87: In the revisions to the report in Chapter 87, she changed "efficient" to "self-consistent".

The forging hammer slammed into the red-hot steel billet.

Bang—

The anvil made the ground tremble, and sparks splattered three inches in front of Vian's boot tips, spreading out like broken gold. She did not retreat.

"Girl—" Old Tom's voice drowned out the second hammer strike. Beads of sweat hanging from his grizzled beard splashed onto the edge of the anvil. "You've been standing here for nearly half an hour; for every hammer strike I make, you write a stroke. If you want to check something, just ask."

Vian closed her notebook. She had been sitting in the town's Intelligence Center for three full days—reconciling grain rationing tables against kitchen ledgers, checking patrol rosters against communication logs, comparing canal maintenance records one by one against the physical ceramic pipe serial numbers; every single item of data had been verified three times. Now, it was time to verify the personnel.

"In the past three months, what was the scrap rate for the tripwire fuses you handled?"

The third hammer blow did not land. Old Tom switched the tongs to his left hand and straightened his back, sweat streaming down the old burn scar on his neck. "What is the standard printed on the Imperial military regulation table?"

"Twelve percent."

"Here—" He picked up a freshly quenched spring and turned it in the sunlight from the window; the steel surface was so smooth there wasn't even a trace of a crack. "For every hundred I make, I discard four. And those four aren't really scrap—it's just that the tolerance for the recast was off by less than a hair's breadth."

Vian's gaze shifted from the spring to the tool wall beside the forge. Wrenches, calipers, files, and squares were arranged in three rows from smallest to largest, each one wiped with anti-rust oil.

"Whose regulations are the tools arranged by?"

Old Tom tossed the spring into the finished goods basket with a clatter. The way he looked at her was not like looking at an Imperial investigator, but rather like looking at a layman asking "why is iron hard."

"According to my own convenience. I can reach the third one even with my eyes closed." He paused and wiped the machine oil off his hands with his apron. "You've been auditing my books for three days. I'd like to ask—are the standards of the Imperial Arsenal something you've seen with your own eyes, or are they just what's printed in the manual?"

The pen tip paused on the paper for half a second. This was the standard reaction time for an Astral Knights intelligence analyst; in two years of training, she had never let an interrogation subject counter-question her for more than a second.

But this time, she spoke.

"What's printed in the manual." Her voice was flat, without defense. "I have assessed Arsenals in seven frontier settlements, and every one of them reported their scrap rate according to the manual's standards. You are the first blacksmith to ask me this question."

Old Tom pulled off his apron and folded it twice in his hands. The forge fire cast his calloused hands in a dark red light.

"Things in the manual—" There was no sarcasm in his tone, only the certainty of a man who had been forging iron his whole life. "Are written by people sitting in offices. I'm the one who hammers the iron. The people in offices don't know that if the quenching water temperature is off by one degree, the spring will crack—I know."

Vian drew a tiny asterisk next to that line of notes. This was her shorthand mark: this sentence might overturn her standard framework.

Leaving the Arsenal, she went to the granary.

The storekeeper, Wang Defu, was a withered old man, his back slightly hunched but his eyes bright. He had been in charge of grain storage in Blackstone Town for two years; every bag of wheat that passed through his hands had to be tested for moisture by pinching the grains with his fingernails. Vian had seen his name in the kitchen ledger.

"Wang Defu." She sat down opposite him. The storage register with its frayed edges was spread out on the table. The date, quantity, source, and handler in the grid on each page were all written neatly in the same handwriting, steady without a single correction.

"For the three cartloads of wheat from Riverbend Town stored on day 1672, you recorded eight hundred and forty kilograms. In Aunt Zhang's kitchen ledger, the same shipment was recorded as eight hundred and forty-two kilograms." She pushed the notebook onto the table, her fingertip pointing at those two rows of numbers. "Where did the extra two kilograms go?"

Wang Defu did not look at the notebook. He took out a copper pipe and tapped it twice against the table leg.

"That batch of wheat traveled three days on mountain roads and was rained on twice along the way." He held the pipe in the corner of his mouth without lighting it. "The wheat absorbed moisture, so it's normal for it to weigh two kilograms more when weighed here. According to the rules of the ledger, I should have recorded eight hundred and forty. But I recorded eight hundred and forty-two." He looked up at her. "Do you know why?"

Vian did not answer, waiting for him to continue.

"Because the wheat Aunt Zhang takes carries those two kilograms of water. The water is in the wheat, and when it's steamed into porridge, it goes into the patrol team's stomachs; it's no different in nutrition than dry wheat. If I recorded it according to the ledger, the porridge she cooks would have two kilograms less consistency." He tapped the pipe gently on the table. "Ledgers are written for people to see, but porridge is for people to eat. Which one do you say is more important?"

Vian lowered her head and wrote two lines of text. When she looked up again, her tone was flat: "The porridge. But if you keep books like this, when an Imperial auditor comes to check, a difference of two kilograms is a difference of two kilograms; they won't listen to you talk about moisture."

Wang Defu finally lit his pipe, the firelight dancing in his wrinkles.

"Girl—" He exhaled a thin stream of smoke. "When was the last time an Imperial auditor came to Blackstone Town?"

Vian did not speak. She knew the answer—this planet didn't even have an official settlement number on the Imperial star map; an auditor had never been here.

Wang Defu did not wait for her to answer either. He knocked out the ash and stood up to receive the next batch of sacks, stopping after a few steps.

"You asked me about eight accounts, and not once did you ask how much I embezzled myself." He said with his back to her. "The last person who came to audit the accounts asked that in their very first sentence."

The pen tip paused on the paper for a beat longer than usual.

When the sky turned dark, she went to find Yang Shitou.

Aunt Zhang intercepted her on the path from the kitchen to the city wall. Vian had walked this path for four days; every time she passed the kitchen, she could see Aunt Zhang tending three pots at once, her apron stained with flour, her rhythm of chopping vegetables faster than any Imperial logistics soldier. Today, Aunt Zhang was not behind the stove; she stood in the middle of the road, holding a bowl of wheat porridge.

"You—" Aunt Zhang shoved the bowl into her hand, her movements so fast it was as if she had rehearsed it a hundred times. "Drink the porridge first. I've been watching you for four days, checking from morning till night, and I haven't seen you eat a single hot meal."

Vian held the bowl without moving. The rim of the coarse ceramic bowl had a small chip, and a few finely chopped green onions floated on the surface of the porridge.

"Your kitchen ledger—"

"I know what you want to ask." Aunt Zhang wiped her hands on her apron. "After every entry of grain usage, I included a person's name; not only recording how much they took, but also who ate it. The Imperial logistics manual doesn't require this."

"Why not follow the manual?"

Aunt Zhang glanced at her. That look was the same as everyone else's in Blackstone Town—not hostility, not ingratiation, but judging whether she really wanted to hear the answer or was just going through the motions.

"Have you ever eaten army rations? Those compressed squares, one pack is enough for a squad to eat a meal; the packaging is printed with calories, protein, expiration dates—all numbers." Aunt Zhang smoothed out the corner of her apron. "But it doesn't say that this pack is for Locke—Locke is big, he consumes a lot on night patrol, he needs to eat an extra half pack. It also doesn't say that Yang Shitou is on the second half of the night shift, and I need to save him a bowl of hot porridge to warm his stomach. The manual doesn't print names, but I manage the kitchen, and I manage people."

Vian drank the porridge. A small lump of thick wheat grains settled at the bottom of the bowl; rather than being burnt, it was more like it had been intentionally left that way. She didn't ask, but she had seen a very short note in the kitchen ledger: "Night patrol—leave the bottom of the porridge thick."

She handed the empty bowl back: "Thank you."

"What are you thanking me for?" Aunt Zhang took the bowl and turned to walk back, her apron billowing in the night wind. "You should be thanking yourself for checking for four days. The last person who came to audit the accounts finished the report and left in less than an hour."

Vian stood where she was. The wind flipped her notebook open to the first asterisk she had drawn this morning, where the old blacksmith's name was written. Three lines down was the granary storekeeper's name, and below that was half a page of blank space.

Soon, that blank space would be filled with the cook's name, along with a bold underline—in her shorthand system, this meant: this sentence is the ultimate challenge to her entire standard framework.

Yang Shitou was crouching beside the antenna base of the communication relay station, using a whetstone to polish the grounding copper strip that had been burred by the strong wind. Hearing the question, the whetstone in his hand paused for a beat.

"For the patrol dispatch signals of the last duty cycle, how many seconds were there between transmission and confirmation? Over the past three months, has this interval become shorter or longer?"

Yang Shitou took off the welding goggles on his forehead and looked at her for a long time. He had been a communications soldier in Blackstone Town for two years; the line of people asking him "is the signal through" could stretch outside the city wall, but no one had ever asked about "confirmation delay in seconds." He thought for nearly ten seconds before speaking.

"Three months ago, I had to wait two or three seconds; in the last half month, most of the time it's been less than a second."

"Did you change the communication equipment?"

"No." Yang Shitou pushed the goggles back and continued polishing the copper strip. "It's the patrol team that has practiced the confirmation action into a habit. Before, I had to call twice for a reply; now they answer on the first call. The machine hasn't changed, the people have gotten faster."

Vian lowered her head and wrote two lines, then looked up to ask the second question: "Have there ever been situations where the signal confirmation process was inconsistent with Imperial communication regulations? Has this inconsistency ever caused errors?"

Yang Shitou put down the whetstone, wiped the debris off the copper strip with his sleeve, and thought for even longer.

"The Imperial regulations are printed in the training manual; the rules here are what Lord Lin Mo and I tested out in actual combat. Things that are printed require three layers of approval to change once; if what we tested out is wrong, we change it the next time." He looked at her. "Which one do you say is faster?"

"The tested one."

Vian was stunned herself the moment the words left her mouth. If this sentence were spoken in the Astral Knights' reporting hall, she would have her entire quarter's evaluation score deducted.

Yang Shitou nodded, as if he had heard something that was only natural. He flipped the copper strip over to continue polishing; the sound of the whetstone scraping across the copper surface was as faint as a worm gnawing on wood.

"You asked me two questions, and I'll ask you one." He didn't look up. "In the Imperial communication regulations, every instruction must be followed by a standard confirmation code, right?"

"Correct."

"That confirmation code—" Yang Shitou stopped his hand. "Did you think it up while sitting in an office, or was it tested out on the battlefield?"

The pen tip paused for the third time. This time it wasn't because she was being counter-questioned, but because she had memorized the standard communication procedures for two years and had never thought about this question—had the people who wrote the regulations ever actually been to the battlefield?

She drew a second asterisk at the end of that line of notes and added a tiny annotation beside it: the core of systemic efficiency might not be the degree of compliance with Imperial edicts, but a kind of internal feedback speed that has not yet been standardized.

By the time the report was finished, the night was already deep.

Vian sat at the table in the Intelligence Center; outside the window, the sound of the forging hammer stopped and started again—Old Tom was leading his apprentices to rush the second batch of tripwire fuses. Amidst the rhythmic clanging of metal, she turned to the eleventh page of the report and wrote a high gothic term at the end of the penultimate paragraph. She read it once, then crossed it out. She replaced it with Low Gothic, read it again, and crossed it out again.

She left a blank line under the two scratch marks and wrote the third word using a concise, short phrase that fell between the two languages. After reading it the third time, she crossed it out again.

"It's not efficient." She said softly to the empty room, the pen tip hovering over the three scratch marks. "Efficiency can be applied to any system that conforms to Imperial standards. Efficiency only speaks of results, not the reasons."

This word was not in the Imperial military terminology list. Every military report she had ever written required the use of standardized expressions, and content outside the standard reference table was not allowed. But looking at the three scratch marks, she knew clearly—what she had found had no name in the Imperial manual.

She picked up her pen and rewrote the word in the blank space below the three scratch marks.

Self-consistent.

She put down the pen and placed the report on Lin Mo's desk, turning to leave without waiting for him to read it. It wasn't that she was afraid of criticism, but she wasn't sure if she should use such a straightforward evaluation to define a place she had only known for less than two weeks.

Coming out of the office building, she went to the Medical Station to find Alice.

She returned the precision vernier caliper she had rescued from the wreckage on the day of the crash—it was a standard medical calibration tool of the Astral Knights. Alice took the caliper and put it into the inner layer of her medical bag, placing it next to the silver lighter.

The two were silent for a moment. Both having served in the Knights, they understood that after a report was submitted and before it was reviewed, one should not say too much and influence the evaluation.

Alice was the first to speak: "You've been watching the Medical Station for three days. What do you think the survival rate of the wounded here relies on?"

Vian paused for three seconds—far exceeding the standard reaction time.

"It doesn't rely on medical equipment." She paused. "It relies on the people who bring the wounded. They will wait on the side, wait for you to finish the purification, and no one will urge you no matter how long it takes."

"That thing you saw—" Alice snapped the buckle of her medical bag shut. "There is no corresponding term in the Imperial military service classification manual."

She stood up and hung the medical bag back on her waist, her ice-blue eyes looking at Vian in the dim light.

"But the report was written by you."

Vian was silent for a long time, then suddenly asked a question that surprised even herself: "Your purification technique isn't classified in the Imperial medical manual either. When you write medical records, what do you write?"

Alice's hand paused on the buckle of her bag.

"Write what I have done." She unfastened her medical kit and set it on the examination table, her movements half a beat slower than usual. "Not what I should have done."

"Are you not afraid of the audit?"

"I used to be." Alice looked up, her silver-white hair glowing like a cold flame in the halo of the oil lamp. "Later, I realized that those who survive don't ask what terminology you used. They only ask if you are still here."

Vian turned these words over in her mind twice. After returning to the Intelligence Center, she reopened her notebook and added a memo next to the second asterisk. It had nothing to do with Yang Shitou's words; it was written for herself: The operation of this system does not rely on adherence to Imperial regulations. Rather, it seems that no one at their post has found a reason to slack off.

Lin Mo finished reading the report that same night.

It was eleven pages in total. The first nine pages were objective data analysis and defense assessments, with comparative standards for Imperial frontier settlements attached after each set of data. The analytical method reminded him of the top data analysts from his previous life—providing sufficient data to let you deduce the conclusion she had already buried within.

The tenth page was the Medical Station assessment. At the end, it read: "The existence of the regional medical system has rewritten the core factor affecting settler survival rates from 'days to the nearest Imperial medical facility' to 'days to the nearest Psyker purification method'." This was not a medical report; it was a system analyst's precise judgment on infrastructure efficiency.

The eleventh page was the overall assessment. In the second to last paragraph, he saw signs of erasure—high gothic terms were crossed out, and the low gothic substitutes were also crossed out; above the two marks was a set of concise, parallel short sentences. Lin Mo read them aloud softly.

"The operational efficiency of the Blackstone Town management system exceeds the standards of similar Imperial settlements. Its operational logic has structural differences from the Imperial standardized template, but this difference does not sacrifice efficiency or coverage. On the contrary—"

He stopped. There were no words on the next line, only scratches.

The mirror of the emperor at the edge of his vision flickered ever so slightly.

The golden glimmer lingered in the bottom right corner for less than half a second; no analysis box popped up, no keywords were marked, and there was no risk level. It had always provided clear instructions, but this time, it only gave a glimmer of light. A light that needed no translation.

She had crossed out all the subsequent technical terms. At the end of the three marks, in the blank line space at the very bottom, she had written one word.

Self-consistent.

She crossed it out three times, not out of hesitation. Every Imperial report she had written required standardized terminology, and "self-consistent" was not among them. In the Imperial military context, this term is used to describe a closed system that maintains equilibrium without external interference, often used to describe remote settlements that do not rely on the Empire—it implies an acknowledgment of independence, rather than an evaluation of adherence to regulations. She read it three times, and each time she felt this word was more accurate than "efficient." Because "efficient" can be applied to any system that meets standards, but "self-consistent" belongs only to those whose internal logic can form an independent closed loop.

He knew the Blackstone Town system all too well—it wasn't stitched together by Imperial regulations; it grew from the soil. Like a tree, it didn't need to be taught which way to grow.

He flipped the report over and set it face down on the table. Outside the door came the sound of knuckles knocking on the sheet metal doorframe; it was Locke's way of knocking. Without waiting for a response, the person had already entered.

"Old Tom wants me to ask you, for the springs of the new batch of tripwire fuses, should the tolerances be adjusted according to the Imperial military regulation table you gave last time?" Locke stood at the doorway, his shoulders still damp with the dew of the night patrol.

Lin Mo glanced at the first page of the report—Vian's hand-drawn tolerance calibration suggestions used the standard template of the Astral Knights. Imperial standards and Blackstone standards were less than twenty centimeters apart on this table.

"Tell him to grind three using the current method and three according to the Astral Knights standard. Take both for testing—"

"Use whichever works better?" Locke turned and walked to the edge of the doorframe, his footsteps pausing, his gaze falling on the cover of the report. "That silver-haired female medical officer, did she audit everyone here?"

"She is conducting an assessment."

Locke thought for a moment: "Assessing what?"

Lin Mo didn't answer directly. He looked out the window, where the torches of the night patrol changing shifts in the square were moving along the city wall. "Locke, if someone came from the outside and said the patrol handover procedure you've practiced for two years is not standard, what would you think?"

Locke barely hesitated: "I don't care what he thinks. My people coming back alive at night is the best standard."

After speaking, he was uncharacteristically silent for a few seconds. Locke was always the type to throw his words out and leave, but that glance at the report just now had shown him pages full of handwriting and three sticky notes on the edges of the pages. He couldn't recognize all the words, but he understood—an outsider had audited the accounts for three days and written eleven pages of paper; this carried weight.

"What she wrote—" Locke lowered his voice half a notch, "She's not here to find fault, is she?"

"No." Lin Mo flipped the report to the eleventh page and pushed it in front of him. "She audited everyone's accounts and finally wrote a word that isn't in the Imperial manual. She crossed it out three times, then wrote it back."

Locke looked down. He didn't recognize a single word, but he saw the three marks—in the same spot, crossed out three times. He had seen such marks when fighting; it wasn't that it was written wrong, but that it was written right, yet a more accurate word couldn't be found.

"Is this word—" he looked up at Lin Mo, "good or bad?"

"It is accurate."

Locke lowered his hand from the doorframe and was silent for another two seconds—two seconds longer than the total duration of silence in his entire life. Then his voice returned to its usual volume.

"Fine." He turned and walked out, his footsteps heavy and steady. "If she stays, the patrol doesn't need to deliberately circle around the back window of the Medical Station to keep watch."

"You had people watching?"

"Obviously!" Locke's voice was already drifting into the corridor. "An outsider coming to audit the accounts, and I'm not supposed to watch? It's not my first day as captain! I'll pull them back tomorrow!"

The sound of footsteps made the corridor resound. Lin Mo stood at the desk for a moment—Locke couldn't read, but he knew how to judge people. He relied on the simplest yardstick to judge things he couldn't understand: trusting Lin Mo's judgment. But this time, he added one more: someone willing to change a word three times just to find an accurate one was not there to find fault.

Outside the window in the square, the sound of Old Tom's forging hammer stopped. Locke led the night patrol down from the city wall and yelled to the sentry opposite from afar: "Password!" The opposite side roared back: "Alive!" A very faint calibration pulse came from Yang Shitou's relay station—he was still adjusting that antenna that had been bent by a stray bullet.

The entire Blackstone Town continued to operate as usual in the night, not according to anyone's regulations, but according to the inertia of many people not slacking off at their respective posts.

Old Tom came out of the Arsenal with a rag over his shoulder. Seeing Lin Mo at the window, he paused.

"Finished reading the report?"

"Finished." Lin Mo paused. "It's heavier than the tripwire fuses you handed in last time."

"That girl—" Old Tom asked directly, "Give me the truth, did she understand it or not?"

"She understood." Lin Mo withdrew his gaze. "She wrote a word that isn't in the Imperial manual, crossed it out three times, then wrote it back."

Old Tom pulled down the rag and rubbed it between his calloused hands. "There are plenty of things not in the Imperial manual. The military regulation table you showed me has the wrong annealing temperature for shell casings printed on page 372; it's twenty degrees higher than the actual one. It took me three tries to figure it out."

"You didn't tell me."

"I fixed it, that's all. What's the use of telling you? You're not a blacksmith." He slung the rag back over his shoulder, walked two steps toward his living quarters, and then stopped. "She asked. About scrap rates, tool placement, quenching temperature control. I've been blacksmithing my whole life; I can tell the difference between someone coming to audit accounts and someone coming to understand what you are doing. She isn't here to audit the accounts."

"That girl—" Old Tom walked forward without looking back, "If she stays, I'll let her watch my third quenching. She'll have to try the heat for the fourth one herself."

The old blacksmith's figure disappeared around the corner of the Arsenal. The embers of the forge flickered one last time in the wind.

Lin Mo put the report into the top layer of the filing cabinet. Locked in that drawer were copies of secret letters, silver-veined crystals, and a brass key; now there was one more thing: a word written by an Astral Knights lieutenant only after three revisions.

"Self-consistent." His voice was so low only he could hear it. "The Empire spent tens of thousands of years classifying everything, yet a lieutenant discovered in three days that Blackstone Town doesn't belong to any category. It's not on any page of the Imperial regulations—but she understood it."

He pulled the drawer open again and flipped to the dog-eared eleventh page. Three marks, one word. The dog-ear meant: this page could be opened at any time without checking the index.

The sound of the filing cabinet closing was very light; the metal hinges were oiled and made almost no noise. The moment the sound completely dissipated, a lighter footstep came from the corridor.

It wasn't a patrol sentry—the sentry's hard-soled boots made a friction sound on the stone floor. This was a soft-soled military marching boot, the same model as the pair on Vian's feet.

The footsteps paused outside the Intelligence Center, not knocking. Then they changed direction and headed toward the Medical Station. Not returning to her living quarters.

Lin Mo stood in front of the filing cabinet for a moment. The word in the report was crossed out three times; each time was not a negation, but her finding a patch of open ground for herself between two language systems that didn't belong to any Imperial regulation.

Only one word was written on the open ground. Not efficient, but self-consistent.

Vian didn't return to her living quarters. She went to the Medical Station to take over the second half of the night shift for Alice.

She was not yet a person of Blackstone Town; she was still on the roster of the Astral Knights, and the assessment mission was already completed. Yet she walked into that Medical Station lit by only one oil lamp to stand the night shift for a Psyker she had known for less than two weeks.

Alice raised her head from behind the examination table, a pale blue tint floating under her eyes—it had been three consecutive second-half night shifts.

"In my report, the tenth page is about you, and the eleventh page is about the town. At the end of the ninth page, there is a very small note written about myself."

Alice didn't ask about the content of the note. She picked up her medical kit and walked to the door, stopping for a moment beside Vian.

"Things like notes are not written for the auditor to see. They are written for oneself to see the next time the report is opened."

Vian watched her back disappear into the night of the square, then walked into the room and sat down on the chair Alice had just occupied. The chair still held residual warmth.

She opened her notebook and found the blank space between two asterisks—between Yang Shitou's confirmation delay and Wang Defu's two kilograms of water vapor, she drew a very light horizontal line.

A communications soldier fussing over signal speed, a storekeeper fussing over the moisture of wheat. Two people in different places did the same thing: didn't slack off.

The torches in the square were blown askew by the night wind for a moment, then straightened up again.

The entire Blackstone Town continued to operate in the firelight, carrying this thing that the Empire had never defined.

Suddenly, a sentry on the city wall shouted.

It wasn't the handover password—the rhythm of the password was fixed, one question every two seconds, one answer every two seconds. This shout was not in rhythm, at least a beat too early.

"North side—" The sentry's voice was torn to shreds by the night wind, but the last two words landed clearly on the stone floor; it was Low Gothic, syllables squeezed out of a hoarse throat, "Someone!"

All the torches in the square tilted toward the north simultaneously—it wasn't the wind, it was everyone turning toward the darkness outside the city wall at the same time.

Vian raised her head from behind the window of the Medical Station, still holding the pen that had drawn the horizontal line. Outside the window, in the direction of the ancient riverbed on the north side, a light that didn't belong to the town flickered on and off in the darkness.

Three long, two short.

It was the internal encryption frequency that Blackstone Town had changed only two months ago; she had never seen this kind of encoding in any Imperial communication manual.

It wasn't calling. It was answering. Answering a question that Blackstone Town had never sent out.

Outside the city wall, in the darkness where the night patrol torches couldn't reach, a Psyker thread as thin as a spider's silk touched the boundary of Blackstone Town. It wasn't Chaos—at least not yet. But it was probing. Like a finger gently pressing on a door panel, not yet deciding whether to knock.

Yang Shitou in the sentry tower turned around abruptly.

He saw nothing.

But the hairs on the back of his neck all stood up, one by one.