14: Chapter 14: Lin Mo's identity as a psychic is exposed; he defies all opposition.

She was discovered in the cargo hold of that crashed transport plane. While Yang Shitou was cataloging the scattered supplies, he saw a sealed metal box in the corner vibrating slightly—he thought it was a mechanical malfunction and knocked on it twice, only for a response to come from inside. It wasn't a knocking sound; it was a human voice.

By the time Lin Mo arrived, the box had already been pried open. Curled inside was a young woman—silver-white hair reaching her waist, ice-blue eyes, and cold, pale skin, wearing a grey robe stained with oil. On her wrists was a pair of silver suppression ring—the standard device used by the Empire to bind Psykers. When she lifted her head to look at Lin Mo, there was no fear in those ice-blue pupils, only a sort of scrutinizing calmness.

In that instant, he had a fleeting sensation—as if he had seen those eyes somewhere before. It wasn't a memory, but more like something deeper within him had been gently brushed. The feeling vanished in a flash, but he remembered the way it had touched him.

The transport pilot's expression changed abruptly: "I didn't know she was in the cargo hold. I received no notification about loading a Psyker before takeoff."

He crouched down to meet her gaze at eye level: "What is your name?"

"Alice Vian." Her voice was a bit raspy, but clear.

"Are those cuffs uncomfortable?"

She was silent for a moment, then nodded.

Cassius pulled him aside and told him that Imperial law required Psykers to be registered, wear suppression ring, and be managed uniformly by the Star Whisperers Court. Alice's transit documents showed she belonged to the Astral Knights' attached military medical sequence. Lin Mo asked the critical question: "If I keep her, what will be the consequences?"

Cassius remained silent for a long time: "On paper, the Empire requires Psykers to be handed over to the Star Whisperers Court. But this is the Eastern Star Sector—not many things that exist 'on paper' for the Empire remain here."

At the village meeting that night, the voices of opposition came faster than expected. Some feared that a Psyker would attract Chaos. Lin Mo waited until the noise died down slightly, then led Alice to the center of the square and had her hold out her hands—the psionic glimmer flickered on her wrists beneath the suppression ring. "What she can do is save people. The Empire ships her around like a weapon, but her designation is Medical Officer. She has treated more people than all of us here have ever seen."

That night, Lin Mo left a pack of peppermint candies at the door of Alice's new quarters. He didn't know if she liked candy—he didn't even know if she could still taste anything, as a Psyker's senses were sometimes suppressed to near nothingness by suppression ring. But he happened to have this pack of candy in his pocket, bought at an airport convenience store before he crossed over, and he hadn't been able to bring himself to eat it. He hesitated for two seconds when placing it at the door—not about whether to give it, but about what this gesture meant. Then he thought, whatever, it's just a pack of candy.

Alice sat on the edge of the temporary wooden bed, clutching the pack of candy. She didn't recognize a single character on the wrapper—it wasn't Imperial script, nor any script she had seen in the Astral Knights' training manuals. She stared at those strange characters for a long time, then unwrapped one and put it in her mouth. A chill rushed from the base of her tongue to her throat; she frowned, and then her brow slowly relaxed.

But she did not smile.

She looked down at the suppression ring on her wrists—the silver metal glinted coldly in the lamplight. The forge mark of the Imperial Star Whisperers Court was etched on the inner side of the bands; she had touched it countless times and could draw every line of that mark with her eyes closed. Eight years ago, when she first put on these cuffs, the Astropath who fitted them said something she remembered word for word to this day: 'These cuffs remind you—the value of your existence depends on your obedience to the Empire.'

She was twelve years old then. It took her eight years to understand the alternative meaning of that sentence: if she did not obey, she had no value in existing.

She sat in the darkness for a long time. The chill of the peppermint had completely faded. she carefully wrapped the remaining candies and put them in her pocket—it was the first thing she had received on this planet that wasn't an order.

The next morning, Alice appeared at the temporary medical station and began treating the refugees' wounds. The suppression ring were still on—he hadn't removed them, because once removed, the psionic fluctuations might attract the attention of Chaos. Yet, even under the restriction of the cuffs, she could still make the wounded fall into a peaceful sleep after touching her fingertips. The chaos attention level rose from 20 to 28. Not because of psionic fluctuations—but because Chaos was scanning this area, searching for the precise coordinates of the silver-haired woman.

That night, while Lin Mo was organizing his notes, that spot on his chest warmed up again—the same warmth as when he touched the octagram pendant before, but lighter, more fleeting, like someone tapping him with a fingertip from a great distance. He stopped writing for a second, stunned, then continued. He didn't record this strange sensation in his notebook—there were some things he wasn't sure should be turned into words yet.

He knew that protecting a Psyker and protecting a village were becoming one and the same.

On my wrists are a pair of silver brackets,

They enclose the entirety of my definition.

Alice's fingers lingered over the silver crystal for a long enough time. Her breathing slowed—not from nervousness, but focus. A few seconds later, she withdrew her fingers and said, "There is a layer of sealed information inside. It's not text, but a code. I can't read it—but I can feel that it is meaningful." Lin Mo looked at the crystal flowing with silver light under the oil lamp; what he thought of wasn't what it could be used for—but whether its material was the same as that metal wall.

Lin Mo opened his notebook under the kerosene lamp. Since the first day he crossed over, he had been recording everything he deemed important: Orc weaknesses, the Imperial bureaucracy, the fluctuation frequencies of underground energy, and the temperature changes of the octagram pendant. These records looked disorganized—but in his mind, they were slowly forming a web. Every piece of information was a thread on this web. He believed that one day, when enough threads were interwoven, he would see the complete shape of the web. He added today's events as well. Then he closed the book and locked it in the desk drawer.

Alice's fingers hovered over the silver crystal for a moment. Lin Mo noticed her hands were very steady—all Psykers' hands were steady, forged by day after day of focused training. Her fingertips didn't touch the crystal, but she perceived the information structure within. "A layer of sealed information. Not text, but a code," she said in the crude medical station of Blackstone Village. On this planet forgotten by the Empire, in a storage room serving as a temporary pharmacy, she had touched a technological remnant that did not belong to this era. She didn't speak after withdrawing her fingers, standing there for a long time. Lin Mo didn't rush her. He had seen this expression before—when someone discovers something they cannot immediately understand but are certain is important, they need time for that discovery to settle.

After Alice withdrew her fingers from the silver crystal, she sat in a chair at the medical station for a long time. The crystal was placed in a ceramic dish on the table, its silver patterns flowing slowly under the oil lamp. She stared at it for a long duration—not looking at its shape, but using her psionic perception to touch its outer shell over and over again. She could feel that the sealed information was very ancient, older than any Imperial archive she had ever seen. She couldn't read it, but she could feel it had weight—not physical weight, but the kind of pressure brought by information density.

She stood up and walked to the window, pushing it open to let the night breeze in. The night in Blackstone Town was very quiet, with occasional insect chirps and the footsteps of patrolling soldiers in the distance. She leaned her fingers on the windowsill and looked down at her wrists. The suppression ring reflected dim light under the oil lamp, the serial numbers on the surface clearly visible. She had never asked the meaning of that number—she had always been told that the serial numbers on Imperial Psyker suppression ring were randomly assigned. But today, in front of that metal wall, a voice told her that this number was not random. It had been matched.

After closing the window, Alice sat back down at the workbench. She picked up the silver crystal from the ceramic dish and turned it against the oil lamp. When the light passed through the crystal, the internal silver patterns would briefly brighten and then dim—like a bioluminescent insect that had been awakened and then returned to sleep. She put the crystal back in the dish and covered it with a glass dome. Then she took a blank experimental logbook from the shelf, wrote the date on the first page, and wrote only one term below: Sample · Unknown. She put the logbook and the crystal together and locked them in a drawer. The first entry in that logbook would become her most important research direction for the months to come.

—Alice Vian's first night arriving at Blackstone Village

There were a few peppermint candies left, and she couldn't bring herself to finish them. She closed the tin lid and tucked it under her pillow. Outside the window, the moon of Hope Star was slowly sliding past the treetops—cold, but bright.

[As the bright moon shines over the sea,]

[From far away we share this moment together.]

—Zhang Jiuling, "Looking at the Moon and Thinking of One Far Away." Memory fragments sealed within the mirror of the emperor quietly surfaced in the darkness.

While that tin of peppermint candies lay under the pillow, the suppression ring suddenly turned cold for an instant—as if something had reached out from afar, touched them, and then retracted.