85: Chapter 85 Peppermints and Frowns: She Said It Tastes Like Earth

The blood on the west wall had not yet dried.

The militia leveled the rips in the sandbags carved open by chain axes — sand mixed with blood splattered everywhere, settling into dark brown, viscous marks in the twilight.

Outside the southern defense line, the three corpses of the Chaos Scout had been dragged deep into the swamp and buried; the wind carried the lingering stench of sulfur from the reed beds into the town, mixing with the smell of gunpowder drifting from the Arsenal, like a pot of burnt, bitter medicine.

A veteran of Riverbend Town crouched behind the sandbags, cleaning his gun barrel; he had wiped it three times and still had not stopped.

It was not that the gun was not clean; it was that after the fighting stopped, his hands felt empty and could not stop trembling.

A roar suddenly erupted inside the Medical Station: "Bandages! Bring another roll — not cotton, a tourniquet! This man's femoral artery is spurting blood!"

The voice of the Deputy Medical Officer, Alice Vian, pierced through the two layers of canvas, carrying that sharp, uncompromising intensity unique to the operating table.

Two militiamen carrying a stretcher burst through the door curtain, the corner of the stretcher striking the door frame and sending wood chips flying everywhere.

The door curtain was splattered with a dark stain, indistinguishable whether it was blood or herbal tea.

Alice had been performing surgery for seven hours straight; she leaned against the door frame holding a cup of tea, her fingers still trembling slightly from holding surgical clamps for so long.

She was waiting for Locke to bring in the last casualty — a miner whose calf had been pierced by shrapnel.

Locke had carried the man on his back for nearly a mile, and the miner's blood had soaked through most of his leather armor.

When he placed the man on the stretcher, he was wheezing like a bellows, his first words focused on the other person: "Quick, look at his leg — the shrapnel went in from the side, a small opening with a wide base, I suspect the bone is shattered inside!"

"Your back is injured too." Alice swept her gaze over a scratch on his shoulder blade.

"Just a scratch." Locke waved his hand, wiping the blood from his axe blade onto his trouser leg. "He bled all over my back the whole way, and I didn't even feel any pain — which means that axe didn't even cut through. Tend to him, don't worry about me."

"Lie down."

"I said it's just a scratch —"

"Locke." Alice's voice remained cold but dropped a degree. "The edges of the scratch on your shoulder blade are oozing purple-black fluid. With wounds from Chaos weapons, you can't tell the depth for the first six hours. The miner's surgery will take forty minutes — you can't afford to wait."

Locke looked into her ice-blue eyes, the words stuck in his throat.

"The last time you said 'can't afford to wait,' Second Lieutenant Cassius almost died on the operating table. You remember." Alice set her teacup on the wooden shelf by the door. "That time, he stood at the entrance of the Medical Station for three extra minutes, giving orders to his subordinates. As soon as he finished, he collapsed."

"That was three years ago —"

"Lie down."

Locke sat on the edge of another stretcher. As he unbuckled his leather armor, he saw in the firelight a pale purple halo around the scratch — he had not noticed it at all before.

After the street fighting ended, Lin Mo stood on the western wall until the deepest minutes of twilight.

His collar was stained with swamp mud, and his cuff had a small tear from the dagger he'd been holding in a reverse grip — something Locke had pointed out to him later; he had not noticed it the whole time.

In the pile of rubble at the foot of the wall, half of a shattered Chaos chain axe lay, its teeth entangled with a small fragment of a steel door plate from the Arsenal.

He pried the fragment loose and turned it over in his palm — the back was engraved with Old Tom's quality control number, "T-037".

This steel plate had only been welded on last week. Old Tom had tapped it three times after welding it, saying it could withstand at least three axe blows. Today, it had blocked five.

The plate cracked on the fourth blow, and when the fifth blow fell, Locke launched a flank attack, piercing the scout's waist and abdomen. The chain axe flew out of his hand and smashed a brick at the corner of the wall.

Old Tom never inflated his specifications.

Lin Mo stuffed the fragment into his pocket. He recalled his habit from when he was a product manager — keeping an "accident fragment" after every version release.

It was not for writing post-mortems, but to remind himself: there is no perfect defense plan, and every breached gap is an angle that was not anticipated last time.

The first wave of Chaos probes had been completely wiped out, and the second wave was on the way, only to be more cunning — specifically targeting the spot where the steel plate had been smashed.

He should have taken advantage of his clarity to comb through the weaknesses one by one and update the defense plan, but after coming down from the wall, his body made the decision for him — sitting on the wooden bench at the entrance of the Medical Station.

The bench was made by Yang Shitou using scraps from the Arsenal.

There was an irregular seam on the bench surface; it was not that the wood had cracked, but an expansion joint Yang Shitou had deliberately left when joining two types of wood.

He said that new wood and old wood had different expansion coefficients, and if he did not leave a seam, the chair would burst apart after surviving one summer.

Lin Mo traced the seam back and forth with his fingertips; his pads could feel the sudden change in texture at the junction of the pine and oak — smooth on one side, rough on the other.

When he used to work overtime, he would always touch the rings left by coffee cups on his desk. Different universes, same little habit; it was all about finding a tiny tactile anchor for his brain.

The door of the Medical Station was pushed open. It was not lifted from the outside, but pushed open from the inside by someone using their back.

Alice came out carrying two cups of herbal tea, her elbows holding up the door curtain. She turned very slowly, afraid the curtain would swing back and hit the disinfectant sprayer on the door frame.

She sat down beside Lin Mo and handed him one of the cups. It was a new cup, part of a batch Yang Shitou had just made last week, with no graduation marks on the wall.

"Where's your old cup?" Lin Mo glanced at the surface of the cup.

"I dropped it. Knocked it over while performing surgery on the fourth casualty." Alice set her own cup on the armrest; there was a thin line etched by a needle on the wall of her cup. "This new one is for you. Yang Shitou says every time you get a cup, you pick the biggest one — not because you can drink that much, but because you want one cup to equal three, so you don't have to keep running back and forth."

"He even noticed that."

"Yang Shitou is honest, not blind. He told me that last month you did not pick up a cup for five days in a row, and he thought something had happened to you. Later, he found you on the wall and saw you drinking water from an old tin can, the taste of rust making the tea bitter. You didn't change your cup because you saw how he spent half a day finding wood with matching grain for every new cup he made — you didn't want to make him go to extra trouble." Alice took a sip of her tea, her gaze not on the cup, but on Locke directing the militia to change the sandbags in the square.

"What did you tell him?"

"I said — next time he doesn't pick one up, you go knock on his door. This man responds to being pushed, not being babied."

The corners of Lin Mo's mouth twitched very slightly. The phrase "responds to being pushed, not being babied," when spoken by Alice, carried a completely different weight than when spoken by Locke.

When Locke said it, it was because he was a tough guy himself; when Alice said it, it was a diagnosis of a person's behavioral pattern, made with the precision of a scalpel after three years and seven months of observation.

The sandbags in the square had blocked the first wave of impact for him that morning, and sand had leaked all over from the axe-hewn rips. The militia were using shovels to scoop the scattered sand back into new bags.

The bowl-cut boy gasped every time he bent down to scoop sand — not because he was tired, but because the standard sandbags made by Old Tom were uniformly ninety-two centimeters long and weighed exactly fifty-three pounds when full, which was not much different from the boy's own weight.

Locke roared at him: "If you can't shovel a full one, shovel half! Forcing yourself to carry the whole bag isn't bravery — if you can't straighten your back tomorrow, who will stand on the wall for you?" The boy did not answer, but the next scoop was indeed only half a shovel.

Lin Mo set the cup on his knees. The heat burned through the fabric; he was used to drinking it warm, and this temperature was beyond his comfort zone, but he did not move it away.

He noticed that before Alice came out, she had brewed hers to the same temperature. It was not a mistake — she needed that heat to keep her fingers awake and sensitive after surgery.

She did not treat him differently; she gave him the same temperature.

"That veteran today," Alice began, "the shrapnel in his leg has been removed. Three pieces, the largest one stuck between the fibular periosteum and the muscle. Old Tom said he stood behind the sandbags for nearly five hours without being relieved. He's older, his bone density is dropping; the same shrapnel might have embedded three-tenths of an inch into a twenty-year-old militiaman's leg, but for him, it only went in an inch, making it even more painful to extract. He didn't utter a sound on the operating table from start to finish."

"Next time, he'll still stand at the very front." Lin Mo said.

"You know he won't change, yet you let him stand there."

"I also let Locke stand at the very front." Lin Mo's voice dropped a degree. "I have never stopped anyone from standing at the front — because from the very first day, these people chose the front themselves. The veteran's marksmanship is the only thing he trusts. His exact words were: 'It's only useful if the trigger is pulled; if not, it's just scrap metal. Every extra shot before I die counts.' He isn't afraid of dying; he's afraid of running out of bullets and having no face to meet the brothers who died in the same trench."

He paused and moved the cup from his knees to the bench — it was too hot, his knees finally could not take it anymore. "My mentor once said —"

"Your mentor?" Alice turned her head. She rarely heard this word from Lin Mo.

The people of Blackstone Town called him Archon, Locke called him Lord Lin Mo, and Old Tom called him young man. No "mentor" had ever appeared in his past.

She held her teacup in mid-air, waiting for him to continue.

"The mentor who brought me into the industry back on Earth. He said a good product manager should treat every requirement like a veteran treats a trigger — not fast, but accurate. Back then, I didn't understand the weight of that sentence, but now I do. Every bullet only has one chance."

The corners of Lin Mo's mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "By the way, this is the first time you've heard me say this word — Earth."

Alice did not reply immediately. She took something out of her pocket and placed it gently on the bench beside him — a peppermint candy.

The candy was wrapped in a thin cotton square patched together from scraps left over by Yang Shitou's wife, who was a seamstress. The cotton had been washed many times, the pattern faded until it was almost invisible, but it felt soft to the touch.

The candy wrapper still held the warmth from her pocket: a mix of the rubbery smell of medical tape, the bitter fragrance of herbal tea, and the cold, rusty scent of a metal lighter.

"The second one today?" Lin Mo glanced at the corner of a candy wrapper peeking out from the edge of her pocket.

"I only took one out." She moved the candy wrapper slightly, as if to clear up some misunderstanding. "The rest are saved for you."

Lin Mo unwrapped the candy and put it in his mouth. A chill exploded from the tip of his tongue, rushing straight into his nasal cavity — it was very similar to the impact of toothpaste left in the mouth back on Earth, but he could no longer remember exactly what toothpaste tasted like.

After holding it for three seconds, he habitually pushed the candy to the right side of the root of his tongue — there was a small spot there that had been numbed by the hot tea.

The coolness of the peppermint dissipated slower than usual; he could feel the coolness spreading across the tip of his tongue to the size of a copper coin, but by the time it reached the root of his tongue, it was only the size of a grain of rice.

"Every time you have this candy, you pause for a moment." Alice said.

"What?"

"You peel the wrapper, pop it in your mouth, and pause for about three seconds. Then you use your tongue to push the candy to the side—I didn't catch whether it was the left or the right, but it was definitely toward the back."

She wasn't looking at his mouth; her gaze was fixed on the torch Aunt Zhang had just relit in the square.

The evening breeze tilted the flame, dyeing the silhouette of her profile from a cold white to a warm orange.

"You didn't pause when you ate these back on Earth."

"Because I didn't have to ration them back then."

Before the words had even left his lips for a second, he added the second half, the truth: "There are less than forty peppermint candies left in the bag. Every one I eat is one less. It's been three years and seven months since I crossed over—an average of a little over one per month. It's going faster than I expected."

Alice turned to look at him.

There was no pity in her eyes—no drooping corners, no furrowed brows.

She was simply recording.

It was like recording a casualty's vitals on an operating table: heart rate, respiration, pupillary response to light.

She converted these indicators into a different set of data: candy inventory, monthly consumption rate, estimated exhaustion date.

Once the data was organized in her mind, she performed an action that belonged to a "decision"—taking the one from her own pocket and placing it next to the unpeeled candy by his hand.

"I don't like sweets," she said.

Lin Mo looked at the two peppermint candies side by side on the bench—the one wrapped in faded cotton cloth was the one she had just taken out, and the other was the one he had placed there earlier.

The two wrappers overlapped, and in the dim light, the lingering red and blue patterns on the cotton cloth were almost indistinguishable.

"Last time, you put a piece of honey candy in your mouth," he said.

"Maltose boiled by Old Li himself, with nothing else added—you spat it out in less than three seconds. It's not that you don't like sweets. It's that you're afraid of getting addicted, so that when the day comes that there's no more sweetness, you won't be able to bear it."

Her brows furrowed ever so slightly.

It wasn't the annoyance of being exposed, but rather the confusion of discovering a hidden program within her own operating logic that she hadn't known existed.

Immediately, she withdrew her hand from the candy and picked up her teacup.

The tea had already gone cold.

"You mentioned your master just now," she said, changing the subject.

"What happened to him later?"

Lin Mo looked at her.

He knew this wasn't an interrogation—just like her lie about "not liking sweets" and the truth he had exposed.

True communication between them had never relied on answers, but on the phrase "I am listening" conveyed by the question itself.

"After he retired, he went to a company where overtime wasn't required. Before he left, he left all his documents to me. He added notes after every requirement—not for the sake of the handover, but his own predictions on whether that requirement would survive three versions. I checked later; his prediction accuracy was seventy-eight percent."

He lowered the second half of his sentence, so only the area around the bench could hear: "The remaining twenty-two percent were variables that appeared after he left, ones he hadn't foreseen. Every time I review, I mark those twenty-two separately. Not to hold anyone accountable—but to wonder, if he were by my side, how he would judge those variables."

Alice didn't comment.

She placed the two items she had gotten from Old Tom that afternoon on the bench: a modified lighter and an object wrapped in cloth, which she didn't unfold first.

"Old Tom asked me to pass this on," she said.

"To the other one—the other me."

Lin Mo picked up the lighter and turned it over.

The striking wheel had been re-machined, and the spring was so tight that you could hear the metallic tension—Old Tom always tightened springs an extra half-turn; he didn't trust tension that was just right, saying time would wear down every spring.

On the side of the casing, the character "Ya" was carved, chiseled stroke by stroke with a file, the characters slightly crooked.

Old Tom didn't know how to read, so he had copied it from the characters Lin Mo had previously written on paper.

When finishing the last stroke, the file slipped, carving an accidental shallow groove below the character.

"What did he say?" Lin Mo asked.

"He said: 'This is for the new one. Her psychic powers are unstable; a lighter is safer than psychic ignition. Lighting an alcohol lamp in the hospital won't burn the bandages.'"

Alice repeated it word for word, even replicating the half-second pause before Old Tom said "safer."

As she spoke, her thumb was pressed on the lighter's striking wheel.

When she heard "won't burn the bandages," Lin Mo subconsciously pulled the unpeeled peppermint candy into his palm.

Old Tom was least skilled at two things in his life: fine work and speaking.

He had spent his life doing rough ironwork; the smallest part he had ever made was a mortar sight screw.

For anything smaller than that, his rule used to be "don't do what doesn't need doing."

But this time, he had spent an entire afternoon polishing the striking wheel—not because he had a deep friendship with the other Alice.

It was because this morning, standing at the door of the Medical Station, he had seen the other Alice use psychic powers to stop bleeding, and the arcs of electricity from her fingertips had splattered a meter away from an alcohol bottle.

It didn't catch fire, but he had seen it.

He hadn't said a word, just turned around, went back to the Arsenal, and dug a micro-file he hadn't used in half a year out from the bottom of his toolbox.

"He adjusted the striking wheel spring three times."

This time, Alice didn't repeat his exact words—Old Tom wouldn't say "adjusted it three times," he would just say "it's done" and hand it over.

"The first time it was too tight, the sparks were too big; he said it was more dangerous than psychic powers. The second time it was too loose, it wouldn't strike. The third time it worked, and he struck it twenty times in a row to confirm its stability. After finishing, he put the lighter on the workbench—"

Her hand rested on the lighter, her fingertips touching the striking wheel, feeling the fine grooves left by the file.

"Then he picked up the scalding hot casing directly and wiped the sweat off his hands with his apron. Old Tom's hand sweat is acidic; if it gets on metal, it accelerates rusting. He knew perfectly well how hot the striking wheel was after being struck twenty times."

Lin Mo leaned back against the chair, and the wooden slats creaked.

From Old Tom's apron to the principles of metal corrosion, when Alice recounted something, she could simultaneously notice the acidity of the maker's sweat and the lifespan of the object.

This wasn't the result of military training; it was an instinct carved into her bones when she served as a Medical Officer in the Astral Knights: every casualty's body temperature, every trace of air humidity, would affect the rate of wound infection.

The precision with which she observed the world was the same thing as the precision of her scalpel.

"Did you thank him?" Lin Mo asked.

"I said 'it works well.'"

She placed the lighter back on the chair.

"He said, 'Even if it works well, you still have to know how to use it.' Then he took the lighter back from my hand and demonstrated the correct striking posture—the thumb must be pressed directly above the striking wheel, not to the left; if it's skewed, the side sparks will burn the inside of the thumb. After demonstrating, he handed it back. His hand was stained with the machine oil he had just wiped off, and there was a grayish fingerprint on the lighter casing."

"You didn't say thank you."

"He saw my expression, waved his hand, and went back to cleaning the cannon barrel."

The peppermint candy in Lin Mo's mouth was almost gone.

He carefully folded the wrapper and tucked it into his pocket.

There were already a dozen wrappers in his pocket, each folded into a square of the same size, like a micro-archive that only he could decipher.

Alice's gaze swept over his pocket.

She saw the entire movement clearly: the right index finger and thumb pinched the bottom-left corner of the wrapper to align it with the top-right corner, the first fold, then the second.

The interval of every movement, the angle of every crease, was precise to the realm of muscle memory.

It wasn't a ritual; it was a habit.

And in this universe, all precise habits that required no conscious participation mostly came from Earth.

She pulled her own unpeeled candy from the cotton cloth, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth.

The moment the coolness exploded, her brows furrowed—more noticeably than last time.

It wasn't that the candy was colder; it was that she hadn't waited for the candy to melt on her tongue and had bitten off a small piece directly.

The coolness seeped into the gaps between her teeth, even more uncontrollable than on the surface of her tongue.

"You furrowed your brows," Lin Mo said.

She turned her head and glared at him.

The look was very peculiar: in her ice-blue eyes, there was no annoyance, only a frustration at being forced to confirm her own disappointing physiological reaction.

This expression on her—an Imperial psychic Medical Officer, an officer trained by the Astral Knights—was as absurd as a daisy hanging on a machine gun ammunition belt.

"This taste," she said, pushing the candy from between her teeth back onto her tongue, waiting two seconds as if waiting for her tongue to retake control of her sense of taste, "always makes my nose sting. It's not sweet—it's cold first, and only when it's thoroughly cold can you taste the sweetness. What do they call this on Earth?"

"Peppermint."

"Pep—permint."

She repeated it slowly, the two syllables pronounced twice as slowly as usual, as if taking a vocabulary word from an official document and kneading it into something she could chew and savor.

"Last time you said there was a kind of grass in Earth's spring—"

"That's also peppermint."

"It's different."

"The candy is refined; the grass is raw."

"The refined one is too intense."

She puffed out the cheek holding the candy—not to be cute, but because the candy had slid into the wrong position and she was using her tongue to push it back.

"The grass is gentler."

"When did you ever taste Earth's peppermint grass?"

"Your description. The way you describe it is gentler than the refined stuff."

After she finished speaking, she pushed half the candy to the other side.

"Is the spring you mentioned a fixed date every year, or does it depend on the weather?"

"Fixed every year. March to May is Earth's spring."

Lin Mo's fingers stopped on a crack in the bench.

"But Earth's spring is gone now."

"What do you mean by 'gone'?"

It wasn't that he didn't want to answer; he was translating.

Translating a fact that he had spent three years and seven months learning not to revisit in his nightmares into a frequency that Alice could receive.

"Earth is gone. After I crossed over—or before, I'm not sure how the timelines correspond. It was still there when I left. But I can never go back."

She said something he hadn't expected: "So that's why you keep the wrappers every time."

"What kind of logic is that?"

"Wrappers are packaging," she said, placing her cup back on the armrest.

Her movements were slow, as if she were laying out her deductions layer by layer.

"Packaging is meant to hold things. But your wrappers hold nothing; they're just paper. You fold the empty packaging into a fixed size and keep them in your pocket. You aren't collecting packaging. You are collecting—evidence. Proof that this candy existed, proof that Earth existed."

Lin Mo was silent for five seconds.

He reached into his pocket and touched the dozen or so wrappers folded into squares, each one the same size.

Alice was right.

He had never thought about his behavior from this angle, but the moment the words were spoken, he knew they were true.

Those wrappers weren't mementos; they were evidence.

In a universe where everyone asks "Where do you come from," carrying evidence folded into squares in one's pocket was quieter than any language, and also closer to the truth than any language.

He leaned back. Faint starlight filtered from the edge of the wall, mingling with the warm orange glow of the torches.

Alice did not ask again about the details of Earth.

She mentally converted "March to May" into the rotation period of Hope Star, then stored this number in that pocket containing peppermint candies, medical tape, and the Astral Knights emblem—together with everything she thought was worth preserving for a long time.

The night had completely settled in. The torches on the square were lit one by one by Aunt Zhang. Her order of lighting was very fixed: starting from the side door light of Old Tom's Arsenal, walking towards the center of the square one lamp at a time, stopping for two steps after lighting each one, and looking around.

The bowl-cut teenager carrying the last bag of sand passed by her, and she tugged at his sleeve.

"Wait a moment—the button on your collar has fallen off. Tomorrow you'll be switching sandbags, and the shovel handle will rub against your collarbone; you'll break skin after a day."

The teenager looked down at his collar: "No thread, I'll go back and find my sister to sew it—"

"By the time you find your sister, it'll be dawn."

She fished out needle and thread from her pocket—her needle was always threaded, saying that a thread not on a needle was like not having a needle at all. She secured the button in three stitches, pressed the teenager's shoulder with her palm after sewing, "There. Don't tell your sister it was me who sewed it—your sister said last time that I don't follow the straight line and it's crooked. So what if it's crooked? Crooked is sturdy."

The teenager walked away with the sandbag, took two steps, and turned back: "Aunt Zhang, was that new light on top of the steel workshop lit by you?"

"Not me, Old Tom ran the line himself. Do you think it's too bright?"

"It's not the brightness—it's that it's too accurate. The light shines exactly on that area of the swamp where the shrapnel hasn't been cleared. How did he know which side to shine it on?"

"Because the place he stood during the day was different from yours. You stand behind the sandbags watching the enemy, he stands on the roof watching the whole town. He watched for six hours on the roof to see which part wasn't cleared."

She put the needle and thread back into her pocket and glanced at the spotlight on the roof, "Ask him yourself next time. He won't reason with you, but he will take you up to the roof."

Aunt Zhang continued walking towards the center of the square. She lit the fires in this order, not to save oil—it was because her husband had said before that the darkest places at night are the corners. The Arsenal side door is the most isolated; lighting that one first means one less dark corner in the whole town.

Her husband had his left hip shattered by an orc three years ago and has been bedridden since; every evening he counts how many torches are lit in the town from the window. After lighting the last one, she glanced towards the direction of her own window. The light inside the window flickered twice; it was his signal by tapping the glass with his finger. It meant: I saw it, twelve in total, one more than last night.

Locke walked over from the direction of the Arsenal, saw the two people on the bench from afar, and paused for a second.

His biological clock told him that the longer Lin Mo sat on the bench, the more it meant he was pondering a decision for an unconventional defense plan.

He didn't walk closer, turned into the Arsenal, and fished out that bottle of ale from Old Tom's drawer. Old Tom was squatting by the cooling pool, calibrating the rifling of a new gun barrel—this was prepared for tomorrow's new defense line; he heard that Lin Mo would most likely draw a completely different deployment map tonight.

"He is still sitting on the bench." Locke poured two cups and placed one of them by the cooling pool. Old Tom didn't take it; he had to finish the last few circles of rifling. "He's been sitting for over two hours."

"Let him sit." Old Tom placed the rifling tool on his knees and took a sip from the wine glass. He never drinks while working, but the tool in his hand was already put down—indicating that the work for tonight was done. "It's rare for him to sit this long. The longer he sits, the more layers the new defense line he draws on the map tomorrow will have compared to today. Don't you also sleep longer than usual before every fight?"

"I am tired from fighting. He is not. He is thinking about things until he's more tired than fighting."

"It's the same thing." Old Tom placed the wine glass back by the pool and fixed the new gun barrel on the workbench with three-finger-wide iron clamps. Under the firelight, four thin spiral lines on the inner wall of the gun barrel were clearly visible—they were the ones he pulled out by hand, one by one, today. The side of his left thumb had blisters rubbed by the file, the blisters had burst, and new calluses had formed. "Did you notice his pocket?"

"Candy wrappers." Locke said, "Every time he puts a candy wrapper away, his movements are especially light. Last time I helped him move the map on the table and accidentally knocked over an unwrapped candy, the speed at which he rushed in from outside the door was faster than a Chaos Scout charging."

"Brought from Earth." Old Tom turned the gun barrel half a circle, checked the inner wall against the firelight, and used the two ruined ones from yesterday for comparison, "In the entire Galaxy, only the candies in his pocket are produced on Earth. He is saving them one by one."

Locke didn't speak, spinning the wine glass in his hand.

"I used to think he was stingy because he couldn't bear to eat them." Locke said, "Later, seeing him on the battlefield, he unhesitatingly threw the last grenade into the gap of the Chaos position—the scout rushing at the very front had his head blown apart by that grenade. I understood then. He saves things not because he can't bear to use them himself, but because he is afraid that if things are lost, they can never be retrieved."

"You've learned to say things like that too." Old Tom glanced at him sideways.

"Learned it from him." Locke raised his wine glass and gestured towards the bench without saying a toast. "Old Tom, how much longer do you think that bag of candies will last?"

"Why do you worry about this?"

"I'm wondering, what kind of expression will he have on the day that bag of candies is finished."

Old Tom put down the gun barrel and picked up the oil-stained rag on the workbench to wipe his hands. He wiped very slowly, from the base of his fingers to the tips, wiping one by one—it wasn't because there was too much oil on his hands, but to use this action to delay the answer. He was the oldest person in Blackstone Town, and he knew that an answer worth delaying was mostly not pleasant to hear.

"The day the candy is finished," Old Tom said, "he will fold the last candy wrapper to the same size as all the previous ones. Then he will stand on the city wall and redraw the new defense line—three layers more than the day before. It's not that he doesn't care that the candy is gone, it's that the things he cares about have never been just candy. He has saved candy for three years and seven months, not to cry once he eats the last one. It's so that before he eats the last one, the days of those who can't get candy won't be so bitter."

Locke spun the wine glass in his hand three times. He wasn't digesting this statement—these things he saw clearly every day while following behind Lin Mo. He was just silently calculating: three years and seven months, if it were himself, could he manage to eat only one a day.

"Can't do it." He gave the conclusion himself.

"What?"

"You said he saved for three years and seven months. I calculated, I couldn't even last three weeks. The first week my alcohol addiction would kick in, the second week my axe would itch and I'd want to chop things, the third week—"

"The third week you would distribute all the candy to the militia, not a single one left."

Locke froze for a moment, then laughed. It was that kind of rough-voiced laugh of a brute who is pleased to be exposed. "You really understand me."

"Every time you distribute things, you distribute them until nothing is left. Every time Lin Mo distributes things, he keeps one. It's not that he is stingier than you, it's that you forget after distributing, and he keeps that one to remember—how many were originally in this pocket." Old Tom threw the rag back onto the workbench, "The two of you, one is responsible for distributing, one is responsible for remembering. Without one, Blackstone Town wouldn't have lasted until today."

When they drank to the third cup in the Arsenal, the sound of the forging hammer stopped completely. The light of the torches cast straight pillars of fire on the walls, and Blackstone Town was operating quietly in the night—not following anyone's orders, but the inertia left behind by everyone who didn't slack off during the day at their respective posts.

When Lin Mo stood up, the candy in his mouth had completely dissolved. He folded the two candy wrappers into squares of the same size—one into his left pocket, one placed beside Alice's cup. She didn't see it, but when she came back to collect the cups, she would definitely know.

When his hand pulled out of his pocket, his fingertips touched a tiny crystal that had dissolved to the end. He looked down—under the moonlight, the crystal was shining at his fingertips. It wasn't a reflection, but more like a thin silver-white line glowing inside the crystal, the shape of the pattern was exactly the same as the cross-section of the special mineral vein he found deep in the mine last month.

He remembered what Old Tom had said before: the mineral veins under Hope Star are not divided by depth, but by density. Some minerals grow scattered, some are squeezed together, the higher the density, the greater the pressure the deep stratum has endured. Geology on Earth calls this metamorphism—the greater the pressure, the higher the purity of the crystal.

The purity of the crystal in his hand was so high that it led to a hypothesis he didn't want to verify too quickly: Hope Star being targeted by Chaos was never because of its remote location. It was that the things buried underground were, in the eyes of Chaos, much more valuable than in the eyes of humanity.

The silver pattern flashed again in the moonlight, like a coin pressed deep in the crust for billions of years, finally flipped over by someone.

The mirror of the emperor flashed deep in his consciousness—like a screen that had been black for three days, suddenly lighting up with a line of characters. It wasn't a half-frame tactical analysis, but a short sentence he had never seen before:

"Beneath this star, lies what I have hidden. Do not touch. Do not forget."

He stuffed the crystal back into his pocket and straightened his body. Alice also stood up to tidy the cups and saw the neatly folded candy wrapper beside the edge of the cup. She picked it up, said nothing, put this new one together with the previous three, and put them into another pocket.

There were not many things in her pocket: a roll of medical tape, four peppermint candy wrappers, a new lighter made by Old Tom, and her own silver Astral Knights emblem. The emblem was against the candy wrapper, the candy wrapper was against the lighter. The three things came from three completely different places—the Empire, Earth, Blackstone Town—they didn't need any classification system to stay together quietly. Because their use was the same: they were all things she would reach in and touch when she needed to confirm she was not a tool of the Empire.

The candy dissolved to the end, leaving only a tiny crystal.

Like a miniature planet polished billions of times—

Its silver pattern, and the mineral veins under Hope Star, shared the same chemical composition.

The four things in Alice's pocket, the fourth candy wrapper was just put in tonight.

They would, on some day in the future, become on this frontier planet, the first—

No need for the Emperor's seal,

No need for the Adeptus Arbites to archive,

Nor any report number to be filled out at the logistics office—peace treaty.

Not signed with ink. It was with peppermint candy, springs, flint, and moonlight.

And the glowing pattern of the crystal on Lin Mo's fingertips,

Would, in the early morning of the fourth day,

Be marked by another Alice's psionic detector as—

"Unknown mineral sample, psionic response level: TBD. Not recommended for anyone to touch."

This is what will happen in the early morning of the fourth day.

But she touched it.