lü Yijian has been reaching too far lately. He needs a tap on the wrist. Besides…"
She paused, her voice dropping as if speaking to herself:
"I intend to protect this piece, Qian Yiyan. But before I protect her, I must first sweep the dust from the board."
The maid dared ask no more. She bowed and withdrew.
The hall fell silent once more.
The Empress Dowager stood alone at the window, gazing at the palace outlines gradually sharpening in the dissipating mist.
The wind carried in the first chill of early spring, and with it, an almost imperceptible scent drifting from the direction of the Yellow River…
The smell of rust.
She frowned slightly and raised a hand to close the window.
But that scent seemed already to have seeped into every timber, every brick of this palace.
Like an omen.
Like an erosion…
that had long since begun, yet remained unnoticed by all.