92: Chapter 92 Nationwide Preparation for War, Two Thousand Hands and a Spring

At the last quarter hour before dawn, the sentry at the top of the East Wall watchtower raised a torch, drawing a complete circle above his head. Three evenly spaced flashes of light fell into the morning mist, the agreed departure signal between Lin Mo and Zhao Laonian: a full circle meant both were in position, gear ready, direction confirmed, and ready to depart immediately.

Zhao Laonian walked in the lead. Having run reconnaissance in the swamp area for three years, walking at night was no different from walking during the day—he placed the front of his foot down first, then slowly lowered his heel, much like an old heron wading through water. In his combat suit pocket was the portable spectrum analyzer that Yang Shitou had finished calibrating just before dawn; it was barely larger than a palm and, in passive mode, could capture abnormal electromagnetic waves within two kilometers. The antenna was a spring steel wire custom-made by Old Tom, lengthened by an extra three inches—he claimed it was to enhance the signal, but in reality, it was mostly so he could extend the antenna out of the brush without having to raise his body while crawling on the ground. This was a modification Zhao Laonian had figured out himself; after three years of crawling through the swamp, every piece of his gear had a unique modification.

Liu Xiaoman followed two paces behind him. The nineteen-year-old communications soldier carried a manual silent beacon and two days' worth of dry rations—buckwheat cakes baked by Aunt Zhang at three in the morning, wrapped in two layers of clean gauze, still carrying the residual warmth from the bottom of the pan. He didn't walk fast, but his ears never stopped. Every two hundred steps or so, he would stop, tilt his head, and close his eyes; it was ostensibly to rest his feet, but in reality, he was listening. He could distinguish a 0.03 percentage point frequency difference between the Chaos tactical encrypted band and the imperial standard encoding. When Yang Shitou mentioned this figure at the military council, he did so with the respect unique to a communications soldier, as if describing a piece of precision instrument he couldn't build himself.

"Brother Laonian—" Liu Xiaoman stopped abruptly as they reached the edge of the swamp, his head tilted to the left, his left eye squinted into a slit. "There's something over there transmitting. It's not an imperial format, nor is it Chaos. The frequency is too low, so low it's almost like the infrasound of ground vibrations."

Zhao Laonian crouched down and pulled out the portable spectrum analyzer, aiming the antenna in the direction Liu Xiaoman pointed. A line of extremely weak waveforms jumped onto the screen; the intensity was less than one-twentieth of a standard signal, but the pulse interval was unusually fixed: once every seventeen minutes, lasting forty-three seconds each time.

"The one on the Salt Flats." Zhao Laonian stuffed the spectrum analyzer back into his pocket, his voice pressed extremely low—lowering one's voice in the swamp wasn't just about speaking softly, but about letting the voice blend into the surrounding insect chirps. "Don't worry about it for now; first, sneak to a distance where we can see it."

"How close is considered 'able to see'?"

"Close enough that I can draw the shape of its antenna on the map with a charcoal pencil." Zhao Laonian stood up and continued forward. Liu Xiaoman followed behind, his left foot precisely stepping into the mud pit his right foot had just stepped in. This was a trick he had figured out himself after following on three reconnaissance missions: stepping in the same pit was both quiet and energy-efficient. He only needed to follow two meters behind, taking steps exactly as Zhao Laonian did, following the optimal route Zhao Laonian had trodden out over three years.

The morning mist over the swamp was slowly dissipating. The sun rose from the direction of the East Wall, illuminating the oil film on the water surface into patches of dark purple scales. Zhao Laonian looked up at the position of the sun and marked the first set of coordinates on the map in his hand. If nothing went wrong, they would be able to reach the outskirts of the Salt Flats before sunset.

Before dawn, Old Tom had stoked the furnace fire to its peak.

The amount to be quenched today far exceeded a normal day. When news of Lin Mo's order to double the density of landmines outside the East Wall reached the workshop last night, Old Tom was eating dinner—a bowl of grain porridge brought by Aunt Zhang, accompanied by half a piece of salted radish. After listening to what Little Zhou relayed, he set his bowl down on the anvil, walked to the furnace to check the heat, and turned back to say only one thing: "Bring out all the spare spring steel; don't extinguish the furnace tonight."

Little Zhou knew the weight of these words. Old Tom's furnace was usually extinguished once every day; it wasn't out of concern for fuel, but because the water temperature of the quenching pool had to cool naturally after the furnace was extinguished so it could be adjusted back to the optimal temperature the next day. Saying not to extinguish the furnace meant continuous quenching for over twenty-four hours. The water temperature in the quenching pool would continue to rise during continuous operation, and for every degree it rose, the hardness and toughness of the spring would deviate by a tiny, imperceptible margin. What Old Tom had to do was constantly add cold water to the pool, using the thermometer in his hand to pin the water temperature at exactly forty-three degrees, with a variance of no more than half a degree—that so-called thermometer was actually a glass tube he had blown himself in Blackstone Town, filled with kerosene, a makeshift tool.

"Go find Aunt Zhang." Old Tom used iron tongs to clamp a spring blank and feed it into the furnace fire. "Tell her not to bring me porridge at noon, but that the furnace side cannot be left unattended. Have her call everyone who can spare a hand."

"What should I call them for?"

"Not everyone can necessarily quench." Old Tom stared at the spring in the furnace fire as it turned from dark red to orange-red; he knew the temperature corresponding to every color by heart, just as Yang Shitou was familiar with the signal source corresponding to every frequency. "But the quenched springs need to be sorted. Those with a tolerance within 0.01 millimeters go in one box to be sent to the front line; those exceeding 0.01 but less than 0.03 go in another box as backups; those exceeding 0.03 go directly back into the furnace for re-quenching."

"0.01 millimeters... can you tell by hand?"

"Yes." Old Tom didn't explain further. He clamped the thoroughly heated spring out of the furnace fire and plunged it into the quenching pool. A cloud of white steam exploded on the surface of the pool, and after it dissipated, the surface of the spring was covered with a uniform layer of dark blue oxide film. The entire cylindrical surface had a consistent luster, with no uneven shades. He wiped off the oil on the surface with his thumb and examined the luster of the oxide film against the furnace fire; in the orange-red firelight, that layer of dark blue remained motionless.

"Good."

He placed the spring on the workbench to his left and immediately clamped a second blank to feed into the furnace. His movements were not fast, but the interval between the two springs was precise enough to match Yang Shitou's calibration pulses. He quenched seven springs per hour, each with a tolerance of no more than 0.01. He wasn't rushing for quantity; he was rushing for precision.

An hour later, Aunt Zhang walked into the workshop carrying two large stacks of washed gauze, followed by seven women, ranging in age from seventeen to over sixty, each holding gauze or bandages in their arms. The Medical Station had to clear space for the Deputy Medical Officer to set up an operating table, so the sterilized instruments and bandages were temporarily stored in the workshop. Old Tom didn't say anything, just turned to look at Aunt Zhang and pointed with his iron tongs to the empty workbench at the very back of the workshop: "Put them there, far from the furnace. Dried gauze cannot be used."

After putting down the gauze, Aunt Zhang didn't leave. She stood at the door and watched for a while: Old Tom stood before the furnace fire with a hunched back, his white hair reflected orange-red by the firelight; Little Zhou crouched by the quenching pool, holding an enamel cup in his hand, with three scale marks painted on the cup wall, corresponding to forty-two and a half, forty-three, and forty-three and a half degrees, a marking cup specifically for measuring water temperature; three apprentices were dismantling old springs on a nearby table—not throwing them away directly, but reheating the still-usable steel to forge them into new blanks. Before each piece of old material went back into the furnace, its thickness had to be measured with a vernier caliper—a rule set by Old Tom: if the thickness deviation exceeded 0.05 millimeters, it was thrown directly into the scrap bucket.

"Aunt Zhang—" Little Zhou raised his head, the burn on the back of his hand glistening in the steam. "Is there anything I can eat while working? My hands are occupied, I can't bite into a cake."

Aunt Zhang took a string of peeled hard-boiled eggs from her apron pocket, all cut into four pieces and skewered on bamboo sticks, with a small slice of pickled radish sandwiched between each piece. She handed the egg skewer to Little Zhou's mouth. Little Zhou tilted his head to bite off a piece, chewed twice, and turned back to stare at the water temperature.

"Aunt Zhang, this radish of yours—"

"What?"

"It's sweet."

"Radish is supposed to have a bit of sweetness. I put a piece of rock sugar in when pickling it. You boys stand in front of the furnace every day; your mouths have long lost sensation, covered by the taste of rust, you wouldn't be able to taste it if it weren't sweet." Aunt Zhang stuck the bamboo skewer into a screw hole by Little Zhou's workbench—the hole was just the right size to catch the bamboo stick; it was originally used by Old Tom to fix the spring jig, and it had just been removed this morning. "Don't stop your hands. Sweet or not, the springs still need to be quenched."

Aunt Zhang turned and walked towards the city wall. In the morning, she also had to organize twenty women to move gravel from the base of the city wall to the East Wall. Last night, Locke had drawn a circle of marks on the city wall with charcoal, each circle representing a crack in the foundation that needed to be filled with stones and reinforced. Aunt Zhang couldn't read, but she could recognize Locke's charcoal drawings. He drew a circle, and she would pick up a stone from the ground and place it in the corresponding position. Last night, Locke drew forty-some circles, and forty-some stones were placed on the ground.

Just as she walked out of the workshop, she bumped into Locke carrying two sandbags from the East Wall towards the Arsenal. His beard was covered in lime powder, and his laser axe was tied to his back with a leather rope—not that he didn't want to carry it, but both hands were occupied. The sandbags were nearly twice as heavy as usual; they weren't filled with pure sand, but the mixture Old Tom had suggested to Locke the day before: three parts gravel, two parts clay, one part lime. When filled into the foundation cracks and poured with water, after drying, the bonding strength with the original foundation could reach seventy percent of a newly built wall. This was a makeshift method Old Tom had learned from an old master when he was an apprentice at the imperial Arsenal; it wasn't written in the imperial military engineering manual, but he had remembered it for fifty years and finally used it on the East Wall of Blackstone Town.

"Aunt Zhang, is the gravel enough?"

"Move as much as you can in the morning." Aunt Zhang pointed to the pile of gravel at the base of the city wall. "Last night you said you wanted forty bags; I'll get you sixty bags this morning. Put the extra twenty bags on the city wall as a reserve; once the fighting really starts, no one will have time to transport stones from the wall base to the wall."

"Sixty bags? Is there enough manpower?"

"Don't worry about whether I have enough manpower or not." Aunt Zhang wiped her hands on her apron. "You just carry the sandbags up; you don't need to worry about the stones." Her tone was hard, but after she finished speaking, she took an extra look at Locke—not glaring at him, but confirming she hadn't misremembered the location of those forty-some circles.

Locke picked up the sandbags again and walked towards the East Wall. His back was hunched very low, but his speed climbing the city wall stairs was faster than when he was empty-handed. The city wall was already full of people; they weren't militia, but townspeople who had heard the news and come voluntarily this morning. There were middle-aged farmers carrying shovels, children carrying buckets, and old women bending over to load gravel into baskets. No one notified them; it was just that when Locke was stacking sandbags last night, he was bumped into by a few townspeople on night duty. When asked why, Locke only said the East Wall needed reinforcement. Several people went down the city wall, knocked on doors one by one—not to mobilize, but just to say one sentence to their neighbors: Locke is stacking sandbags on the East Wall, I'm afraid there isn't enough manpower.

Before dawn, nearly three hundred people had gathered at the base of the city wall. By noon, it was over eight hundred. When Lin Mo stood on the roof of the armory looking down at two o'clock in the afternoon, Vian's range-finding telescope could count at least two thousand heads just by scanning a circle of the people working on the city wall and at the base of the wall. The entire permanent population of Blackstone Town was just over three thousand; the elderly who could move, the children who could walk, the women who could spare a hand, all came. They weren't waiting to be assigned tasks; they found work themselves. Some moved stones, some carried water, some dismantled the doors of their homes to carry onto the city wall as temporary shields. There weren't enough doors, so an old carpenter moved out all the spare materials stored in his workshop for three years, pushed a whole cart of wooden boards to the base of the wall, and stood by the cart shouting at the city wall: "Anyone who needs doors, come down and take them yourself, take as many as you need."

Lin Mo stood on the roof for a long time. In his hand was the city defense schedule from this morning; the left column was the seventeen reinforcement projects listed by Locke last night, each marked with a planned completion time; the right column was the actual progress verified by Vian at the observation post during the morning. Of the seventeen items, the completion time for twelve was at least two hours ahead of schedule.

He folded the sheet and put it into his jacket pocket, next to a signal map of the swamp area brought from the Information Center. Last night, the interval of Echo X had shortened from twenty-one minutes to fourteen minutes. In the record Yang Shitou submitted at 6:07 this morning, at the end of the note for the Echo X line, there was an extra, extremely light question mark drawn in pencil, with no explanation beside it.

Lin Mo saw the question mark and didn't touch it. Yang Shitou didn't need to explain, and he understood: the frequency base of Echo X was quietly merging from the upper layer of Chaos tactical encryption into a more ancient modulation method. It wasn't from the end of the Great Crusade, nor from the Golden Age; it was more like a signal encoding that had been operating alone on a civilizational orbit outside of them for who knows how many years. It had no hostility, at least not for now, but it was using shorter and shorter inquiry intervals—from forty-seven minutes to twenty-one minutes, then to fourteen minutes—repeatedly asking the same question in the direction of Blackstone Town.

What the question was, Yang Shitou didn't know, and Lin Mo didn't know either. But they both knew one thing: when a signal continues to ask questions without needing a response, it isn't looking for a communications station; it's looking for your location.

The sound of hammers on the city wall interrupted his thoughts. It wasn't the sound of Old Tom's forging hammer, but several carpenters reinforcing the shield brackets; the iron hammers hit the wooden stakes, making a solid, muffled sound. This sound mixed with the forging hammer sound from the workshop direction, condensing into a continuous, low resonance over Blackstone Town, as if the whole city had taken a breath deep underground and held it firmly.

Old Tom clamped the twelfth spring of the day and had just lifted it out of the quenching pool when the workshop door suddenly darkened—someone was blocking the noon sun. Old Tom didn't look up, his eyes fixed on the oxide film on the surface of the spring, confirming that the dark blue luster evenly covered the entire cylindrical surface before placing the spring on the workbench and looking up.

Standing at the door was Lin Mo.

Old Tom did not get up, nor did he put down his iron tongs; he merely tapped the row of quenched springs on the workbench with the tip of the tongs—eleven in total from left to right, each one's dark blue hue identical to the last. The twelfth was still by his hand, its heat not yet dissipated.

"The tolerance for each one is within zero point zero one," Old Tom said. "The spectrum analyzer antenna that Zhao Laonian, whom you sent to the far north, carries, was modified by me using spring steel. It is three inches longer, so he can receive signals while lying in the bushes without having to poke his head out. Is that enough?" He was asking about the spring tolerance, but his eyes were fixed on the spot circled three times on the East Wall defense map in Lin Mo's hand.

"Enough. Zhao Laonian has tested the antenna; the reception sensitivity at the edge of the swamp has improved by at least twenty percent." Lin Mo walked into the workshop and stopped by the quenching pool. A thin layer of steam still floated on the surface of the pool.

"You didn't come for the springs." Old Tom placed the iron tongs on the workbench and turned around. His hunched back was particularly noticeable as he turned—humpbacked, his knuckles deformed from years of gripping a hammer—yet his movements were not slow in the slightest. Like a man who had stood before an anvil for fifty years, he had long been taught an agility unrelated to age by the forging hammer.

"That metal wall," Lin Mo said. "When you buried it back then, did you see any symbols on the wall?"

Old Tom was silent for a long time. The only sounds in the workshop were the occasional popping of cooling bubbles in the quenching pool and the faint sound of Xiao Zhou measuring springs with calipers nearby. He raised his right hand and drew an arc in the air with his index finger—from top to bottom, then from left to right, finally pausing in the middle.

"No symbols." He lowered his hand. "But the sound when struck was wrong. A solid metal wall sounds dull when struck; you've struck an anvil, so you know that sound. But that wall had a lingering echo. It wasn't a metallic echo, but a stony one, as if it were hollow inside."

"Hollow?"

"Not just hollow. A hollow space only has one layer of echo; what I struck had two layers." Old Tom held up an index finger. "The first layer sounded like someone on the other side of the wall had struck it at the same time. It wasn't an echo—echoes don't have such short delays; it was synchronized. The second layer—" He paused. "I didn't finish listening to the second layer. That year, halfway through filling the soil, the supervising Imperial engineer yelled at me: 'Stop knocking! Keep knocking and I'll bury you in there too.'"

"You never knocked again after that?"

"I did," Old Tom said. "Later, before winter every year, I would walk around the place where I filled the soil; I even went last winter. But I didn't knock anymore—not out of fear." He looked up, his murky old eyes suddenly becoming sharp in the reflection of the furnace fire. "It's because I'd been filling that wall for nearly twenty years, going once a year, and last year was the first time I discovered something growing on the filled soil. It wasn't weeds; the soil there is thin, and weeds can't survive. It was moss, and it only grew in a rectangular area, the dimensions exactly the same as that wall."

Lin Mo took out the silver-veined crystal from his pocket. The crystal flashed in the reflection of the furnace fire, the silver veins inside flowing slowly. "When you buried it twenty years ago, did you see any stones with this kind of pattern near the foundation of the wall?"

Old Tom took the crystal but didn't answer immediately. He held the crystal up to the furnace fire, letting the light shine through from the side—the silver veins turned into a set of deeper lines under the transmitted light, like plant veins sealed in amber. He stared for a long time, so long that Xiao Zhou finished measuring three springs nearby while he still held that pose.

"Put this away." Old Tom handed the crystal back, his hand trembling slightly—not the shake of old age, but an uncontrollable tremor from recognizing something. "Twenty years ago, an Imperial engineer came to find me. He wasn't wearing a Military Affairs Bureau uniform, but a kind of grey robe I'd never seen before. He asked me if I had found any light-reflecting stones underground when measuring the foundation. I said no. Before he left, he said something that I've remembered for twenty years; only today do I understand it was a warning."

"What did he say?"

"He said: 'If you find it, put it back. That is not an ore. That is a lock placed here by the Emperor. A lock cannot be too far from what it is meant to lock—if it is too far, the lock becomes a key. And a key never opens just one lock.'"

Lin Mo put the crystal back into his pocket. Old Tom's words and the annotations displayed by the mirror of the emperor last night overlapped in the same direction to reveal a third layer of information: XV-091 was not some deliberately sealed ore at all; it was a bidirectional locking mechanism. The person who sealed it wasn't just sealing a mineral vein, but the correspondence between the mineral vein and something else. The people who dug it out from underground thought they were mining, but in reality, they were modifying a lock. And the beacon relay station that Chaos built in the Salt Flats wasn't looking for ore, but for the psychic resonance signal generated after the lock was moved. They weren't monitoring the ore; they were monitoring the person who held the key.

"Old Tom, if one day it becomes necessary to dig up that wall—"

"There is no 'if'." Old Tom interrupted him, picked up the iron tongs again, and turned to face the furnace fire. "I filled it with soil for twenty years because the Empire told me to. But that grey-robed engineer from twenty years ago said a second sentence before leaving. He said: 'One day, someone will come to find you carrying the light-reflecting stone. When that person stands before you, you are not to add another shovelful of soil to that wall. You step back and make way for him.'"

He picked up the thirteenth spring, which had been heated to an orange-red glow in the furnace fire—this one was a circle thicker than the previous twelve, not meant for a tripwire fuse. Lin Mo looked at the cross-section of the spring, recalling the message Old Tom had asked Locke to deliver yesterday: the section of the East Wall foundation that had been patched needed a spring liner plate. The size of this thick spring would fit perfectly between the interface of the newly patched foundation and the original wall.

"This one isn't a tripwire spring," Lin Mo said.

"Correct." Old Tom plunged the thick spring into the quenching pool. This time, the steam exploded higher than at any time before, the white vapor shooting straight up to the workshop ceiling. "This one is for locking the wall. That East Wall foundation of yours is thirty percent weaker; I've calculated that if you embed one every three steps, the vibration waves of the old and new foundations can be absorbed by the springs by at least half. The Arsenal's seismic resistance standard only requires absorbing one-third. Do you think that's enough?"

"Enough." Lin Mo watched as the steam dissipated, revealing the dark blue layer on the surface of the spring, two shades deeper than the tripwire springs—that was the oxidation layer quenched at a higher temperature, with greater toughness. "But I'm not asking on behalf of the Empire."

Old Tom placed the spring on a separate area cleared on the workbench to his left, a full foot away from the other springs. He turned to look at Lin Mo, the furnace fire casting his shadow on the wall, the hunched shadow stretched long by the light. "The Empire told me to fill the soil, and I did; the Empire told me to close my eyes, and I did. But the Empire didn't tell me—" He tapped Lin Mo's pocket with the iron tongs, "—that the Emperor had hidden words in the stone. Nor did they tell me that someone would come to find me with it. The Empire's rules are rules, and the Emperor's contingencies are contingencies. I can tell the difference."

A commotion suddenly came from outside the workshop, not of panic, but of surprise. Xiao Zhou put down the calipers, ran to the door to take a look, and turned back to shout: "Zhao Laonian is back! He didn't take three days; he's back after only one! He received an abnormal echo on the outskirts of the swamp and says it's not a Chaos signal!"

Old Tom put down the iron tongs and walked to the door with Xiao Zhou. Lin Mo stood by the quenching pool, his fingertips pinching the silver-veined crystal in his pocket—it had just been held up to the furnace fire by Old Tom, and the temperature hadn't completely cooled yet. He could feel those silver veins pulsing slightly; it wasn't thermal expansion or contraction, but a pulsation completely different from the rhythm of the quenching pool's water temperature, which perfectly coincided with the seventeen-minute interval of the echo.

Lin Mo walked out of the workshop. Zhao Laonian was striding from the North Wall toward the Intelligence Center, covered in swamp mud, with dark green algae hanging from the hem of his combat uniform. Liu Xiaoman followed behind, his lips pale, but his steps were steadier than when they had set out. He clutched a piece of paper in his hand—not a map, but a spectrum graph—the paper wrinkled from moisture, but the waveform ink on it was very clear. His eyes were startlingly bright.

"Lord Lin Mo—" Zhao Laonian spoke before he had even reached them, his voice hoarse from not drinking water while rushing. "The signal relay station is still in the Salt Flats. We didn't see an antenna, but Liu Xiaoman's ears caught something else. Three kilometers due north of the relay station—" He caught his breath and turned to look at Liu Xiaoman.

Liu Xiaoman spread out the spectrum graph and pointed his fingertip at the peak of the waveform. It was a set of triple pulses, the intervals completely consistent, each one precisely landing on an integer multiple of seventeen minutes. But this frequency was a whole order of magnitude different from the transmission frequency of the Salt Flats beacon; it was neither from the same source, nor a reflection, nor interference—it was an independent signal. And as for its modulation mode, having spent two years running communication monitoring in the Imperial border star sector, Liu Xiaoman had never seen it in any Chaos records.

"This is something from an Imperial exploration fleet; it is the positioning code corresponding to the XV-091 designation." Liu Xiaoman's finger traced lightly over the spectrum graph. "But it didn't come from the Salt Flats; it came from further away, due north, returning from deep underground. Brother Zhao lay on the ground and used the spectrum analyzer antenna to measure it three times facing the ground; the waveforms were exactly the same all three times. It's not a signal propagating in the air, but one being beamed up from underground, penetrating the rock strata."

Lin Mo took the spectrum graph. Beside the three almost perfectly overlapping waveform lines was Liu Xiaoman's crooked handwriting: Underground pulse source, depth unknown, period seventeen minutes. Non-Chaos. Non-Imperial standard.

The third signal. It landed in the same position as the largest iron filing he had placed at the end of the military council—the dashed line in the due north direction.

He looked up, the midday sun passing through the gaps in the workshop roof, cutting a line of distinct light and shadow across his face. In one morning, two thousand people had piled more than three hundred bags of mixed sandbags on the city wall, cleared away all the rubble at the foot of the wall, and dismantled the door panels of half the town. Old Tom had quenched twelve springs, and the thirteenth was a wall-locking spring made specifically for the East Wall foundation, its tolerance even stricter than military regulations. Zhao Laonian had brought back the exact location of the third signal two days early—due north above their heads, underground.

The hint from the mirror of the emperor flashed in the strong midday light, extremely faint, yet exceptionally clear in his field of vision.

The metal door remained silent under twenty years of filled soil,

But the veins locked in the stone had been waiting since the first day they arrived in this world—

Waiting for a hand to lift it to the moment it aligned with the three satellites,

Waiting for the echo from the far north to penetrate the rock strata,

Waiting for the old man who filled the soil to say: Step back, make way for him.

Outside the window, the last layer of sandbags on the city wall was being leveled. Locke stood at the highest point of the East Wall, leaning his axe by his feet—the blue-white light of the axe blade was mostly swallowed by the sunlight, but he kept it lit. It wasn't that he forgot to turn it off, but to tell everyone who looked up at him: He would still be at this position tonight.

And on the Salt Flats to the north, the Chaos beacon relay station, which had been operating for over a dozen hours, was still transmitting steadily, one pulse every seventeen minutes, one reply every forty-three seconds. It did not know that Zhao Laonian and Liu Xiaoman had already lain in the swamp mud and drawn its location on a map; it did not know that Old Tom had quenched an extra wall-locking spring before the furnace fire; it did not know that this planet, which it had marked as a [Priority Target], was using two thousand pairs of hands—rubble, sandbags, springs, and door panels—to plug the cracks in the defense line inch by inch. It knew even less that at the very moment it considered itself the hunter, the person it had targeted had already treated it as the second iron filing on the chessboard.

A very short beep suddenly came from the direction of the communication relay station; it was the automatic lock-on sound for the calibration pulse. Immediately after, Yang Shitou's back stiffened before the console, and he stood up, clutching a sheet of record just torn from the terminal, and ran toward the Intelligence Center. He was faster than when he had received the encrypted Chaos reply last time, but not because of fear. His fingers were not shaking; on the record paper was only one line of automatically decoded Low Gothic words. This word was not in any Imperial standard code dictionary, but he recognized it—in the retirement code passed down by word of mouth among veteran communication soldiers in the border star sector, it had only one meaning: Signal received, routing. Source station: Terra.

Terra had received the beam. It wasn't fifty-one hours; it was shorter, nearly six hours earlier than the shortest arrival time Lin Mo had calculated. Someone was waiting for his signal on Terra's communication array in advance.

The sound of the forging hammer reverberated between the East Wall and the workshop,

The water temperature in the quenching pool remained motionless at forty-three degrees,

A foot of space separated the twelve springs and the one wall-locking spring,

Behind the sandbags piled by two thousand hands was a receipt that had arrived six hours early.

Someone had been waiting for this move on a chessboard from ten thousand years ago.

And now, the person who had been waiting for ten thousand years finally received a reply:

Hope Star still stands.