Whenever I wandered around Shadow City, I often ran into Shilin—the slightly scatterbrained super-consciousness who always seemed to be idly roaming about would unconsciously appear in several specific places, which were basically the places Sandora or I usually liked to visit. This probably had something to do with her life form: as the collective consciousness of the Shilin people, she was more inclined to keep track of the movements of the species' leaders. The coordinates where Sandora and I usually lingered were probably the places Shilin knew best.
That explained why Shilin was always hanging around Silvia's dessert shop: this place was practically Sandora's second paradise—incidentally, Sandora's first paradise was the kitchen at home.
Speaking of Shilin, her life in Shadow City was quite leisurely. This girl always drifted about looking perfectly carefree. Aside from going to the Research Center to cooperate with Tawell's various experiments, she spent nearly twenty hours every day loafing around. I really envied her life of idle freedom. But according to Bubble, the workload Shilin handled every day was actually enormous: basically every Shilin Apostle connected to the Spiritual Network was constantly uploading and downloading data through her, yet Shilin herself seemed never to realize she had any of this work. All data exchanges on that level were handled by the Spiritual Network's underlying protocols. As the highest-level consciousness of that network, Shilin could not even feel them. The reason the Shilin Apostles' Spiritual Network had continued operating normally all these years while Shilin wandered outside was exactly this: most of the work was handled by the Spiritual Network's "subconscious layer," while Shilin, its conscious mind, spent every day as leisurely as a retired official who had been off the job for seven or eight years—no, this wouldn't do. The moment I saw her utterly