97: Chapter 97 Forty-one notices, each charcoal mark etched into the wood.

Dawn came, and the fog finally cleared.

It wasn't blown away by the wind; rather, the dark red psionic flare in the direction of the swamp had completely retreated beyond the range of psionic perception by four in the morning.

The Bishop retreated.

He withdrew his remaining heavy armor units back into the Chaos-occupied zone deep in the swamp.

Before leaving, he used psionic energy to level the beacon relay station on the Salt Flats—leveling it completely, leaving only a charred crater forty meters in diameter at the coordinates Zhao Laonian had marked yesterday.

This wasn't a rout; it was an orderly withdrawal.

The Bishop pulled out all remaining combat-capable units according to their formations, with heavy armor covering the rear and light infantry moving ahead, pacing every step to maximize the cost of pursuit, leaving Lin Mo no opportunity to exploit.

However, he didn't take a single corpse left beneath the East Wall.

Chaos light infantry, infiltrators, mech wrecks—all were abandoned on the battlefield.

It wasn't that there was no time to drag them away—in the doctrine of Khorne, defeated soldiers are not worthy of being brought back to their homeland.

Lin Mo stood on the city wall, watching the first ray of morning sunlight sweep obliquely across the plains from the direction of the swamp.

The hard earth beneath his feet had been churned up, revealing black mud.

Before yesterday, this had been a greyish-white meadow covered in frost, but now it was plowed with irregular scars: shallow craters from tripwire mines, deep imprints from mechs, scorched marks from laser ablation, and the dark purple pus seeping from the infiltrator wrecks at the base of the wall, slowly spreading.

Yet, among all the traces of war, what held his gaze most was the row of canvas-covered stretchers at the foot of the city wall.

Forty-one of them.

They lined up from the south end of the wall to the north.

Beside each one, one or two people stood guard—family members, fellow squad mates, or townspeople who couldn't bear to leave them after carrying the stretchers and had simply stayed put.

No one cried out loud.

The weeping in Blackstone Town was never wailing; it was suppressed, kept low and long, held in until it could no longer be contained, leaking out only through gritted teeth.

Locke was unwinding his bandages beneath the East Wall, letting Vian put in two more stitches.

The six stitches he'd had done yesterday had burst when he jumped down from the city gate, landing on his shoulder and back.

Vian's needlework was incredibly steady; her psionic perception allowed her to anticipate the path of the subcutaneous blood vessels, and every stitch avoided the main capillaries.

Locke, however, didn't look at his own wounds; his gaze rested only on that row of stretchers—those people covered by canvas.

His knuckles, gripping the axe handle, tightened slightly, the leather wrap squeezing out a faint friction sound between his fingers.

This wasn't anger—Locke had seen too much life and death on the battlefield, having long passed the age of getting angry over every passing soul.

The sound was him counting silently—not counting on his fingers, but counting the tally marks he made with a charcoal pencil on the barracks wall after returning from every patrol.

As he counted, his lips moved ever so slightly.

"How many?" Lin Mo walked down from the city wall and stood beside him.

"Seven." Locke paused.

"From my platoon.

They were all there at roll call last night; this morning, five are gone.

The other two were transferred to my platoon from the reserves yesterday afternoon."

He rested his axe on the ground; the blue-and-white glow on the axe blade had been turned off after daybreak, leaving only a faint standby shimmer that was almost invisible in the morning light.

He stared at that row of stretchers for a long time before raising his hand to re-wrap the leather grip, which had darkened with sweat.

"Two new recruits, in for less than four hours.

I don't remember their full names, just a nickname—Iron Egg.

He said he wanted to learn blacksmithing from Old Tom.

I asked him why, and he said once he learned, he could forge his own axe, tempered even harder than this one."

"How old was he?"

"Seventeen.

Said he might have been a blacksmith in his past life."

Locke pulled his axe from the ground, his voice deepening.

"Didn't get to swing a hammer in this one."

Lin Mo didn't say "I'm sorry," nor did he say "my condolences."

He had been a product manager; he knew all too well that saying "my condolences" to someone who had lost their companions was no different from a product manager telling a user "we will improve"—it was just converting the other person's real pain into a platitude they didn't need.

He wouldn't say empty words at a time like this; he simply stood quietly for a while, just long enough for Locke to know he had heard him, and that there was no need to say anything more.

Then, he walked along the base of the wall toward the row of stretchers.

He stopped in front of every stretcher.

Bending down wasn't a bow, nor was it the standard imperial etiquette; he was simply looking at the shoes exposed beneath the canvas.

Forty-one pairs of shoes.

There were combat boots, patched cloth shoes, straw sandals with toes nearly poking through, and one pair of brown leather labor shoes that looked like they had been put on just yesterday morning.

On the upper of the shoe, someone had embroidered a symbol with needle and thread, crooked and uneven; it didn't look like a character, but rather a circle.

Lin Mo recognized this circle.

When Old Tom inspected springs in the workshop, he would draw the exact same mark.

The owner of these shoes was Old Tom's apprentice—not Little Zhou; Little Zhou had been cleaning the quenching pool in the workshop last night; it was someone else.

Lin Mo bent down to pull the canvas back into place, stood up straight, neither sighing nor closing his eyes, simply engraving the position of these shoes firmly into his mind.

He spent nearly an hour walking past all forty-one stretchers.

Finally, he stood at the foot of the wall for a moment before turning back to the Information Center.

On the way, he ran into Aunt Zhang, who was carrying a large pot of freshly cooked porridge from the temporary stove next to the workshop toward the foot of the wall.

The porridge in the pot was still bubbling, the steam reddening the wrinkles on her face.

She saw Lin Mo but didn't stop, only tilted her head and pointed her chin toward the stretchers.

She didn't say anything, but in the reflection of the water droplets condensed on the pot lid, her eyes were rimmed with red.

This morning, she had added three extra scoops of rice to the porridge—the usual ration was two and a half.

The extra half scoop was because she felt that people who had cried would be hungrier.

She didn't ask Lin Mo if he wanted a bowl.

She knew he couldn't drink it now; it wasn't that he wasn't hungry, but his mouth was filled with the metallic taste of war, and he couldn't swallow anything.

The oil lamp in the Information Center was still lit; it hadn't gone out from last night until now.

Yang Shitou had fallen asleep on the console, his left hand still resting on the frequency fine-tuning knob, his right index finger pressing on the spacebar of the terminal keyboard—he had fallen asleep while waiting for the next set of receipts, still sending the coded pulse of the "key" root word before he drifted off.

Lin Mo didn't wake him, instead draping the blanket that had slipped from his shoulder back over him.

This blanket was the one Aunt Zhang had casually covered him with when she brought hot water late last night; after covering him, she had also placed an enamel mug nearby, filled with hot water, the rim of the cup missing a small piece of porcelain.

Old Tom had discovered this morning that his enamel mug wasn't at the workshop door, but he didn't look for it; he knew it was here.

Lin Mo sat at the table at the very back of the Information Center.

Spread on the table was a piece of paper—not a map, not a signal briefing, nor a projection table, but a blank page torn from a production log, its edges still ragged with tear marks and a grey smudge from a charcoal pencil.

He smoothed the paper out and placed a freshly sharpened charcoal pencil on the left.

This pencil was one Zhao Laonian had fished out when he returned from the swamp yesterday; he used it for marking maps himself, the tip ground very sharp, the barrel slightly softened by the humidity of the swamp.

After submitting the spectrum chart, he had placed the pencil on Lin Mo's table, said only, "For mapping, it's sharp," and turned to leave.

Lin Mo took out the list Vian had registered that morning from his pocket.

Forty-one names, written on the back of a roll of medical tape.

Vian's handwriting was extremely fine, each character uniform in size, yet she would stop every five names—not from fatigue, but to confirm, as the next name was someone she had personally verified from beneath the canvas.

She didn't write numbers; behind each name, she had noted one thing in parentheses: where this person had been on the city wall yesterday afternoon, and what they had been doing.

The first name was "Zhao Laoshi, fifty-two years old, hit in the back of the head by shrapnel from a psionic shell while carrying sandbags at the north parapet."

Vian had added a small line of text after the parentheses: The last sandbag he carried was still on the parapet, not blown apart.

Lin Mo picked up the charcoal pencil and wrote the first notification.

He didn't follow the imperial format.

Blackstone Town had no standardized casualty notification template issued by the Military Affairs Bureau; those templates with headers reading "Hereby Certify," stamped with the seal of the Military Affairs Bureau, and filled with numbers and dates in the middle, were not worthy of the people of Blackstone Town.

He wanted another format—a format so simple that even an illiterate old lady could understand it the moment she heard it.

Each notification would only have three lines: the first line, name and age; the second line, what they were doing on the city wall yesterday; the third line, his own signature.

He spent a full twenty minutes writing the first notification.

It wasn't that he couldn't continue writing; it was that with every stroke, he had to summon that person's face from his memory and look at it again.

He remembered Zhao Laoshi: he was an old stonemason who had moved from a neighboring village, usually taciturn and quiet.

Last year, when the city wall was being repaired, no one had notified him; he had heard about it himself, carried a whetstone over to help, saying he wanted to fix the chisels for the militia.

When he was hit in the back of the head by psionic shell shrapnel yesterday afternoon, he was piling a heavy sandbag that others couldn't carry onto the parapet.

A recruit next to him shouted that it was too dangerous and told him to get down.

He only said: "I'm fifty-two, I've lived enough. You haven't."

After saying that, he bent down and hoisted the sandbag.

The second one was written a bit faster, fifteen minutes.

But halfway through the third one, his hand stopped.

It wasn't that he had forgotten the person's face; it was that the third person's name was right next to Zhao Laoshi's on the list.

He was the one who had been handing sandbags to Zhao Laoshi on the city wall yesterday; they took turns carrying them, one bag for Zhao Laoshi, one for him.

After Zhao Laoshi fell, he rushed over to try to drag him behind the bunker.

He succeeded.

After settling Zhao Laoshi, he got up, intending to go back to continue carrying sandbags, and another piece of psionic shrapnel flew over.

It hit the exact same spot as Zhao Laoshi—the back of the head.

When he fell, he was still clutching a corner of the sandbag.

On the third notification, Lin Mo finished writing the name and added another line below.

It wasn't the content Vian had registered; it was something he added himself: He did not let go of the last sandbag.

The oil lamp on the table flickered.

It wasn't out of oil; Yang Shitou had turned over in his sleep, his hand sliding off the keyboard, his elbow knocking against the metal panel of the console with a dull thud.

Lin Mo got up to help him pull the blanket back over him, then returned to the table to continue writing.

By the time he wrote the tenth, it was already broad daylight.

Outside the window, people on the city wall began changing shifts according to the duty roster Locke had arranged last night.

Locke had moved all the injured sentries to the afternoon shift, letting the new recruits who had been added that morning take the morning shift, but he himself hadn't changed.

His left arm was in a sling, and he was leaning against the iron hinge on the inside of the city gate, his axe resting across his knees.

He said he was resting, but in reality, he was waiting for Lin Mo's first order of the morning.

He looked at the window of the Information Center that had been lit all night but didn't go in.

He knew that on the paper beneath the oil lamp, the fourth, fifth... up to the fortieth notification was emerging, word by word.

When he wrote the seventeenth, the door frame was tapped lightly.

It wasn't a knock, but a very light tap with knuckles on the wood.

Alice stood at the door.

Her hair had completely faded back to silver-white, with only a hint of pale gold at the tips that could only be distinguished in the morning light.

The dark circles under her eyes were at least two shades deeper than last night—it wasn't just from staying up all night; after yesterday's psionic duel, her psionic core had repaired itself, consuming a massive amount of physiological energy.

Vian had advised her to rest today, but she still came—not for duty.

She placed an enamel mug on the corner of Lin Mo's table.

The cup was full, a very thin mint leaf floating on the hot water.

This wasn't mint native to the Empire; it was seeds Lin Mo had brought from Earth, planted in the backyard of Blackstone Town.

She hadn't been used to it when she first came to Blackstone Town, and the first time she drank it, she frowned from the coldness.

Now, she could control the water temperature perfectly—too hot would scald away the volatile substance in the mint leaf that she called "grass vapor"; the water temperature had to be just right to scald out the fragrance without boiling.

She had memorized this temperature.

"The seventeenth." She said.

It wasn't a question.

"The seventeenth." Lin Mo answered.

She didn't say anything more, taking a roll of medical tape from her pocket.

It wasn't blank; it was the second casualty registration form she had verified herself.

After Vian registered it last night, she had gone to check against each stretcher one by one.

Vian had registered names and causes of death; what Alice added was what each person had done in yesterday's battle.

When she was a medical officer in the Astral Knights, she had never done such a thing—the Empire's casualty registration only required numbers and time of death.

In Blackstone Town, she learned to add a line behind each name: what they were doing at the very last moment before they died.

It wasn't for the Military Affairs Bureau to see; it was for Lin Mo to write the notifications.

She knew he wouldn't write all of this on the notification, but he needed to see it.

Only by seeing it could he fill the empty gap between the charcoal pencil and the paper with the living, breathing people behind each name.

Lin Mo took the tape, opened it to the first name, and froze.

Beside the medical description in Zhao Laoshi's line, Alice had added a line: Before he was hit by the shrapnel, he piled the last sandbag on the highest point of the parapet.

Eight psionic impacts hit that position yesterday, but it wasn't blown apart.

Lin Mo read every word she had added, which took nearly ten minutes.

After reading, he set the tape down by the paper, picked up the charcoal pencil, and continued writing.

Alice didn't sit down, standing to the left behind him.

The distance was neither too far nor too close, just enough for her psionic perception to capture his physiological rhythms.

From the frequency of his breathing, she read a layer of pressure that was very thin, very flat, yet slowly sinking.

It wasn't fear; it was that he was doing the same thing every time he wrote a name: transforming the reason this person stood on the city wall—not for the Empire, not for military orders, not to escape punishment—into the last thing they did.

The difficulty of this transformation wasn't emotional, it was cognitive.

He had to speak for everyone who could no longer speak, expressing the meaning of their last day of life.

He couldn't make it up; he could only dismantle the facts, word by word, from the notes Alice had added.

The facts had always been there, but to put them down on paper with a charcoal pencil required an observer willing to spend the time to truly, earnestly look.

She stood behind him, waiting for him to finish reading all the notes, standing until he finished writing the twentieth notification.

Then she walked to the corner, picked up the blanket that had slid onto the floor, folded it, took away the enamel mug that had gone lukewarm, and returned with a fresh cup of hot water.

The cup was placed on the same corner of the table, only cushioned underneath by a piece of paper torn from her medical tape.

There were no words on the paper, only a circle.

It was exactly the same as the circles drawn on the map of Blackstone Town when Vian registered the locations of the deceased that morning.

By the time he wrote the twenty-fifth, Old Tom pushed open the slightly ajar door of the Information Center.

He rarely came here; the last time was when Lin Mo asked about the metal wall.

This time he stood at the door without speaking, holding a spring in his hand.

It wasn't freshly quenched; it was an old one.

There was a smooth cut on the surface of the spring, where it had been cut into two pieces and welded back together; the weld was made by his own arc welding.

After quenching the last batch of springs last night, he had searched through the scrap bin, picking out the springs that had been discarded yesterday one by one to re-test their hardness.

There were nearly forty discarded ones, and he had measured each one with calipers at least three times.

Substandard springs couldn't be used on tripwire mines, but he had kept every single substandard one.

It wasn't because the material was a pity; it was more like he wanted to find a place for every spring that was no longer about killing.

He placed the welded old spring on Lin Mo's desk. "It was in the scrap bin yesterday. Each one has been hammered by hand, tempered, and measured with gauges, but because they were off by a few hundredths of a millimeter, they were rejected. You write the names; one spring for each name. When you bury them, put the springs into the soil. This steel won't rust on this planet—the soil by the swamp is too damp; other metals would rot through in two years, but my springs won't. They won't rot for a hundred years."

He paused, looking at the growing stack of notices on the desk. "And it doesn't need to be a hundred years. Twenty years is enough. Twenty years from now, when someone fills the soil and digs up these springs, they will know that what is buried beneath is not just numbers."

The spring pressed down on the edges of the paper that had curled up in the wind, holding them perfectly in place. Old Tom turned and walked toward the door. When he reached it, he glanced at Alice. He had no questions; he just wanted to confirm she was there. Then he left.

The sound of a forging hammer immediately rang out from the direction of the workshop, but today the hammer blows were half as loud as usual. It wasn't because the furnace temperature was low; it was because Old Tom wasn't tempering today. He was hammering the old springs that the apprentices had dug out of the scrap bin straight, one by one. Straightened springs couldn't be tempered again; perhaps they were meant for something else. He hadn't said what yet.

Lin Mo picked up the welded spring. Under the oil lamp, it shimmered with the dark blue oxide film he had recognized the first time he entered the workshop—even and smooth. The metallic luster of the weld was half a shade darker than the surrounding area, but the strength of the weld was exactly the same as the spring's original strength. This spring had been rejected yesterday; it had never been installed in a tripwire mine, and had never blown up an inch of soil. But today, it was placed where forty-one people would be remembered forever.

When he reached the thirtieth notice, he stopped. It wasn't because he was tired; it was the next name—he knew him too well. This person was not a recruit from the reserve team in Locke's platoon, not an immigrant who had moved from the edge of the swamp, and not one of the intelligence analysts under his command. This was someone he met every morning as he walked up the stone steps of the city wall from the Information Center. Lin Mo held the charcoal pencil suspended over the paper, pausing for a long time. It wasn't that he didn't dare to write; he was dredging up every image of this person in his memory—not written descriptions, but individual actions: Every morning when Lin Mo climbed the city wall, this man would hand him a neatly folded night log and say, "Lord Lin Mo, there was fog on the wall last night." He never said "There is a situation," only "There is fog." He didn't care what was in the fog; he was only responsible for reporting what he saw truthfully. His logs were not in the Imperial standard format; they were written on pieces of paper the size of cigarette boxes, densely packed on both sides, with handwriting so cramped one had to lean in close to see it clearly. Yet every stroke was steady; the strength with which he held the pen was exactly the same as how he held a hoe. This man was named Zhao Laogen, the younger brother of Zhao Laonian. They weren't biological brothers, but they grew up in the same village and had dug for loaches by the swamp together since they were children. Zhao Laogen hadn't returned after handing the log to Lin Mo last night. He had taken over a wounded man's post and stood guard in the sentry box all night. Early this morning, during the Chaos's last wave of light strafing, a bullet had pierced the gap between his left shoulder and his ribs. When he collapsed, he was still clutching the sentry record board in his arms. It wasn't the nervousness of a recruit afraid of being punished, but an instinctive reaction in the moment of falling—his duty was observation. Before losing consciousness, he had to record what he last saw, even if no one would ever be able to see that record board after he finished writing.

Before Zhao Laonian went to the outskirts of the swamp for post-battle reconnaissance this morning, he stood for a long time beside the thirty-second stretcher. Then, he pulled out the last sheet of paper from the record board. The last line of text on the paper had begun to slant—a trail left by fingers sliding crookedly down the page as they lost sensation. That line of text read: "East wind, fog, middle section, fifty paces north, suspected movement—" The end was obscured by a blob of bloodstains; the last word was only half-written. What he hadn't finished writing, Zhao Laonian filled in for him. He didn't fill it in with words; he filled it in with the route Zhao Laonian took during his reconnaissance this morning. The word Zhao Laogen hadn't finished writing was "retreat." Zhao Laonian wrote the batches, positioning, and numbers of the Chaos light force's retreat on the back of the same sheet. After finishing, he tucked the paper into the crack of the Information Center's door without knocking—he still had to continue north; his reconnaissance mission wasn't finished.

Lin Mo didn't stop his pen while writing the thirty-second notice. But after he finished, he set the charcoal pencil aside, flipped to the back of Zhao Laogen's record sheet, and wrote the reply that he would never have the chance to write.

When he reached the thirty-fifth, Yang Shitou woke up. He didn't stand up from the console immediately; for a few seconds after waking, he observed Lin Mo's actions. Seeing the thickness of the stack of notices on the desk, he knew how many there were without counting. The latest casualty statistics received by the terminal last night were accurate down to the individual. He was a signalman, not a military medic, but he had verified them in his own way: the position where each person fell, the signal attenuation between them and the communication station's antenna, and the correlation between their deaths—he had recorded it all in another private notebook. The cover of this notebook had a question mark drawn on it. Unlike the shape of the question mark he drew on the Echo X records, this time the question mark was inverted, with the opening facing downward. It meant: "Gone down."

He pushed the notebook to the most prominent position on the console—if Lin Mo needed to verify the time and location of anyone's death, this record contained the signal archives for the entire battle. Then he got up, walked to the desk, and placed the heated water on Lin Mo's desk. It wasn't an enamel cup; it was the measuring cup he used to calibrate his instruments. The glass wall was etched with scales from one to one hundred percent; between each mark, there was just enough room for the weight of a name to be remembered. He didn't say this metaphor aloud. But when Lin Mo picked up the measuring cup, he saw a faint circle of reagent stain on the wall of the cup, which, under the refraction of light, looked like a name that had been washed many times but remained clear.

By the time he reached the forty-first, the afternoon sun had shifted nearly halfway. Lin Mo had been writing for a whole morning and half an afternoon. His hand didn't tremble, but his grip on the pen changed from holding it between his index and middle fingers to pinching the end of the pen shaft with three fingers. It wasn't because he was tired; it was the name of this last person that forced him to change his grip. This person was the first stretcher he had noticed on the city wall this morning—the owner of those brown leather work shoes embroidered with circles. Old Tom's other apprentice, not Little Zhou. Yesterday afternoon, when he was delivering springs from the workshop to the city wall, Old Tom said there was no need to deliver any more today, but he said it was the last trip. After delivering them, he stood on the city wall and watched the battle in the fog for a while, and didn't leave. After handing the springs to Locke, he quietly stood by the crenelations. He didn't have a gun, and he didn't know how to shoot. But he could tell which sandbags on the crenelations had been loosened by the tremors. He straightened them one by one; it wasn't a task assigned by Locke, but a leak he had spotted himself. A stray bullet from the Chaos light force hit him in the abdomen. Before he fell, he was pushing a sandbag that had been knocked askew back into place. That sandbag, after he pushed it back, never fell over again.

The old springs Old Tom hammered straight this morning were the very batch he had delivered from the workshop for the last time. The sandbag he pushed straight before he died, and the springs Old Tom embedded into the wall base, were less than twenty paces apart. In the afternoon of the same day, the master and apprentice were doing different parts of the same task, twenty paces apart—one embedding springs into the East Wall foundation, the other straightening sandbags on the crenelations. Old Tom didn't know his apprentice had died yet. Little Zhou hadn't dared to say it. Little Zhou had come to the door of the Information Center three times this morning; all three times he wanted to knock, and all three times he pulled his hand back. When he pulled his hand back the third time, there was a fresh red burn mark on the back of his hand—it wasn't from the quenching tank, but from gripping a piece of spring steel that had just been tempered in the workshop; he had gripped it too tightly, and the steel had slipped out of his glove and burned him. He was using the physical pain to suppress the words he didn't dare to speak.

When Lin Mo wrote the forty-first notice, he wrote the apprentice's name on the last line. Then he turned to the page with Alice's added note and saw a sentence: "The sandbag he straightened is on the outermost side of the middle section of the city wall's crenelations. From yesterday afternoon to this morning, it hasn't been knocked askew once."

Lin Mo put down the charcoal pencil. The thickness of the stack of notices on the desk was exactly level with the height of Old Tom's welded spring lying flat. He laid the forty-one notices out one by one—not aligned by the edges of the paper, but in the chronological order of their deaths, from the first to the last. The first, Zhao Laoshi, fifty-two years old. The last, Old Tom's apprentice. An age span of nearly forty years; one carrying sandbags with his last breath, the other pushing sandbags with his last breath. They had never met on the battlefield, but the sandbags they had piled were right next to each other on the same section of the city wall, separated only by two layers of crenelation stones.

He placed the welded old spring next to the fourth notice. The notice read: "Hit by a bullet while straightening sandbags on the city wall." The weld on the surface of the spring, under the light of the oil lamp, blended into the same color as all the charcoal writing he had done this morning. Charcoal is carbon, and the spring is an iron-carbon alloy. In the periodic table, they come from the same cell. It's just that one is used for writing, and the other for support.

Outside the window, Locke was taking down the torn Dawn flag hanging on the city wall from the flagpole that had been shaken crooked by the psionic shock. He wasn't replacing it with a new one; he was checking if the base of the flagpole had loosened. After checking, he raised the flag again and tapped the base of the flagpole gently with the iron ring at the end of his axe handle. Just one tap. It meant exactly the same thing as the tap he made on the steps.

A very short, automatic calibration pulse beeped from the direction of the communication station. Immediately following it was a new signal log—one that Yang Shitou had specifically recorded for the forty-one names after pulling out the backup notebook from under the lead-lined floor. Each name corresponded to a frequency. He had assigned to each of the fallen the signal frequency band of their personal equipment that had been automatically captured by the communication station's antenna for the last time yesterday on the battlefield. Whether the Empire had such a regulation didn't matter; this was something he wanted to do himself. He cut the forty-one signal segments out of the communication log one by one and stored them in that lead-wrapped iron box. If this iron box were to be blown apart directly on the battlefield, the data inside would melt into the soil along with the lead. On the lid of the iron box, he wrote a stroke with Old Tom's charcoal pencil. It wasn't a complete character, more like the first stroke of the first notice Lin Mo had written this morning. He hadn't finished it. He would wait for some day after the war to let Lin Mo write it himself.

In the evening, Lin Mo walked alone to the crenelations in the middle section of the city wall. He stood where the first batch of stretchers had been carried away this morning; the lime powder in the cracks of the stone slabs was still there, just a layer thinner than yesterday. He wrapped the forty-one notices in oilcloth—not the Empire's waterproof file bags, but the oilcloth Old Tom used to wrap newly tempered springs, still bearing the circular impressions of the springs on its surface. He tucked the oilcloth package under his arm and walked toward the Arsenal.

Passing by the workshop, Old Tom was still hammering. The straightening work had taken all day, and all the old springs in the scrap bin that could be straightened had been processed. They were lined up neatly on the workbench; next to each one, what was marked wasn't the tolerance, but the identification number of the tripwire mine it originally belonged to. Most of the tripwire mines had exploded; these springs were the ones that hadn't exploded, the ones that had been rejected. The reason for their rejection was so minor that Old Tom would never tell anyone in his life: one was off by 0.015 millimeters, another had an oxide film on the tempered surface that was two shades thicker. They weren't meant to be kept for commemoration, but tonight, they would be placed together with the forty-one notices and packed into the same box.

Tomorrow afternoon, these notices would be taken home by the families themselves, or delivered by Aunt Zhang to the doorsteps of those who would never wait for their loved ones to return. As for the springs Old Tom had straightened—a plan he hadn't told anyone about yet—they would be buried at the edge of the muddy ground outside the East Wall when the battlefield was cleared after the war. They wouldn't be buried in the cemetery, but at the base of the city wall, next to the foundations that had been smashed by the mecha power fists and then patched back together by springs and sandbags. No names would be engraved on the springs. But twenty years later, if someone were to dig open this wall foundation, they would find forty straightened springs in the stone crevices. Every single one of them had existed in the same position on this wall: on the day it was needed, it had always been there.

When Lin Mo walked into the workshop, Old Tom had just finished hammering the last one. The two of them looked at each other across the workbench covered in springs, no words needed. Old Tom took his vernier caliper out of his pocket—not to measure the springs, but to place it on the edge of the workbench, with the caliper's scale facing east. To the east was the direction of the city wall.

Then he picked up the blacksmith's hammer. Today, this hammer blow didn't land on the anvil. He walked outside the workshop door, hammer head down, handle up, and propped the hammer on the stone slab that had been stepped on by his iron boots for twenty years. The posture was exactly the same as the way Locke propped his axe.

The workshop was silent for a moment. Lin Mo also stood by the workbench for a moment.

Then he lowered his head and pulled out a blank forty-second sheet of paper from the bottom of the forty-one notices. He didn't write a name; he just drew a circle on the paper. It was exactly the same as the circle embroidered on those brown leather work shoes. He folded this piece of paper and put it into his jacket pocket. This circle didn't need to be read by anyone. But the next time he stood on the city wall and looked up at the East Wall crenelations, it would help him remember who had pushed that sandbag straight.

The mirror of the emperor lit up the moment he put down the charcoal pencil. It wasn't text, but a golden circle, exactly the same shape as the one he had drawn on the forty-second sheet of paper. Next to the golden circle, a line of tiny annotations appeared: "This circle is numbered as the forty-second casualty record in the system archives. Type: Mortal. Level: Irreplaceable."

The sky outside the window was getting dark. The evening sky today was different from yesterday. Yesterday it was the dark purple of psionic light; tonight it was the orange-yellow of the city wall torches. At that corner of the middle section of the East Wall crenelations, the spot Lin Mo had marked on the map, a seventeen-year-old recruit had carried the sandbag that Zhao Laoshi hadn't finished carrying to the highest point of the crenelations this morning. After the sandbag was piled up, he placed a wild chrysanthemum on it. No one told him to do so; he placed it himself. He didn't know the flower would wither, but he knew the flower would always be there. Because that sandbag would never be knocked askew again.

Charcoal is carbon, and the spring is an iron-carbon—they are only a few cells apart on the periodic table, but today on this table in the Information Center, they were placed next to the same notice. The names written in carbon will be worn away by time, but the fire tempered into the iron-carbon will not be buried by the soil.

Forty-one—on that evening wrapped in oilcloth—the charcoal writing on each one was carved into the fibers of the paper.

And tomorrow afternoon, what each family member receives in their hands—is not the Empire's "Certificate of Confirmation." It is their son, father, brother, at 4:07 yesterday afternoon—still on the city wall, straightening sandbags.