Chapter 189: Hidden Beneath the Restraint
The twelve hours following the raid were the most peaceful stretch of time the West Bastion had experienced in a long while.
The high-tier priest in the rock cavity still hadn't left. It was curled up in the depths of the shadows, nursing its wounds. The cracked spiral bone crown atop its head emitted a dim light. Occasionally, it would barely manage to gather enough power for a single pulse, but its strength was pitifully weak. When it struck the resonance barrier of the blockade array, it only created a ripple so faint it was practically negligible. After transmitting into the spore network within the city, it could only cause mild tinnitus in a handful of sleepers; it couldn't even manage to induce auditory hallucinations.
On the spectrum panel, the pulse spikes that had once pressed in relentlessly were now sparse and feeble.
The command center seized this hard-won window of opportunity, accelerating all operations at full speed.
The water supply pumping stations continued to inject neutralizing agents. Reserves were allocated overnight and transported through underground pipelines to the pipe network nodes throughout the city. Screening squads were split and reorganized into two-person teams. Following the high-priority resonance chain, they went door-to-door to register and track down the sleepers still hidden in residential areas, sending them to isolation pods for monitoring. Taking advantage of the lowered load, the engineers of the blockade array inspected each oscillation pillar one by one, replacing aging circuits, calibrating the barrier's resonance frequency, and patching up the hidden dangers left by days of continuous pressure.
The Sea of Consciousness training curriculum at the academy was also adjusted, adding practical drills on emergency suppression for anchor point restlessness. Day after day, the youths practiced stabilizing their Seas of Consciousness, preparing for the next storm.
On the city streets, the taut atmosphere of panic had relaxed slightly. Many residents were unaware that a raid gambling with the fate of the entire city had just taken place in the wasteland rift. They went about buying groceries, hurrying to their destinations, and chatting as usual. Only the garrison military police and the research institute personnel knew that this peace had been bought with fifteen seconds of life-and-death assault.
The rocky hill observation point maintained its shift rotations, though the nerves were no longer stretched to the breaking point.
Old Zhou took the injured team members back to the city to recuperate. The rest of the assault squad stayed at the point for shifts. Everyone bore scratches and bruises of varying severity and remained taciturn. The brief dozen seconds of charging into the rock cavity were already etched into everyone's minds.
Lin Yan had voluntarily applied to stay behind at the observation post.
Instead of staring at the instruments to pass the time, he pulled up the spectrum recordings from the entire operation and replayed them over and over.
Two curves were displayed side by side on the screen: one was the secondary fluctuation of the priest's bone crown accumulating energy and releasing pulses; the other was the gentle main signal belonging to the supreme ruler deep in the middle of the rift.
He repeatedly paused at two critical nodes.
The first node was the moment the squad charged into the rock cavity and the oscillation stinger hit the bone crown. The supreme ruler's signal had twitched upward slightly—a mere "notice," without any frenzied tendency to erupt.
The second node was when the squad delayed their retreat, intending to follow up with another strike while the scaled beasts pincered in to seal off their escape route. The main signal had risen a second time, with a significantly larger amplitude. The signal had split into countless fine threads extending toward the city's pipe network—the telltale sign that the fuses leading to the city-wide anchor points were primed and ready for ignition.
Yet, the instant the squad burst out of the rift and cleared the rock cavity, that impending momentum, which was about to crush the red line, slowly receded.
The external conclusion for everyone was: The supreme ruler had weighed the pros and cons, judged it as a localized sneak attack not worth the cost of detonating the entire city, and therefore chose restraint.
Scholar Su had made the same judgment, and the command center's after-action report had also settled on this conclusion.
But Lin Yan stared at the waveforms, reading them over and over again. The fissure at his brow throbbed with a dull ache, and the unease in his heart grew increasingly clear.
No.
Having confronted this indifferent will for so long, sensing its rhythm through layers of rock countless times, he knew it was never a chess player who merely calculated gains and losses and knew when to stop. It was patient in its planning, skilled at long-term pulling and pushing, with every probe carrying multiple purposes.
If it had wanted to detonate at that time, even if the squad had already burst out of the rift, the signal link would have remained clear, and the tens of thousands of anchor points within the city could have been ignited just the same. Distance had never been an obstacle for it. It had clearly touched the switch, the fuses pulled taut, yet it had voluntarily let go and withdrawn its power. Simply weighing the risks was too flimsy a reason.
Lin Yan walked alone to the top of the rocky hill, facing the cold wind of the wasteland carrying sand, and gazed far into the pitch-black fissure of Rift No. 79.
The priest lay quietly in the rock cavity nursing its wounds, its bone crown damaged and its relay capability drastically reduced. On the surface, humanity's desperate gamble had broken its pulsing rhythm and won precious time to rest.
But what if this was exactly the outcome it had wanted to see?
A chill crept up his spine as the thought surfaced.
It had let the squad charge in. It had let its high-tier priest be wounded. It had deliberately suppressed the urge to detonate the entire city, creating the illusion for the West Bastion that "our counterattack succeeded and we have temporarily seized the initiative." Humanity would use this breathing room to accelerate screening and reinforce its defenses. But could humanity truly screen out every single sleeper? The resonance chains spanned the entire underground pipe network, with pipe gallery nodes densely packed; there would always be blind spots.
Or perhaps, it was using this raid to collect more data.
To observe firsthand what kind of assault tactics humanity would employ in desperation, how much risk it was willing to take, and what it would prioritize as the target of the raid. To figure out the role Lin Yan, the unique perceiver, played in the operation, and to map the boundaries of his commands, judgments, and warnings.
It had always known that Lin Yan was the core switch of the entire operation. Could that fluctuation of signals just now have been a performance staged for Lin Yan? To lead Lin Yan to form a judgment:As long as we retreat in time, it won't choose to flip the chessboard.
Once this judgment took root in Lin Yan's mind, the next time a similar desperate operation was planned, everyone would subconsciously rely on this experience. And that would be the flaw it was waiting for.
Lin Yan raised his hand and pressed against his brow. He gently released a wisp of extremely faint tentacles from his Sea of Consciousness, carefully reaching into the depths of the rift.
That familiar, vast indifference still lingered in the middle of the channel. The waveform had returned to its usual stability, showing no ripples, as if the heart-stopping confrontation from before had been nothing more than an insignificant, minor interlude. It lay dormant quietly, neither angry nor restless, as if the wounded priest were merely a disposable chess piece.
The calmer it was, the heavier Lin Yan's heart sank.
It could discard the priest. From the very beginning, the priest had only been a forward relay piece, used to knock on the gates, test, and transmit signals. It could even be used as bait to exchange for the intelligence it desired. Sacrificing a chess piece to make the opponent misjudge the situation—for a chess player who had been patient for millennia—was perhaps not a bad trade.
The encrypted communicator vibrated. It was a message from Scholar Su:Screening progress has accelerated. We dug up thirty-two more sleepers today. The isolation pods are continuously expanding. Everything is looking good. At the end, there was an added note:Rest well, don't be overly tense.
Lin Yan briefly replied that he had received it and turned off the communicator.
Everyone was immersed in the relief brought by the阶段性 (phased) victory, seizing every minute and second to patch the loopholes. Only he, staring through the fissure in his Sea of Consciousness at the unchanging stream of consciousness deep in the darkness, couldn't shake the lingering doubts in his heart.
The breathing room was real, and the temporary easing of the crisis was real as well. But this breathing room might not have been fought for by humanity; it was possible that it had been actively granted by the darkness.
It hadn't been angry. It hadn't retaliated. It hadn't flipped the chessboard. Not because it couldn't, but because it had chosen not to, for now.
The gray fog of the wasteland slowly gathered, once again enveloping the entrance to the rift. The priest in the rock cavity occasionally let out a low, hoarse hiss. The faint light on its bone crown was intermittent, so weak it was barely visible.
Lin Yan stood in the wind, staring at the massive fissure.
He hadn't reported this guess in his heart. There was no evidence, only the intuition brought by his perception. Speaking of it would only disrupt the rhythm the command center had worked so hard to stabilize. He could only firmly remember this doubt himself and keep an extra watchful eye the next time he captured its signals.
The game continued. Beneath the brief tranquility, who knew what new layout was being quietly woven deep within the rock strata.
End of Chapter.
The high-tier priest in the rock cavity still hadn't left. It was curled up in the depths of the shadows, nursing its wounds. The cracked spiral bone crown atop its head emitted a dim light. Occasionally, it would barely manage to gather enough power for a single pulse, but its strength was pitifully weak. When it struck the resonance barrier of the blockade array, it only created a ripple so faint it was practically negligible. After transmitting into the spore network within the city, it could only cause mild tinnitus in a handful of sleepers; it couldn't even manage to induce auditory hallucinations.
On the spectrum panel, the pulse spikes that had once pressed in relentlessly were now sparse and feeble.
The command center seized this hard-won window of opportunity, accelerating all operations at full speed.
The water supply pumping stations continued to inject neutralizing agents. Reserves were allocated overnight and transported through underground pipelines to the pipe network nodes throughout the city. Screening squads were split and reorganized into two-person teams. Following the high-priority resonance chain, they went door-to-door to register and track down the sleepers still hidden in residential areas, sending them to isolation pods for monitoring. Taking advantage of the lowered load, the engineers of the blockade array inspected each oscillation pillar one by one, replacing aging circuits, calibrating the barrier's resonance frequency, and patching up the hidden dangers left by days of continuous pressure.
The Sea of Consciousness training curriculum at the academy was also adjusted, adding practical drills on emergency suppression for anchor point restlessness. Day after day, the youths practiced stabilizing their Seas of Consciousness, preparing for the next storm.
On the city streets, the taut atmosphere of panic had relaxed slightly. Many residents were unaware that a raid gambling with the fate of the entire city had just taken place in the wasteland rift. They went about buying groceries, hurrying to their destinations, and chatting as usual. Only the garrison military police and the research institute personnel knew that this peace had been bought with fifteen seconds of life-and-death assault.
The rocky hill observation point maintained its shift rotations, though the nerves were no longer stretched to the breaking point.
Old Zhou took the injured team members back to the city to recuperate. The rest of the assault squad stayed at the point for shifts. Everyone bore scratches and bruises of varying severity and remained taciturn. The brief dozen seconds of charging into the rock cavity were already etched into everyone's minds.
Lin Yan had voluntarily applied to stay behind at the observation post.
Instead of staring at the instruments to pass the time, he pulled up the spectrum recordings from the entire operation and replayed them over and over.
Two curves were displayed side by side on the screen: one was the secondary fluctuation of the priest's bone crown accumulating energy and releasing pulses; the other was the gentle main signal belonging to the supreme ruler deep in the middle of the rift.
He repeatedly paused at two critical nodes.
The first node was the moment the squad charged into the rock cavity and the oscillation stinger hit the bone crown. The supreme ruler's signal had twitched upward slightly—a mere "notice," without any frenzied tendency to erupt.
The second node was when the squad delayed their retreat, intending to follow up with another strike while the scaled beasts pincered in to seal off their escape route. The main signal had risen a second time, with a significantly larger amplitude. The signal had split into countless fine threads extending toward the city's pipe network—the telltale sign that the fuses leading to the city-wide anchor points were primed and ready for ignition.
Yet, the instant the squad burst out of the rift and cleared the rock cavity, that impending momentum, which was about to crush the red line, slowly receded.
The external conclusion for everyone was: The supreme ruler had weighed the pros and cons, judged it as a localized sneak attack not worth the cost of detonating the entire city, and therefore chose restraint.
Scholar Su had made the same judgment, and the command center's after-action report had also settled on this conclusion.
But Lin Yan stared at the waveforms, reading them over and over again. The fissure at his brow throbbed with a dull ache, and the unease in his heart grew increasingly clear.
No.
Having confronted this indifferent will for so long, sensing its rhythm through layers of rock countless times, he knew it was never a chess player who merely calculated gains and losses and knew when to stop. It was patient in its planning, skilled at long-term pulling and pushing, with every probe carrying multiple purposes.
If it had wanted to detonate at that time, even if the squad had already burst out of the rift, the signal link would have remained clear, and the tens of thousands of anchor points within the city could have been ignited just the same. Distance had never been an obstacle for it. It had clearly touched the switch, the fuses pulled taut, yet it had voluntarily let go and withdrawn its power. Simply weighing the risks was too flimsy a reason.
Lin Yan walked alone to the top of the rocky hill, facing the cold wind of the wasteland carrying sand, and gazed far into the pitch-black fissure of Rift No. 79.
The priest lay quietly in the rock cavity nursing its wounds, its bone crown damaged and its relay capability drastically reduced. On the surface, humanity's desperate gamble had broken its pulsing rhythm and won precious time to rest.
But what if this was exactly the outcome it had wanted to see?
A chill crept up his spine as the thought surfaced.
It had let the squad charge in. It had let its high-tier priest be wounded. It had deliberately suppressed the urge to detonate the entire city, creating the illusion for the West Bastion that "our counterattack succeeded and we have temporarily seized the initiative." Humanity would use this breathing room to accelerate screening and reinforce its defenses. But could humanity truly screen out every single sleeper? The resonance chains spanned the entire underground pipe network, with pipe gallery nodes densely packed; there would always be blind spots.
Or perhaps, it was using this raid to collect more data.
To observe firsthand what kind of assault tactics humanity would employ in desperation, how much risk it was willing to take, and what it would prioritize as the target of the raid. To figure out the role Lin Yan, the unique perceiver, played in the operation, and to map the boundaries of his commands, judgments, and warnings.
It had always known that Lin Yan was the core switch of the entire operation. Could that fluctuation of signals just now have been a performance staged for Lin Yan? To lead Lin Yan to form a judgment:As long as we retreat in time, it won't choose to flip the chessboard.
Once this judgment took root in Lin Yan's mind, the next time a similar desperate operation was planned, everyone would subconsciously rely on this experience. And that would be the flaw it was waiting for.
Lin Yan raised his hand and pressed against his brow. He gently released a wisp of extremely faint tentacles from his Sea of Consciousness, carefully reaching into the depths of the rift.
That familiar, vast indifference still lingered in the middle of the channel. The waveform had returned to its usual stability, showing no ripples, as if the heart-stopping confrontation from before had been nothing more than an insignificant, minor interlude. It lay dormant quietly, neither angry nor restless, as if the wounded priest were merely a disposable chess piece.
The calmer it was, the heavier Lin Yan's heart sank.
It could discard the priest. From the very beginning, the priest had only been a forward relay piece, used to knock on the gates, test, and transmit signals. It could even be used as bait to exchange for the intelligence it desired. Sacrificing a chess piece to make the opponent misjudge the situation—for a chess player who had been patient for millennia—was perhaps not a bad trade.
The encrypted communicator vibrated. It was a message from Scholar Su:Screening progress has accelerated. We dug up thirty-two more sleepers today. The isolation pods are continuously expanding. Everything is looking good. At the end, there was an added note:Rest well, don't be overly tense.
Lin Yan briefly replied that he had received it and turned off the communicator.
Everyone was immersed in the relief brought by the阶段性 (phased) victory, seizing every minute and second to patch the loopholes. Only he, staring through the fissure in his Sea of Consciousness at the unchanging stream of consciousness deep in the darkness, couldn't shake the lingering doubts in his heart.
The breathing room was real, and the temporary easing of the crisis was real as well. But this breathing room might not have been fought for by humanity; it was possible that it had been actively granted by the darkness.
It hadn't been angry. It hadn't retaliated. It hadn't flipped the chessboard. Not because it couldn't, but because it had chosen not to, for now.
The gray fog of the wasteland slowly gathered, once again enveloping the entrance to the rift. The priest in the rock cavity occasionally let out a low, hoarse hiss. The faint light on its bone crown was intermittent, so weak it was barely visible.
Lin Yan stood in the wind, staring at the massive fissure.
He hadn't reported this guess in his heart. There was no evidence, only the intuition brought by his perception. Speaking of it would only disrupt the rhythm the command center had worked so hard to stabilize. He could only firmly remember this doubt himself and keep an extra watchful eye the next time he captured its signals.
The game continued. Beneath the brief tranquility, who knew what new layout was being quietly woven deep within the rock strata.
End of Chapter.