98: Chapter 98 Forty-one voices echoed in the rain, and every name had an answer.

It rained in the afternoon. It wasn't a downpour, but the fine, cold rain most common in Blackstone Town before the onset of winter. The rain was so fine that the wind blew it off course, and as it landed on one's face, it didn't feel like water droplets, but rather like a layer of extremely thin ice shards gently pressed against the skin.

People had been gathering in the square since noon. It wasn't Locke who notified them, nor was it an order from Lin Mo; it was Aunt Zhang, who, while delivering porridge in the morning, had stopped at every house to drop a message: "This afternoon, the square, reading names."

She set the porridge pot on a stone platform at the edge of the square, with two layers of bricks underneath—at just the right height so one could reach it while bending over, but not so high that passing children would be scalded by the steam. The enamel cups beside the porridge pot had increased from the two rows at the foot of the city wall yesterday to three rows today, with each row arranged even more densely than the day before.

Aunt Zhang had added an extra handful of red beans to the porridge today. They were from her trial planting in the backyard last year; the harvest hadn't been much, and she had saved them for an entire year, unable to bear eating them, but this morning, she poured them all into the pot. The red beans were cooked until soft, dyeing the porridge a very pale brownish-red. When ladled into the cups, the pale red smear on the walls of the cups looked different from the bloodstains on the canvas at the foot of the city wall yesterday. It was paler, more translucent, like an old piece of cloth that had been washed countless times but still retained faint marks.

By the time Lin Mo walked from the information center to the square, it had been raining for nearly an hour. He hadn't draped himself in that old combat uniform—Blackstone Town had no umbrellas, and the combat uniform was the only thing to shield one from the rain; he had folded it and left it on a chair in the information center before leaving. It wasn't that he had forgotten to bring it; it was that he wanted the rain to fall on his hair and shoulders. He hadn't been hit by a single piece of shrapnel yesterday, and this layer of cold rain was the only non-physical connection he could establish with those forty-one people at this moment.

In the center of the square, a low platform had been built using a few wooden planks from the Arsenal, less than a foot high—no one needed to look up to see the person on the stage. There were no chairs, no tables, and no rain shelter on the platform, only the old anvil base removed from the workshop wall. When Old Tom brought it over, he only said one thing: "Whoever stands on it must have solid footing."

With the two-hundred-pound anvil pressing down on the wooden planks, the entire platform sat firmly against the stone floor, requiring no additional reinforcement. Lin Mo stepped onto the platform and stood in front of the anvil base, but did not step onto it. The empty space on the base was not left for him; it was left for those forty-one names.

Nearly two thousand people had gathered in the square, not much different from the number of people piling sandbags on the city wall yesterday. Many were still wearing yesterday's clothes, unchanged. After walking home from the foot of the city wall yesterday, they had sat there all night in those same clothes stained with lime and mud, waiting for someone to read the names out this afternoon.

The stretchers covered in canvas had been transported to the cemetery on the eastern slope of the town at dawn, and people had kept watch beside each stretcher until daybreak before burial. Before the burial, Old Tom had placed the straightened springs, one by one, on the chest of each stretcher. He didn't speak, only bowed to each stretcher, bowing forty-one times in total. The rainwater soaked his hump, creating a deeper depression on his clothes, like a groove that had been hammered for too long but never shattered.

After the burial, Old Tom sat on a stone at the cemetery entrance for over an hour, wiping the vernier caliper in his hand back and forth over thirty times. When the suede cloth was finished, he fished out another piece of cloth and continued wiping. It wasn't until Xiao Zhou ran over with a cup of hot water—the rim of the cup had a small chip in the porcelain—that he stopped. Old Tom took the cup but didn't drink, resting it on his knees, holding it quietly just as he had done that day at the workshop entrance.

Lin Mo stood on the platform, waiting for the square to quiet down. There was no whistle, no anvil-hammering, no imperial-style orders for silence. He pulled the forty-one names wrapped in oilcloth from his pocket; the indentations of the springs on the oilcloth had been blurred even more by the rain than they were yesterday.

He unfolded the oilcloth layer by layer, and the speed at which the square quieted down was perfectly synchronized with the unfolding of the oilcloth. When the first layer was unfolded, there was still the sound of footsteps shifting in the back rows; when the second layer was unfolded, the footsteps vanished; when the third layer was lifted, the forty-one sheets of paper were revealed—the entire square was left with only two sounds: the rain falling on the stone slabs, and the rain falling on the shoulders of two thousand people.

The families of the fallen sat in the front row. They had carried their family members from the foot of the city wall to the cemetery yesterday, and walked back down from the cemetery today, a walk of over an hour, their bodies covered in rain-soaked mud. Their soles had left trails of mud on the stone slabs, winding down from the slope; these marks would soon be washed away by the rain, but looking down from the platform at this moment, they clearly marked the positions where they sat.

Lin Mo lowered his head and glanced at the first notification in his hand. There were forty-one sheets of paper, and he had arranged them in order of the time of death at the information center—from 4:03 PM to 4:51 PM yesterday afternoon, reading them out in sequence according to the moment they finished their last act on the city wall. It wasn't by age, not by rank, and certainly not by the seating order of the families.

He read out the first name. "Zhao Laoshi. Fifty-two years old."

In the third position from the left in the front row, an old woman stood up shakily. It wasn't that she had intended to stand; her body had reacted before her ears. She was fifty-six, having farmed rice by the marsh for most of her life, and her eardrums had been dulled by decades of wetland winds. Yet, the frequency that the name vibrated into the air was identical to the sound she had used to call him at home for forty years.

She had heard it. She stood up, her right hand pressed to her left chest—not an imperial salute, but the etiquette used by elders at funerals in the years before Blackstone Village had electricity: hand over the heart, meaning the heart was still beating. She stood for a few seconds, not crying, and said only one word: "Present."

The voice was not heavy, not even loud; she was short, and her voice couldn't carry to the back half of the square in the rain. But everyone in the front row had heard it; no one repeated it loudly, they just turned to look at the person beside them. The meaning in that glance needed no translation. The back rows went completely silent, even their breathing grew very light. The sound of rain soaked that word in humidity, yet it did not dissipate; from the moment it fell from the old woman's lips, it was nailed to the stone slabs of the square in a way that transcended sound waves.

Lin Mo waited for that "Present" to settle; he didn't repeat the name and proceeded to read the second one. "Zhao Dabao. Nineteen years old."

A middle-aged man on the left side of the back rows stood up. Before rising, he first moved the militia combat uniform stained with mud and dried blood from his knees to the side—that was what his son had worn yesterday. After carrying his son to the cemetery last night, he had folded the combat uniform and brought it home, intending to wash it clean before bringing it back, but after washing three basins of water, the water color grew paler each time, and he finally stopped. He didn't want to wash away that layer of something that wasn't mud.

He knew what it was. After his son was hit by shrapnel yesterday, he had used his last bit of strength to crawl less than two feet to the side, just so he wouldn't block Vian who was bandaging the wounded behind him. The blood had seeped into the gravel and stained the combat uniform.

"Present." The middle-aged man's voice was twice as deep as the old woman's from moments ago, without an extra word. After finishing, he refolded the combat uniform, turning the smallest worn patch on the inside of the sleeve to the outside—that had been worn down because his son held the rifle butt too tightly during training; he had told his son dozens of times not to hold it so tightly. Now, this worn patch was the only place that could remind him of his son's posture when holding a rifle.

Lin Mo continued reading. With every name read, someone in the front row stood up; the rhythm of their rising was exactly the same as the rhythm of the pen tip scratching across the paper when he had written each name down with a charcoal pencil.

Some family members reacted a beat slow. It wasn't that they couldn't hear, but that their family never called them by their full names. For example, Zhao Laogen—his wife usually only called him "Genzi." When Lin Mo read out the three characters "Zhao Laogen," she froze for a moment and opened her mouth—she had lived for decades and had never heard anyone address her husband by his full name. The last time someone had shouted it like that was when Zhao Laonian was a child, standing by the marsh calling him to come home for dinner.

She didn't know Lin Mo, who was reading the names, but she recognized that stack of paper. The top sheet was her husband's unfinished observation log from yesterday; Zhao Laonian had taken it off the stretcher and brought it to her last night to look at all night long. She couldn't read, but she recognized her husband's crooked handwriting; it was exactly the same as the mud furrows she had first seen earthworms push up in the fields.

"Present." She stood up, not pressing her chest, just gently spreading her two hands out at her sides—like pushing open the front door from the inside. Every time Genzi came home after the night shift, she could always hear the sound of him pushing the door open at four in the morning. Today, in the square, she was pushing the door for him once. The door was open; the place where he should be, was right there.

The names were read one after another. When he reached the seventeenth, Lin Mo paused. It wasn't that he couldn't find the characters, but that the family of the seventeenth person was not in the front row.

That person was Liu Xiaoman, Yang Shitou's communications deputy. He had fled here from a neighboring planet three years ago with Zhao Laonian and had no direct blood relatives in Blackstone Town. But he had comrades-in-arms.

Yang Shitou stood in the back of the square, carrying the silent beacon terminal board dismantled from the communication station. He didn't raise his hand, didn't stand up, didn't perform any ritual; he simply placed the terminal board on the stone platform beside him and pressed the play button—that was the last set of calibration frequencies Liu Xiaoman had tuned with him yesterday.

The terminal emitted a very short line of green optical code, the parameters of which Liu Xiaoman had written on a cigarette box paper yesterday afternoon, and which Yang Shitou had transcribed into the system himself. The rhythm of the flashing light code was exactly the same as the frequency Liu Xiaoman used when crouching under the city wall, tapping the stone slabs to signal Zhao Laogen: two short, one long.

It wasn't SOS. It was "I am here."

This was a secret code the two communications soldiers had invented themselves; the Empire didn't know it, and the Chaos didn't know it either. Today it was shining in the square, two short and one long, looping back and forth, reading his own name for him.

Yang Shitou didn't speak aloud; the light code answered for him. His Adam's apple bobbed three times, but the word ultimately didn't pass his lips. He was afraid that if he opened his mouth, the sentence Liu Xiaoman had said yesterday while they were calibrating the antenna together would come gushing out with it. He didn't want to mix that farewell into this "Present."

When the twenty-first name was read, Aunt Zhang stood up. Her posture in rising was no different from anyone else's, without a moment's hesitation—this name, there wouldn't be a second person in Blackstone Town called this.

It was her youngest son, Zhang Youtian. Twenty-three years old. Just yesterday morning, he had said to her at the foot of the city wall, "Mom, that bag of gravel is heavy; put it down, I'll do it." She hadn't put it down, but he had carried it away in the end. Those stones were filled into the bunker Locke had built in the northern section of the East Wall, holding up against the side shockwave of a psionic impact yesterday afternoon.

He was still alive after the shockwave. It was after the shockwave dissipated that he ran back to the southern battlements to help a new recruit whose torch had been knocked over, when a second stray bullet struck his lower back.

Before Aunt Zhang stood up, she first untied the apron from her waist. This apron had wrapped steamed buns yesterday, wrapped gauze, wrapped the dozen or so times she had carried hot water to the workshop; it was covered in small spots scalded by steam, and had frayed edges worn by the stove. She folded the apron neatly and placed it beside the porridge pot—not because she wouldn't use it anymore, but because she would have to tie it back on later.

She stood up, her hands not pressed to her chest, nor spread open, but simply behind her back, just like the posture she took every time she stood at the workshop entrance, waiting for Locke to come down from the city wall to tell her if there was enough gravel for the day. Then she said, "Present."

She held this one word for nearly twenty seconds. It wasn't that she was dragging out the sound; it was that after saying it, her lips were still slightly repeating the same syllable. It wasn't for anyone to hear; it was for the pot of porridge that was still steaming. The first bowl of red bean porridge she had ladled this morning was for her son; it had gone cold now, sitting on the stone platform beside the chipped enamel cup—that was the spot where he had crouched to drink porridge yesterday morning.

The names continued. By the time he reached the thirtieth, the rain had grown heavier; it was no longer a fine drizzle, and one could hear the distinct pitter-patter as it hit the stone slabs. No one left the square; the people in the back rows actually leaned forward—not to shelter from the rain, but to hear the remaining names clearly.

Many of those standing in the back were the militiamen who had carried the stretchers yesterday, the comrades who had crouched behind the battlements with the deceased yesterday, waiting for the next wave of Chaos attacks. They couldn't remember everyone's full name, but they remembered who had stood in each position yesterday. During roll call last night, those positions were empty, and no one was willing to fill them.

Today they stood in the back, not sitting in the front. It wasn't that they weren't close enough; it was that they felt they didn't deserve to sit in the same row as the families. Their comrades had died, and they were still alive. They had to wait until all forty-one names were read out, then walk up to each family member and say in person: "When he fell, I wasn't in time."

This sentence wasn't meant for the families; it was to find a reason for their own lives, which were still breathing today, to land.

Lin Mo continued reading. By the thirty-fifth, the sound of the rain was almost loud enough to drown out his voice, but he didn't raise his volume. When he wrote these notifications, he had decided: the volume for each name should be about the same as when their wives or mothers called them home for dinner at the doorstep. It wasn't the volume that echoed across the square during a military parade, but a level where the front row could hear clearly, and the back rows could lean forward if they couldn't hear, or hear it passed on by others.

The thirty-sixth. Locke stood up.

He was not a family member, not anyone's direct blood relative. But yesterday, it was he who had personally carried the five people in his platoon from the city wall to the foot of the city wall. He had carried every stretcher for a stretch; some from the middle section to the south end, some from the north section to the middle, thirty-six one-way paths, the final few dozen steps from the battlefield to the place where the canvas could cover them.

The bandage on his left arm had not yet been removed. Vian stood in the corner of the square; seeing him stand up, her fingertips unconsciously tightened toward the knot of the bandage. She had changed his dressing three times that morning, each time instructing him not to raise his arm above his shoulder. But today, she didn't stop him. Stopping him from standing up at this moment would hurt more than the stitches of his wound bursting open.

Locke said nothing. He hoisted the axe from the ground, resting it on his right shoulder with the blade facing up—the exact same posture as when he climbed the East Wall carrying sandbags yesterday. The direction the blade pointed was the parapet in the middle section of the East Wall, the place where he had last seen the seven men in his platoon.

The thirty-seventh, the thirty-eighth, the thirty-ninth, the fortieth.

Xiao Zhou stood up. He was young, and Old Tom would not let him go to the graveyard. He stood in the back row of the square, near the Arsenal, from where he could see Old Tom at the workshop entrance—the old man was holding a new, unquenched spring in his hands.

That was what Old Tom had forged with his own hands this morning; it was not a reject for the scrap bin, but for his apprentice who had been pushing sandbags on the city wall yesterday. Yesterday afternoon, when the sound of the apprentice working the bellows in the workshop ceased, Old Tom knew immediately, without waiting for anyone to bring him the news. He simply waited for the furnace to be lit this morning and forged this spring.

He did not put the spring into the quenching pool; after heating it to an orange-red glow, he placed it directly on the stone slab at the workshop entrance to cool naturally. A naturally cooled spring lacks the hardness of a quenched one, but its surface develops a layer of extremely thin iron oxide patterns, so fine they are only visible under a microscope. Those patterns would absorb moisture from the air, just like the fine mist that hung on the apprentice's nose tip, reddened by the cold wind, as he stood at the workshop entrance every morning.

"Present." Xiao Zhou answered for Old Tom.

Old Tom did not walk into the square, but stood under the workshop eaves. Rainwater dripped onto his shoulder from a gap in the eaves, but he did not wipe it away. He turned the cooled spring one last time in his hand, aligning the oxide patterns toward the porridge pot in the square, and then lowered his head slightly—not to bow, but to maintain the half-arm distance he should keep between his face and the workpiece when inspecting his apprentice's work.

Now that his apprentice was no longer across from him, he left that half-arm distance empty.

The forty-first, the last name.

When Lin Mo read this name, the rain happened to wash the old, welded spring on the wooden platform until it was spotless. The dampened dark blue oxide film was twice as bright as when it was dry, and the water film refracted light, revealing transition colors usually invisible, with a trace of extremely faint purple dragging at the end. It was a different color from the marks left on the stone slab after the forty-one stretchers were carried away, yet they were within the same spectrum.

The family member of the last name sat in the front row, right in the path of the rain. Her hair was completely white, and her back was hunched, much like Old Tom's. She was Zhao Laoshi's neighbor, not his wife, and had no direct blood relation to him. She had lived in Blackstone Town for nearly twenty years, had no family, and no children, yet from yesterday until now, she had been the one guarding all the stretchers in the graveyard that had no one else to watch over them.

She would crouch before each stretcher, neither crying nor speaking, simply tucking back in the corners of the canvas that had been blown askew by the rain, one by one.

Lin Mo handed her two pieces of paper. They were not two death notifications. One was the name of the young man from the neighboring planet who had come as a refugee, and the other was a forty-second one that Lin Mo had written separately, outside of the forty-one—there was no name on the paper, only a circle drawn on it.

The old lady took the paper with the circle drawn on it. She was illiterate, but she recognized this circle. It was the circle that every blacksmith's apprentice in the workshop knew how to draw. Yesterday evening, when she went to deliver porridge to Old Tom, she saw the old man's hands shaking violently; after finishing the last spring, his hand holding the hammer had kept trembling slightly.

She waited for him to calm down a little, then walked into the workshop and picked up the enamel cup that had fallen to the ground. Beside the cup lay a pair of brown leather work shoes, with a circle embroidered on the upper. She picked them up, wiped the dust off with her apron, and placed them on the east-facing windowsill.

Today, she took the paper, stood up, and turned to face the two thousand people in the square. She did not say "Present" immediately; she simply held the paper up above her chest—not to display any merit, but to show it to all the family members who had already answered, and to those who had not yet answered.

The rain dampened the paper, and the charcoal ink on the edges of the circle bled slightly along the paper fibers. It was just like when that apprentice had used a knife to carve a circle onto the shoe upper; his hand had slipped, and the circle hadn't closed, missing by just a little bit. At the time, he had been afraid Old Tom would scold him for not even being able to draw a round circle, but Old Tom had only taken one look and said: "Round enough."

The old lady slowly folded the paper, held it against her chest, and said one word: "Present."

Forty-one names, forty-one "Present"s.

The timbres were different, the volumes were different, the posture of rising, the movement of raising hands, the details of untying aprons, were all different. Yet these voices layered over the square, forming a resonance heavier than the bombardment of heavy artillery—not a physical vibration, but one living person after another confirming the same fact: the person you called out was still alive yesterday afternoon. He did one last thing on the city wall. That thing, we remember.

Lin Mo finished reading the last name and took out a charcoal pencil from his pocket. It wasn't to write a new name, but to turn the registry to the last blank page and record the echo of the forty-one "Present"s in the square today.

Locke lowered the axe from his shoulder and shook the rainwater off the blade—not to dry it, but to shake out the water accumulated in the plasma cooling fins. Then, carrying the axe, he walked toward the East Wall. It was his turn for night watch tonight, and he would guard the parapet in the middle section of the East Wall, the place where the men in his platoon had last crouched. It wasn't that the spot was more important; it was just that tonight, he didn't want anyone else standing there.

Yang Shitou copied and archived the optical code frequency band, adding a line of symbols to the notes, which looked very similar to the question mark he had drawn on the echo record, only with the point facing down. It meant: the forty-one names had not dispersed, the signal had not been cut; it had simply transferred from the terminal to another reverse channel. Human ears could not hear it, but every time someone remembered what they had done yesterday, that channel would briefly light up.

Vian walked to the edge of the platform and placed a cup of hot water on the anvil base. It was not for Lin Mo. The names were all read, but the base was still empty; she didn't put anything else down, only a cup of water. The temperature of the water was just right, clear and transparent, like the water Aunt Zhang had splashed on her training log this morning.

Old Tom walked into the square, still holding the naturally cooled new spring in his hand. He walked to the front of the platform and placed the spring next to the anvil base, at a half-arm's distance from the old spring. A half-arm was not a measurement; it was the minimum safety distance that should be maintained between a master and an apprentice in the workshop. The spring still retained a bit of residual warmth.

Xiao Zhou ran up from the back row and placed the enamel cup he had been clutching for an hour onto the wooden board. The water in the cup was no longer hot, but it hadn't cooled completely yet. The rim of the cup had a small chip in the porcelain, exactly the same as the one at the workshop entrance this morning. Old Tom looked down at the cup, didn't take it, but just raised his eyes to look at Xiao Zhou. On the boy's nose tip, reddened by the cold wind, hung a fine mist, exactly as it had been early yesterday morning, without the slightest difference.

Zhao Laonian walked back from the direction of the swamp. He hadn't gone to the square today, not out of absence, but because he had promised Zhao Laogen yesterday: the reconnaissance run wasn't finished yet.

This morning, he had carried the portable spectrum analyzer that the two of them shared and walked north, not to investigate the remnants of Chaos, but to the base of the city wall, to the patch of muddy ground where Zhao Laogen had fallen. He had dug up a clump of flattened grass—it had been pressed down by the edge of the recording board when Zhao Laogen fell. The grass was still green; the grass by the swamp was actually still sprouting at this time of the season.

He planted the grass at the base of the city wall, directly below the parapet, and watered it with half a cup of calibration fluid borrowed from the communications station. The calibration fluid was distilled water, without minerals, but Yang Shitou had mixed in the last drop of kerosene from the information center's oil lamp. The kerosene wouldn't kill the grass, but it would float a layer of invisible film on the surface of the water, refracting sunlight. When the grass grew taller next year, the noon sun shining down would cause it to emit a faint iridescence, exactly the same as the reflection of the communications station antenna at a specific angle.

In the evening, the rain stopped.

Before night fell, the people in the square slowly walked toward their respective directions. It was not the end of the gathering. Lin Mo took the forty-one notifications from the oilcloth on the platform; as he opened each one, he invited a family member to come to the front, and handed the paper over with both hands. Unlike when the names were read, there was no sound at this moment, only the tactile sensation in the humid air of paper being passed between different fingertips.

Some fingertips were rough, having held hoes for a lifetime; some had thick calluses, burned by steel sparks splashing during quenching in the workshop. There were no pampered, white hands in Blackstone Town. None of those who received the notifications folded them—they didn't want to fold them. They asked others to help carefully wrap them in clean cloth; what was wrapped inside was not death, but the things he had done while he was alive, recorded one stroke at a time by others.

When night had completely fallen, the last person to leave the square was Zhao Laoshi's wife. She held the notification against her chest, the spot where she held it being the same point where she had pressed her right hand when she said "Present" in the afternoon.

She walked out of the square, each step treading on the same muddy road she had walked down from the graveyard this morning, only this time, she was walking home. Her husband's shoes were still placed at the doorway, and the old clock in the inner room was still running—that was what she had brought back from a second-hand market on a neighboring planet for his fifty-second birthday. The glass on the clock face had a crack; he had insisted on repairing it with a mixture of straw ash and oil, and even after the repair, the mark was still visible.

Yesterday afternoon, the clock had stopped at the exact moment he was hit. This morning, she had reset the clock herself. It wasn't that she had forgotten he was gone; it was that she needed something, just like her—something that could keep moving forward after answering that "Present."

Lin Mo remained in the square until the last person had left. He picked up the cold water on the anvil base and took a sip. The names had all been read, but the forty-one "Present"s were still layered in the air, the aftershocks not yet dissipated.

These voices did not need to be recorded. They had already seeped into the crystalline structure of the stone, following the muddy footprints on the stone slabs, just like the patina on a sword blade during quenching. From now on, anyone who walked into this square might perhaps never truly hear only the sound of their own footsteps.

The mirror of the emperor flashed at the edge of Lin Mo's vision. The light this time was not a warning; it was a record.

It was different from all the previous times. The golden light did not immediately shrink into text; instead, it condensed into a translucent human silhouette at a half-arm's distance to his right. The height was similar to Lin Mo's, the shoulders slightly narrower, and the edges were not sharp, like a layer of gold leaf polished countless times, slowly unfolding in the dim light. It stood in the empty square, side-by-side with Lin Mo, looking together at the stone slab ground soaked by rain.

It lowered its head—not to look down, but to lower its gaze to the same depth as where the muddy footprints had seeped into the stone crevices. Then it raised its hand—not a physical entity, but countless extremely fine particles of golden light—and its fingertips gently touched the stone slab where the forty-first "Present" had fallen.

The moment of contact, the crystalline structure inside the stone slab unfolded layer by layer at its fingertips—not destruction, but perspective. The sound waves of the forty-one "Present"s had left invisible micro-cracks in the silicon-oxygen tetrahedral framework of the stone, each less than one-thousandth the width of a human hair, yet they existed in reality.

The forty-one vibrations of different frequencies, the spectrum of each "Present," each had a unique resonance peak at the moment it was spoken by the wife, mother, comrade, or the stranger keeping vigil. The golden figure restored these resonance peaks, one by one, into the original waveforms they had when they fell into the stone.

In Lin Mo's vision, forty-one extremely fine golden threads briefly unfolded. The amplitude, period, and decay curve of each were different. The voice of the stonemason's wife was low-frequency, with a long decay; the crack left in the stone was like a door pushed open from within. The voice of Old Tom's apprentice, spoken for him by the stranger old lady, carried the weight of two people in its waveform; the crack branched within the crystal lattice, like two hands that had never held each other, completing their final handover between the molecules of the stone.

The golden figure withdrew its fingers. Those micro-cracks would not disappear; they had permanently changed the stress distribution inside the stone. From now on, anyone who walked into this square would not hear only their own footsteps—when the stone slabs were stepped on, they would vibrate slightly at a frequency inaudible to the human ear; every time they passed a crack left by a "Present," it would be amplified, like when a bell is struck, forty-one echoes would awaken together.

The golden figure dissipated, and the mirror of the emperor returned to its usual golden text. It unfolded the waveforms of the forty-one "Present"s into continuous, in-phase resonance curves within the characters. Thirty-seven voices came from parents, children, and family members; four voices came from comrades, signalmen, the blacksmith's apprentice, and the stranger who had kept vigil over the canvas for him.

These golden imprints overlapped in the system, forming an entry with no number, no classification, and one that would not be entered into any combat records.

At some moment before dawn, Lin Mo stood in the center of the empty square, slowly tucking his hand, which had been cut while moving the anvil, into his pocket. Deep in his pocket, the rotation speed of that silver crystal and the rhythm of the forty-one "Present"s from the afternoon—

Coincidentally, they were exactly the same.

After the rain stopped, the voices did not leave.

Forty-one names were read from the charcoal pencil into the air, and then from the air, they were received into chests.

This square, this afternoon, had no more echoes.

There was only the reverberation—and as the rain seeped from the crevices of the stone slabs into the foundation, it kneaded every "Present" into the ground, only to rise again with every new rain.