Jingxing's Defense: The End of Reason
When Jingxing stepped inside, he saw that the lecture hall was packed with people.
The circular staircase spiraled upwards, with people in white and gray robes packed tightly together, even the aisles at the top were filled with people. There were no windows in the hall, but several cold, white beams of light shone down from cracks in the stone dome, illuminating everyone's faces with a uniform, deathly pale light. Fine dust particles hung suspended in the light spots, taking a long time to fall to the ground.
It looked strangely desolate.
Three high-backed chairs were arranged in the center of the platform, and three locals dressed in white robes sat on them, acting as referees for the day.
The man in the middle had a chest-length white beard and a withered face; to his left was a woman with sunken cheeks; the man on his right had his eyes closed from beginning to end, like a weathered stone sculpture. Yesterday's tall, thin priest stood to the side of the platform, his third-class silver badge on his chest polished to a gleaming shine.
"Student Jingxing." The Chief Examiner in the middle opened a booklet, his voice echoing in the heavy stone hall, "Someone has accused you of being obsessed with useless things during your studies and disregarding the school rules. As per precedent, you are given one opportunity to defend yourself. The topic of your defense is—"
"Does an unquantifiable sense possess irreplaceable enduring value?" The Chief Examiner's fingers, thin and bony, pressed against the desk. "Four-quarters of an hour. You may use mathematical deduction, logical reductio ad absurdum, or any reproducible system. Vaksya is in charge, but the use of private fighting or force is strictly prohibited."
"How are violations calculated?" Jingxing asked.
"Suspension of essential living resources for five years."
Jingxing smiled and slowly untied the sachet from his waist.
The tall, thin priest on the side of the platform immediately stepped forward half a step and said sternly, "Weapons are strictly prohibited here—"
"I won't do it myself," Jingxing without even lifting his eyelids. "I just plan to draw a couple of strokes."
He inserted two fingers into the bag and pulled out the Cloud-Washing Ink-Tracer.
The pen, made of dark Darksteel Cold Iron, was heavy and dark, with layers of extremely fine folded forging patterns. The cloud pattern in the middle section shimmered in the cold light, and a layer of pale golden imaginary light floated up. The teardrop-shaped green jade at the end of the pen was firmly held by the bronze eaves. As soon as it saw the light, the aura gathered in the entire lecture hall inexplicably shifted towards his fingertips.
Jingxing made a very light flourish with his brush. "Let me explain myself."
Jingxing's first stroke was placed in the void, where all was calm and still.
The second stroke, still silent, fell without a sound.
The moment the third stroke was dragged across the paper, the thick black ink line suspended in mid-air suddenly stopped, as if it had steadily seeped into a sheet of Xuan paper invisible to the naked eye, and remained suspended in the air.
Jingxing didn't look at the examiners on the platform, nor did he glance at the dense array of eyes around him. His wrist was steady, and the pure black ink marks flew rapidly in the air, each turn as precise as if carved by a knife or axe.
With just a few strokes, Jingxing sketched out the lecture hall.
A suspended dome, circular stone steps, layers upon layers of figures—even the crease in the examiner's sleeve was captured in a single stroke. In the blink of an eye, a miniature, almost transparent, three-dimensional lecture hall was suspended in mid-air.
Someone gasped.
However, Jingxing's brushstrokes did not stop at all, and the ink spread outwards along the steps.
The Academy's neat stone buildings resemble matchboxes, its shrubs are trimmed into rigid cubes, and its straight, monotonous corridors stretch out; beyond that, there is a desolate white sand slope, and a hundred or so small tombstones neatly arranged on the slope.
The pen tip fell like rain in the air.
A broken mechanical pocket watch, a worn-out dip pen, an abandoned name tag with faded writing... all the inanimate objects were outlined with ink lines and hung above the heads of hundreds of trainees, creating an oppressive atmosphere like an upside-down graveyard.
"You remember the roster so clearly." Jingxing finally spoke, his voice not loud, but it echoed clearly in the deathly silent stone hall, "Who fell in which year, what score they got, what year they died, it's all become a string of numbers in your filing cabinet."
He suddenly flicked his wrist, the pen tip striking the air with a heavy thud. "But what right do you have to arbitrarily change the lives of outsiders? They never even considered coming here!"
The group of tombstones hanging overhead suddenly trembled.
On the foremost stone tablet, the name "Ivan" suddenly lit up faintly.
The ink spread out, turning into a moving glimmer in the void: a dusty miner squatted by the mine shaft, breaking off pieces of dry bread in his hand, chewing and tapping his toes on the ground as he did so.
Immediately afterwards, the second name lit up.
Inside the cold hold of the cargo spaceship, a young escort officer hunched over a wooden crate, writing a letter by the light of a lamp. Reaching the end, he hesitated for a moment, then abruptly crossed out the words "Don't worry," and added, in crooked strokes, "Wait for me."
The third and fourth rounds.
A young woman holding a baby patted the swaddled infant gently, humming a wordless tune; in a corner of the market, several barefoot children slapped a broken iron basin haphazardly to the rhythm of meat being chopped on a cutting board, the vendor waving a rag as if to shoo them away, but a smirk played on his lips; two parallel sets of footprints walked on the snow, one of them awkwardly circling around before tightly merging back beside the other...
The light and shadow were so faint, like looking at a reflection through deep water.
But in Jingxing's writing, everything seems to come alive.
The crisp sound of miners' boots crushing gravel, the scraping of pens on coarse paper, the clamor of children breaking pots, and the faint trembling of women's hums—all these sounds, carried by the ripples in the air, struck everyone's ears without fail.
The entire hall fell silent.
All the white and gray robes craned their necks, looking at those who had long since passed away on the cold, impersonal register of axioms, picking up the fragmented days that the rules had regarded as garbage from above their heads.
"What is this?" The female examiner on the left side of the platform asked emphatically, "A lingering illusion of emotions? This doesn't count as proof."
"Not considered proof?" Jingxing stopped writing and looked up at her.
"You call formulas 'truths' because anyone who calculates them will arrive at the same result." He tapped the air with his pen, "But when I just finished writing these words, weren't you all thinking about something different?"
The tall, thin priest sneered from the side of the stage, "This is a neurotic interpretation caused by empathy; it cannot be supported by objective data."
"Objective data?" Jingxing smirked, his expression laced with undisguised sarcasm. "Then I'll give you an objective look at this world."
Regarding their understanding of the world, the Emanator walk at the forefront of Path naturally have their own perspectives, and even the relatively inexperienced Jingxing is no exception.
With a light stroke of his pen, the edges of those warm, soft lights and shadows suddenly shifted into a deep, somber hue.
Everything is sliding towards entropy increase and demise; stars will fade, civilizations will crumble. Pure rational deduction, pushed to its limit, leaves nothing but a predetermined end. When all computing power clearly tells you that existence is meaningless, when all data proves that living is nothing but a futile endeavor destined to return to nothing, the only outcome reason can lead to is irreversible nothingness and self-destruction.
He glanced up and swept his eyes over the pale faces on the tiered seating.
"You think reason constitutes everything? No, pure reason is a cold scalpel that, in the end, strips away all meaning from existence, forcing mortals down the path of Self-Annihilator. What allows material life to cling to its anchor point when fighting against nothingness is never those perfectly fitting equations, but rather these emotions that you dismiss as 'redundant'."