93: Chapter 93 One Night on the Wall: No One Ever Shielded Me from a Bullet

After dark, the people on the city wall began to withdraw one after another.

It wasn't a changing of the guard; the final row of sandbags had been laid, and as Locke changed shifts, he swept his gaze over everyone. His eyes lingered on each face for a beat, then dipped an inch lower — falling towards the base of the wall.

The old man who had carried stones all day, the child who had hauled buckets of water all day, the woman who had spent the day laying sandbags by the battlements — they all descended the stone steps in turn. No one called for the end of the shift, but everyone knew: after dawn, the people standing on this wall should be those carrying guns. Those who had exhausted their strength tonight needed to go back and sleep.

The last ones remaining on the wall were Locke and two sentries, and someone who didn't count as a sentry.

Lin Mo stood behind the highest battlement at the corner of the East Wall, his back to the city. His silhouette looked as if he were studying a map, but he held no map; he only clutched that crystal with silver veins. As his knuckles tightened, a faint light leaked from the edges of the crystal, following the creases of his palm.

Locke walked over from the other end. His laser axe wasn't propped on the ground but laid horizontally across the sandbags, blade facing outward. This posture wasn't for rest, but to be a beat faster when grabbing the axe to face an enemy.

"Old Tom tempered an extra spring today." He stood two steps behind Lin Mo. "He said it's not for a tripwire, but for locking the wall — specifically for that section of foundation you just patched on the East Wall. Embedding one every three steps can absorb half the vibration."

Lin Mo didn't turn around. "Did he tell you the spring's dimensions?"

"He did. It's a ring thicker, different from the others."

"That spring was something he added on the fly this morning after hearing the East Wall had to withstand two thousand Chaos. It wasn't in the production plan." Lin Mo stuffed the crystal back into his pocket and turned around. The moonlight cut his face into light and shadow; the torch behind him flickered twice. The illuminated half of his face was smeared with a layer of lime powder from carrying sandbags that afternoon. "After tempering it, he kept that spring a foot away from the others. Do you know why?"

Locke thought about it. "Afraid of mixing them up."

"No." Lin Mo shook his head. "The quenching temperature was a full eight degrees higher, and the oxide film is two shades deeper. He used physical distance to remind himself — the mission of this spring isn't to kill, but to lock a wall in place. A tripwire spring on the battlefield is gone once it explodes, but a wall-locking spring must be nailed in place, enduring every wave of shelling without loosening. The requirements for it are much higher than for a killing spring."

Locke was silent for a moment, then reached out and touched the newly patched foundation of the East Wall — the spot where he had drawn a circle and added a vertical bar earlier that day. The patched lime wasn't fully dry yet; when his fingertips pressed against it, they picked up a trace of cool dampness.

"For these twenty years, from making gunpowder guns to tempering springs, Old Tom's creations were never meant for killing." He pulled his hand back. "They were meant for defending."

"Correct."

"Then you, standing here tonight —"

"I am also defending." Lin Mo's gaze drifted past him, falling toward the darkness outside the East Wall. Moonlight spread across the hard-packed plain, tracing every bush into a black silhouette. Further out, the swamp mist was slowly pushing toward them. "Terra's receipt arrived early, Zhao Laonian brought back the underground signal from the due north, Old Tom tempered the wall-locking springs, and two thousand people spent the whole day building the city wall — is it enough?"

"Enough to defend for four days. That's what you said."

"That is what I said."

Lin Mo turned back around, facing the night outside the wall again. After a long time, his voice sounded again, a degree lower than before. "But after four days, if the Terra reinforcements haven't arrived, the fourth wave of Chaos will come. By then, it won't be a question of whether it's enough, it will be —" He paused. "— a question of who is still alive."

There was no question mark in that sentence. In combat simulations, "who is still alive" was never a question; it was a variable. A variable he couldn't optimize using a product manager's competitive analysis model.

Locke lifted his axe from the sandbags, the blade tracing a blue-white arc in the moonlight — a habitual flick of his wrist as he switched hands. He walked down the stone steps, stopping suddenly halfway, tilting his head without turning around.

"You're not leaving the wall tonight?"

"No."

"Then I'll lean on the steps for a while. Axe by my side, modules off." Locke walked down a few levels, found a nook in the battlements, and sat down, placing his laser axe across his knees. The energy was off, but his fingers still gripped the axe handle. It wasn't to defend against Chaos; it was more like, across seventeen stone steps, he was keeping Lin Mo company while guarding the same stretch of wall.

He knew what Lin Mo was waiting for. Not an enemy, but a person.

Lin Mo didn't ask why he stayed. Sometimes Locke didn't need orders, just a position. Tonight's position was to have his back to him, facing the myriad lights of Blackstone Town.

The oil lamps in town flickered sparsely. Aunt Zhang had set up a large pot in the open space next to the workshop; she wasn't cooking, just boiling water. She filled every thermos she could find in town and lined them up neatly at the base of the wall, placing an enamel mug next to each. Under each mug was a piece of paper torn from a production log, with words written by Xiao Zhou on her behalf: "After drinking, put the mug back in its place. There will be another pot before dawn."

The windows of the Medical Station were also lit. Vian spent the night organizing combat first-aid kits, dividing bandages into five categories: hemostatic, splinting, antiseptic, Psyker-assisted, and a pile of burn ointments and peppermint pain-relief balms she had pulled from her personal stash — not standard Imperial equipment, but all concocted by her from herbs gathered in Blackstone Town. The labels on every shelf of the medicine rack were written in her own hand in Low Gothic, the script extremely fine, each letter fitting perfectly into the grid space meant for a roll of bandage.

The furnace fire at the Arsenal had gone out. Old Tom had finished tempering the twentieth spring of the day and finally turned off the blower. He didn't go back inside but sat on an old chair at the workshop entrance, his legs covered by an old blanket Aunt Zhang had insisted on giving him. In his hand, he clutched the vernier caliper that had been with him for fifty years, wiping invisible grease from the measuring surfaces with chamois leather every so often. After wiping it, he'd place it on his knees, only to pick it up again a moment later.

Xiao Zhou walked out from behind him, placing a cup of hot water within his reach, not handing it to him. Old Tom didn't drink, but after putting down the caliper, his fingertips lingered on the cup wall — the water was hot.

He looked at the cup, then at Xiao Zhou's back as he returned to the workshop to clean the quenching pool. A tiny Imperial Arsenal serial number was stamped on the enamel cup wall; it was the first cup he had received thirty years ago as an apprentice. The rim had a small chip of ceramic missing, and it was the only old item he had brought from the Empire to Blackstone Town.

The antenna of the communication relay station turned gently in the night wind. Yang Shitou hadn't turned off the auto-calibration and had manually adjusted the calibration cycle from 0.5 seconds to 0.2 seconds. Over the past six hours, the interval of Echo X had shrunk from fourteen minutes to eight, and it was still accelerating. Its modulated wave was no longer a simple low-frequency pulse; a very short segment of code was superimposed on the tail end of every echo.

Yang Shitou had spent the whole night comparing it against three Imperial communication manuals and hadn't found a matching format. But he noticed a detail: the last pulse of the code always landed on the same frequency, which was exactly an octave apart from the frequency of the underground pulse source Zhao Laonian had brought back, yet the interval time was exactly the same — both were seventeen minutes.

It wasn't simultaneous; one was emitted on the Salt Flats, and one returned from deep underground, with exactly seventeen minutes in between, like two mouths breathing in alternation.

Lin Mo was still standing on the city wall. The person he was waiting for hadn't arrived yet.

The moonlight moved past the zenith; it was around eleven at night — the way of keeping time he was accustomed to on Earth before he transmigrated. In this world without mobile phones, watching the moon move was his only way to accurately estimate the time.

Tonight's moon was as bright as last night's, but the humidity in the air was rising. The swamp mist had advanced at least three kilometers further than last night; there would definitely be heavy fog tomorrow morning. Fog was a double-edged sword for defense: the attacking side couldn't find targets, and the defending side couldn't see the enemy's formation changes.

As he mentally simulated three scenarios for engaging the enemy in the fog, footsteps came from the other end of the wall. It wasn't Locke — Locke's steps were heavy, his 180-jin weight pressing down on the stone slabs with a dull thud every step. These footsteps were lighter, each step landing on the exact same area of the stone slab, without dragging or scuffing, neither hurried nor slow.

The person stopped three steps behind him.

The moonlight made her long, silver-white hair appear almost transparent.

"You said today in the assembly room that I am not the Commander of the reserve team." Alice's voice was the same as usual, calm and precise, the interval between every word carrying the same restraint. "But you placed me in a position that can simultaneously cover the middle section of the East Wall and the reserve team's assembly area. If the barrier leaks, my Psyker level cannot withstand a direct assault from a Level 6 Bishop. You know this. Therefore, what you gave me wasn't command authority, but responsibility. Something heavier than command authority."

Lin Mo turned around to look at her. "You didn't come here tonight to ask this."

"No."

Alice took a step toward the battlements; her hand didn't touch the wall but landed on the copper clasp of the medical kit at her waist. This was a habit she had formed while serving with the Astral Knights — whenever she had something uncomfortable to say, she would subconsciously touch something related to her duties. The clasp was locked, but her fingers could feel every minute scratch on it. One was from being scraped by the twisted cabin door during the crash, and the rest were all worn in, one by one, over these few dozen days in Blackstone Town.

"I spent six years in the Astral Knights, from eighteen to twenty-four." Her tone had no rise or fall, but the interval between her words was shortening. "I followed the Third Company through seven star sectors and fought fourteen border campaigns. Every company I served in, every Commander —" She paused, not to find words, but to strip the excess emotion from her speech before letting it out.

"— every Commander wrote my Psyker level at the very front of the combat sequence. Not my name, but my level. At deployment meetings, when the intelligence officer reported my position, they said, 'Level 5 Psyker, assigned to frontline support group, Psyker barrier coverage radius 300 meters.' No one ever reported my name. On the battlefield, I am not called Alice; I am called Level 5 Psyker."

Lin Mo didn't speak, waiting for her to continue.

"After the crash, when you pulled me out of the ruins —" Her fingertips stopped on the scratch left by the crash. "What you said was, 'Is anyone still alive?' Not 'What is your Psyker level?', not 'Can you still cast a barrier?'. You asked if anyone was still alive."

She turned from the battlements, her ice-blue eyes showing no fluctuation in the moonlight. But in the tenth of a second as the moonlight shifted away, Lin Mo saw it — her pupils constricted in the dark. It wasn't a reaction to light; it was something that had been suppressed for too long, leaking out through the cracks in the ice.

"You are the first person who, before knowing my Psyker level, confirmed that I was still alive."

The night wind from the swamp direction poured over the city wall, messing up a few strands of her silver hair. She didn't tuck them back; her hand remained on the copper clasp of the medical kit.

"You just said, every Commander." Lin Mo took half a step forward, yielding a path of moonlight between them just enough so his voice wouldn't be swept away by the wind. "What about the soldiers? The soldiers who went to the battlefield with you, has anyone ever blocked a bullet for you?"

Alice was silent. This time, it wasn't about stripping away emotion; the answer was too simple, there was no need to strip anything away.

"No." She loosened the bronze clasp, turned around to face the darkness outside the wall again, and the moonlight fell back onto her face. "In the Astral Knights, Psykers are the ones who protect people, not the ones who are protected. A soldier's duty is to charge, and a Psyker's duty is to set up barriers for those charging. Even if the barrier shatters, and the fragments splash onto you, you have to bear it yourself."

"It's not that the soldiers aren't willing; it's that their training taught them one thing: Psykers don't need protection. Because Psykers aren't people; they are parts of a weapon. Parts don't need to block bullets. If they break, you just replace them with new ones."

She paused. "Of the fourteen field Psyker medics registered in my file, the average turnover cycle is eleven months. Those sniped by Chaos, those who died from overdrawing their psychic power, those whose barriers shattered and no one had time to drag back—eleven of them died. The reason in the files is always the same line: 'Combat attrition.' No names, only serial numbers."

"Eleven of them, you knew them all?"

"I knew every single one. Three days before the eleventh one died, she was still teaching me a technique for suturing blood vessels with psychic power. Her fingers were half an inch longer than mine, and her speed at tying surgical knots was twice that of a standard Imperial army surgeon." Alice's fingers moved to the stones on the battlement—the stones had been baked warm by the sun during the day and were now slowly radiating heat in the moonlight. "The day she died, the combat log wrote: 'Level 5 Psyker KIA, replacement transferred from the Third Battalion, psychic barrier coverage radius restored to 300 meters.' No one wrote her name."

"I wrote it for her, in the corner of the last page of the medical log, using a charcoal pencil to write her full name. After the battle, the logs were collected by the Military Affairs Bureau. They said the last page of the medical log could not contain non-standard records. That page was torn out."

"You remember her name?"

"I remember. Her name was Isabelle Valen."

Alice spoke the name, every syllable as precise as when she read out file numbers. But after saying it, she pursed her lips. She didn't bite them, just pressed the remaining half of the sentence back down her throat.

Lin Mo didn't need her to finish to read it—the day before Isabelle died, while teaching her to suture blood vessels, she had said something. That sentence, Alice hadn't written into the log.

"What was the last thing she said to you?" Lin Mo asked. He wasn't guessing; he had seen the curve of her pursed lips and knew that sentence was still stuck in her heart.

Alice didn't answer immediately. She looked up at the three satellites in the night sky, one of which was moving from above the swamp toward the true north.

"She said, 'Your hands are steadier than mine. Psychic power isn't for fighting; it's for mending. When you have the chance—'" She retracted her gaze, letting it fall back onto the city wall. "When you have the chance, teach it to the next one."

Silence crept in. It wasn't that there was nothing to say; it was that Lin Mo was waiting for her to decide how much more she would share. He understood this kind of silence—unlike the silence of Locke gripping his axe, Alice's silence wasn't about swallowing words back down; it was about letting the words linger in her throat a little longer, ensuring they wouldn't spiral out of control before letting them out.

"You're standing here tonight, not waiting for the enemy, are you." Alice said. It wasn't a question.

"How long have you known?"

"Since Locke sat down on the steps and turned off his axe's energy module." She looked toward the stone steps—Locke was leaning there, his back separated from the wall by a sandbag, his breathing already steady and deep. "He's guarding the steps not to defend against Chaos. Chaos won't attack from the inside of the wall. He is shielding you, making sure no one interrupts your waiting tonight."

"And you?"

"I—" She withdrew her gaze from Locke and glanced at Lin Mo. "I decided to come before Locke went up the steps. He didn't call me."

"The Empire didn't call you." Lin Mo said.

"No." This negation hung in the moonlight for a beat. "It's that I wanted to ask a question myself."

"Ask."

"When you were standing on the roof of the Arsenal this afternoon looking down, with two thousand townspeople moving stones on the wall—what were you thinking then?"

Lin Mo didn't answer immediately. He reached into his pocket and touched the crystal with silver veins. The patterns were still slowly flowing, moving slower in the cold night than in the day, but they had never stopped.

"Thinking that these people could have not been here." He put the crystal back into his pocket. "If the Emperor told them to fill in the dirt, they could fill it; if the Imperial nobles said they were only fit to farm and pay taxes, they could accept it; if Chaos came, they could run."

"But nobody notified them this morning; they came on their own. Two thousand people, not here to fight, but here to pile sandbags, move stones, and take down door panels. They might not be able to hold this wall, but they made sure this wall was supported before it could be held."

"You aren't talking about military matters."

"Correct." Lin Mo's gaze withdrew from the darkness outside the wall and fell into her eyes. "I'm saying that some people are worth protecting, not because they are weapon parts, but because they were willing to come and move stones themselves."

Alice's hand loosened from the battlement, as if she were gently pulling back something that shouldn't have been placed on the cold stone, returning it to beside the bronze clasp of her medical kit.

"You just asked me what I was thinking on top of the Arsenal." Lin Mo looked into her eyes. "That's not what you really wanted to ask. You had to listen to me answer the first one, confirm that the answer was in the same direction as the unspoken question in your heart, before you dared to ask the second."

"Yes."

"I've finished answering the first one now."

Alice shifted her gaze from his face to the night sky behind him, not to avoid eye contact, but to organize a form of expression she had never used before. The battle report format of the Astral Knights was always fixed: status, threat, plan, risk level. But this conversation tonight didn't fit into any format.

"These days in Blackstone Town—" She began, the spacing between each word inconsistent; sometimes two words were separated by nearly two seconds, sometimes three words were squeezed into a single breath. She wasn't reading a file; she was searching for words. After six years of service, this was the first time she had to express something in her own words, and these words were not in any Imperial manual.

"Aunt Zhang puts a cup of hot water on my workbench every morning. She doesn't put it on the left—the left is my psychic potion rack, and if she put it there, I would mistake it for medicine and put it in the cabinet. She tried for three days, and on the fourth day, she finally placed it on the right, just within range of my elbow."

"When Old Tom was checking spring parameters with me, he didn't treat me as a Psyker. He treated me as someone who could spot a 0.01-millimeter deviation. He said, 'If she says it's okay, then it's okay.' He never said this to you; Xiao Zhou told me secretly later. Xiao Zhou said that was the first time Old Tom had an apprentice pass on a message."

She paused and took a breath. This breath wasn't for speaking; it was to suppress the speed at which the next words were rising from her chest.

"And Locke." She continued, her fingertips gently touching a dent on the battlement—a mark accidentally made by the back of his axe when Locke was carrying sandbags in the afternoon. "He left his axe, with its energy glowing, in front of the Medical Station all night. I knew he wasn't monitoring me. But it wasn't until tonight, seeing him sit on the steps and turn off the module, that I realized it."

"He wasn't scaring the enemy; he was telling everyone who wanted to take me away from the Medical Station—'This person is under my guard. If the Empire comes to take her, they have to get past my axe first.'"

Her voice stopped on the last word. She withdrew her hand, turned around, and faced Lin Mo directly. The moonlight fell on her forehead and chest simultaneously, and between those two points lay a passage she had rehearsed countless times in her heart but had never spoken aloud.

"No one has ever stood in front of me on the battlefield before." She put every word into the same breath, not fast, not trembling, just with her volume kept very low, so low that no extra explanation was needed. "During that flanking maneuver in the swamp, you had Locke lead men from the left, and you took the right yourself." Her right hand drew a very short arc in the air, from left to right. "On your left were Locke's two hundred men; on the right, there was only you. You drew the enemy toward yourself."

"Your psychic barrier can only block the front," Lin Mo said. "During the flanking maneuver, you set up a double-layered barrier on the left flank to protect Locke's men, leaving your own right flank half-open. If I didn't push to the right, the enemy would have bypassed your open flank and gotten behind you."

"You didn't say that in the pre-battle briefing."

"If I had, you would have demanded to split the barrier to the right flank."

"I would have."

"After splitting it, the barrier thickness would have been halved, and you wouldn't have been able to block either side. You've seen that consequence in the files."

Alice looked at him for a long time. The moonlight grazed the surface of her ice-blue eyes—this time, that layer of ice wasn't a barrier, but the restraint of not allowing herself to lose control.

But the difference between restraint and indifference is that indifference has no temperature. The underlying color of restraint, when pushed to the limit, will leak a trace from the bottom of the eyes.

This trace of temperature shone through Alice's eyes tonight. It was extremely faint, like the pale gold that shimmered at the ends of her hair when she purified psychic energy; a flash, fleeting. But Lin Mo saw it.

"So, you blocked it."

"Yes."

"Why? The optimal solution in tactical simulations wasn't that."

"The optimal solution was to put you in the front to draw fire, while I pushed forward from the flank with full force—minimal casualties, maximum efficiency." Lin Mo's voice was also very low, not like answering a tactical question, but more like stating an answer he had already answered thousands of times in his heart. "But you spent six years as a part in the Empire. I won't let you be a part in Blackstone Town, too."

The city wall suddenly went quiet.

It wasn't that there was no sound—in the distance, there were the footsteps of sentries changing shifts, the low whistle of wind passing through the battlements, and the gurgling sound of Aunt Zhang's kettle spout as she poured hot water at the base of the wall. But these sounds all sank, submerged under the weight of that sentence as it landed.

Alice raised her right hand, her five fingers slowly opening in the moonlight, pausing in front of her chest. This movement didn't belong to any Imperial military regulation; it was a soothing method she had invented herself in Blackstone Town. When her palm opened, a very fine, pale gold pattern appeared faintly—it wasn't the same thing as the silver patterns in the crystal, yet it seemed written in the same grammar.

"You just asked me what I was thinking on top of the Arsenal." Lin Mo looked at her open palm. "Now I can tell you the other half of the answer. I was thinking that the people building this wall each have their own reasons."

"Old Tom's reason is to keep the new foundation of the East Wall from collapsing; Aunt Zhang's reason is to let the people fighting have hot water to drink; Xiao Zhou's reason is that he's been blacksmithing with Old Tom for two years and it's the first time his master has called him to pass on a message; Yang Shitou's reason is that 0.3 degrees cannot eat up a single percentage point."

"None of these reasons are for the Empire or the Emperor, yet every single one is the reason they are still guarding here tonight. This is what I was looking for on Earth before I transmigrated—a consensus organized not by orders."

"Then what is your reason?" Alice asked.

Lin Mo shifted his gaze from her palm to her eyes.

"My reason is already standing in front of me tonight."

The mirror of the emperor flashed very lightly at the edge of his vision. It wasn't a warning, it wasn't information; it was a pale gold shimmer he had never seen in the system, carrying no text, just quietly lighting up for a beat at the edge of his retina.

It was like the one sitting on the Golden Throne, separated by an unknown number of light-years of silence, seeing this moment and choosing not to speak.

These words didn't sound like something Lin Mo would say. Not because they were sentimental, but because they lacked any data, any deduction, any logic that could be broken down by a product model.

Yet he knew that the confession Alice could understand was never "I like you," but rather "You are no longer a part." At the military conference table, he had said, "The reserve unit is under no one's command; place them where her Psyker power covers." Standing beneath the battlements, he was simply translating that same meaning into a language she could understand.

He wasn't saying it for her to hear; he was reaffirming the decisions he had already made, here on this wall tonight, under the moonlight.

Alice understood.

She slowly closed her palms and pressed them against her heart.

That spot was the same point as the resonance source when she unleashed her Psyker powers. Throughout her entire life as a Psyker, this place had always been calibrated as a weapon's energy core. Tonight, she placed her hand on that same spot—not to unleash power, but to feel her heartbeat.

"You told us that beyond the Emperor and Chaos, there is a third path." She spoke again, her voice steady, each word like water that had seeped beneath the ice for a long time. "I didn't refute you at the time, not because I believed you, but because I've seen too many people in the archives who claimed there was a third path, only to either become Chaos cultists or be executed as heretics by the Empire. I thought you were just another idealist who would die because of that word."

"But you're standing on this wall tonight, not for the Empire, and not to fight Chaos. You're standing here because two thousand people spent the day moving stones on this wall." She looked up, the moonlight making her ice-blue eyes shine intensely. "You aren't drawing a roadmap for a third path. You're using the people who move stones, the people who temper springs, the people who won't yield even by 0.3 degrees—you're using the wall they built with their own hands to prove that this path truly exists."

Lin Mo said nothing. But the corners of his mouth twitched in the moonlight—it wasn't a smile, but the exact same expression he had worn when speaking to the sentry under the banner: an answer, with half its outline just surfacing from beneath the water.

"I have never stood on a wall like this." Alice placed her hands back on the battlements. This time, she didn't touch the clasp of her medical kit, instead pressing directly onto the cold stone surface. "Every wall I've guarded in the Astral Knights belonged to the Empire. The Empire ordered me to guard them, so I guarded them."

"But this wall tomorrow, the Empire isn't the one asking me to guard it. It's me, choosing to stand here. Not because you are 'right'," she paused, "but because you didn't give 'right' as an order to me. You simply stood on the side I couldn't defend when you were blocking bullets."

A low, muffled thud suddenly came from the direction of the swamp, like the pressure difference caused by mist churning up from the depths of the marsh. Immediately after, a torch on the wall was blown nearly horizontal by the wind passing through the battlements.

The wind speed was rising. The mist tomorrow morning would be thicker than what Lin Mo had deduced tonight.

Lin Mo looked up at the southeastern sky. The three satellites had passed midnight, and a layer of extremely thick cumulus clouds had gathered above the swamp, the base of the clouds hanging so low it nearly brushed the crown of the tallest dead tree on the edge of the marsh. Based on Earth's meteorological experience, this was called low-level convergence cloud, meaning visibility would drop to within fifty meters before sunrise.

Fifty meters—the tripwire minefield Locke had set last night would become an invisible net in the fog, advantageous for both the attackers and defenders. But there was one variable not on the deduction chart: the Chaos Bishop's Psyker perception, which could precisely pinpoint the source of Psyker power in the fog. The thicker the fog, the clearer his perception of Alice's barrier position would be.

The fog was the Chaos Bishop's advantage.

"After dawn, the fog will be very thick." Lin Mo turned around, once again facing the darkness outside the wall. The mist was accelerating, and the night sky in the direction of the swamp had been completely shrouded by a low-hanging grey-white mass. "Thick enough that standing on the wall, you won't be able to see the base of the wall."

"I know." Alice also turned back, standing in the same direction as him.

There was a half-step gap between them—the interference buffer that Psykers automatically maintained when highly vigilant. But this time, she closed that gap by an inch. Not because her power required it, but because she felt there was no need to stay so far apart.

"If you unleash your barrier in the fog, the Chaos Bishop can precisely lock onto your position from ten kilometers away," Lin Mo said.

"Yes."

"That means he will concentrate all his firepower on you."

"Yes."

"Tomorrow morning, will you still stand on the East Wall?"

Alice didn't look at him. She stared at the hard-packed plain outside the wall being swallowed by the mist. The moonlight had been mostly obscured by the fog layer, but her hair still shimmered with a faint silver-white in the dim light. It wasn't a reflection; it was the natural color in her bloodline. The fog could cover the moonlight, but it couldn't cover that.

"You said it just now; I don't want to be a part in Blackstone Town either." She pressed her hands onto the stone battlements, palms against the cold rock, fingers slightly spread. "Everyone on this wall tomorrow has their own reason. Aunt Zhang's reason is hot water, Old Tom's reason is spring tolerances, and Locke's reason is the axe he guards the door of the Medical Station with."

She turned to look at him. Her ice-blue eyes did not blur in the thickening mist; instead, they became even clearer.

"And my reason is that you drew the enemy toward yourself in the swamp that day."

These words landed on the wall, between the stones of the battlements and the night wind. The temperature of every word was like the lingering warmth of sunlight slowly cooling within a stone—not scorching hot, but that faint warmth remaining at midnight after the heat of noon had dissipated. It had been locked in the crystal structure of the stone all day; you had to reach out and touch it in the dead of night to feel it. Buried deep, but it lasted long.

Lin Mo said nothing. He took his other hand out of his pocket and stepped forward half a step—the same half-step as when he walked from the map to the other end of the military conference table, not fast, not hesitant, with the landing point of every step already walked through in his heart.

He walked to a position side-by-side with Alice, and the two faced the darkness outside the wall together, with less than an inch of air between them.

That inch was the physiological gap between a Psyker and an ordinary person, the distance compressed together by six years of life as an Imperial part and three years of a transmigrator's loneliness.

"Tomorrow, this layer of fog," Lin Mo began, his voice lowered so only she could hear, "will help the Chaos Bishop lock onto your position, but it will also block his line of sight. He won't be able to see our tripwire minefield, he won't see the firing angles Locke built, and he won't see the thirteen wall-locking springs Old Tom embedded in the wall."

He paused.

"And he won't see—that I am a person underestimated by both the Empire and Chaos. And you are a person no longer numbered by the Empire."

Alice turned her head to look at him. This time, the corners of her mouth twitched—not a smile, but the same expression as him, seeing half an outline surfacing from the water.

"'No longer numbered'—you haven't even asked about my Psyker level."

"No need to ask," Lin Mo said, looking at the darkness ahead. "When you were in the corner of the Arsenal calibrating springs with Old Tom using calipers, I passed by the window. You were looking at the spring tolerances, and Old Tom was looking at your hands. He could tell at a glance that your hands could be more precise than the calipers on a 0.01-millimeter tolerance line. He didn't need to know what your level was."

Alice took her hand off the battlements and pressed against the medical kit at her waist. Inside the bag were the last three imperial-standard Psyker potions salvaged from the crash wreckage, all of which she would bring to the East Wall tomorrow.

Her fingertips lightly brushed the canvas surface of the bag, not to check her equipment, but more like she was saying to the last three potions brought from the Astral Knights: After tomorrow, you will no longer be ammunition in a serial number. You are for defending the wall.

The fog swallowed the entire swamp and the hard-packed plain. The light from the torches on the wall spread into rings of orange halos in the mist, their edges blurred, but their centers remaining bright.

The only clear things in the darkness were the two people standing side-by-side by the battlements. One had hair that nearly melted into the ink-black of the night, and the other had silver hair that still shimmered in the mist. Neither looked at the other, yet their standing angles, heights, and the direction they faced were perfectly matched.

From the direction of the stone steps came the sound of Locke turning over—he wasn't awake, just half-asleep, his fingers tightening again around the axe handle. The energy module wasn't on, but his knuckles gripping the handle were tightening unconsciously, as if he were still swinging the axe to fight the enemy in his dreams.

Beneath the base of the wall, Aunt Zhang finished filling the last thermos of hot water and lined up the enamel mugs neatly in two rows. After finishing, she stepped back two paces to look, confirming the mugs were in a straight line—not out of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but because she felt that whoever drank water tomorrow morning would be able to see the mugs as soon as they bent over, without having to reach out and fumble around.

Old Tom finished wiping his vernier caliper for the last time, folded the chamois leather and put it into his toolbox, then picked up the cup of hot water that had already gone cold and set it on his knees. He didn't drink it; he just held it. He held the first enamel mug he had brought out of the Empire thirty years ago, its rim chipped. In his twenty-plus years in Blackstone Town, he had never felt attachment to any Imperial product, except for this mug.

In the communication station, Yang Shitou adjusted the auto-calibration interval from 0.2 seconds to 0.1 seconds, then sat up straight in front of the console.

It wasn't a signal anomaly; it was that he had finally deciphered the structure of the code at the end of echo X. It wasn't ordinary code; it was a set of Low Gothic root words compressed to the ends of the high-frequency pulse, with each end taking less than 0.2 seconds. He had spent three hours expanding it, and in the end, only three words appeared on the paper: Key. Location. Confirmation.

The blank interval between the words was exactly seventeen minutes—identical to the cycle of the underground pulse source brought back by Zhao Laonian.

This was not a Chaos beacon, nor was it an Imperial probe. It was more like something existing beyond both Chaos and the Empire, attempting to establish communication with the metal wall underground.

And the object of its inquiry was in Lin Mo's pocket, slowly shimmering with silver light.

In the Imperial archives, she had always been just a string of numbers, a level.

And on the wall of Blackstone Town, someone had rewritten the page that had been torn out of her, stroke by stroke.