The moment his fingertips touched the pattern, the Fruit's markings flashed deep within his Sea of Consciousness. That brightness differed from the light it emitted when outputting energy. It was more like the optical response produced when one mirror faced another-not active emission, but reflection. Within that reflection, he sensed the direction and density of the pattern itself, as though his Fruit were using the structure of its own markings to read the information on the metal plate's surface. The reading process was gentle and continuous, without the impact of external data flooding in. It felt more like a slow weaving process, like one vein gradually extending along the course of another, gradually fitting against it, gradually establishing a structural connection between the two.
He remained seated on the stump for some time, keeping his hand against the Metal Box. The morning light over the river continued to shift, climbing from its position in the east and casting an increasingly broad band of warm light across the water. Zero Seven waited quietly at the edge of the trees' shadows, neither approaching nor speaking. By the time Xu Wuyi finally lifted his fingers from the Metal Box, the morning light had risen to almost the brightness of noon.
He looked down at the Metal Box. No visible change had appeared on its surface after his touch, but the directions of the pattern he had sensed during that contact had left a clear path in his consciousness. The similarity between the pattern's structural logic and the logic of his Fruit's markings ran deeper than he had judged when first sensing it in the void. It was as though the same underlying code had been implemented again in a different language-the syntax had changed, the vocabulary had changed, but the core nodes in