Zhou Mingyuan gave an unusual talk at the Evening Session on the seventeenth day. He stood before the gray-white wall with his data board beside the lectern. He projected no charts or diagrams. His hands hung naturally at his sides as he looked over the faces filling the Assembly Hall. More than two hundred people sat inside, and nearly a hundred more sat outside on the open ground. The warm golden light of their cores formed a continuous glow against the dusk.
"Today, I want to talk about something new that's appeared in the Evening Session records," Zhou Mingyuan began. His voice was quiet but carried clearly through the silent Assembly Hall. "Some of you may have sensed it already—the Mental Byproducts flowing from the network into your cores are finer and more uniform than they were a few months ago. You're not imagining it, and it isn't a random fluctuation. I've tracked the change over the past few weeks, and its onset closely matches the formation of the Hybrid Overlay on the west side of the Central Defense Line."
The audience remained quiet. Some sat up a little straighter. Others lifted their eyes from the floor to Zhou Mingyuan's face. No one made a sound.
"My current theory is that, as the Hybrid Overlay spread across the network connections, it began to 'filter' the signals passing through them. Think of water flowing through a lined pipe: the inner walls absorb some impurities, so the water comes out cleaner than it went in. The change in the Mental Byproducts reaching your cores is the result of that filtering."
The assembly hall stayed silent for a long time. Then someone in the back raised his hand. Zhou Mingyuan nodded for him to speak. The man stood, his voice tentative and cautious