Seeing that the woman seemed full of goodwill, Liu Xiaolou was about to ask her name when his heart suddenly jolted, and his gaze swept the surroundings.
On more than a dozen nearby peaks, there were as few as one person and as many as several dozen, all watching from afar. Countless gazes intertwined around him, making his scalp prickle.
A blue flower landed on the page, pinning down a line of still-wet ink. Zhou Lin closed his notebook. Wind swept over Wulong Mountain's summit, carrying the scent of ancient ice sheets melting, mixed with a low-frequency vibration—not from the Earth's core, nor from a data stream, but from something more primordial. Like a heartbeat, and like a pendulum, it ticked softly through the cracks of time.
He looked up and saw Shen Qingwu standing before the stone tablet, her fingertips brushing the ring of spiral patterns. The blue markings in her palm were faintly hot, as though resonating with the inscription.
"It's reading us," she said softly. "Not monitoring us. It's... like turning through us, dismantling our memory structures page by page."
"Then let it read." Zhou Lin rose to his feet and brushed the dust from his clothes. "But it will never understand the parts left blank."
The moment he finished speaking, the sky suddenly darkened. It was neither clouds nor the arrival of night, but a visual "absence," as though all the color in the world had been drained away for an instant. Then a soundless tremor came from the Arctic, twisting even the air for half a second.
Lin Wanqiu's communication immediately came through. "Zhao Gui and Xiao Lin have lost contact. The last data they sent back from the Ruins of the First Tablet was a reverse-coded memory fragment... and it was about your mother."