Silent Ark

Chapter 45: Heart Imprint

He opened his eyes.

"Did you see that?" Wukong asked.

"Hmm, the outside... is very thin."

It will get thinner and thinner.

"How long can I hold out?"

Wukong looked at him.

"That depends on how much you're willing to forget."

Yao Chong remained silent.

He looked down at his hands.

My hand is still there.

The shadow is still there.

But the shadow was indeed a little fainter than yesterday.

He clasped his hands together and squeezed them tightly.

The knuckles are white.

He needs to remember this feeling.

There is a highway at the foot of the mountain.

It's unclear when it appeared—or rather, it's always been there, but Yao Chong hadn't noticed it before.

The asphalt road surface was cracked in many places, and grayish-white grass grew in the cracks.

The road sign was crooked, and the words on it had been weathered away, leaving only half a radical.

"Where's the car?" Yao Chong asked.

What kind of car?

"How are we going to get back? Loki ran away and left us in this desolate place. His sudden appearance in the city will definitely cause a riot."

Wukong did not answer.

He stood by the roadside and looked down at himself.

Then he did something.

His body began to change.

It wasn't a transformation—there was no golden light, no smoke, and no dramatic visual effects whatsoever.

It is a quieter, more fundamental change.

Like someone slowly taking off a coat they've worn for a long time.

The golden hairs receded back into the skin one by one, and the bones made a faint clicking sound—not breaking, but rebuilding.

Height is decreasing, shoulder width is narrowing, fingers are becoming thinner, and facial contours are softening from sharp angles.

three seconds.

The figure standing before Yao Chong was no longer the Monkey King with golden fur and vertically slit pupils.

It was a man.

He was around thirty years old, tall and thin, and wearing a faded dark blue jacket.

Her hair was long, loose on her shoulders, and a little messy from the wind.

Thin face, high cheekbones, deep-set eyes—not the thinness of malnutrition, but the thinness of being under high pressure for a long time, like a wire that has been repeatedly bent but has not broken.

The eyes have changed.

The pupils were no longer the vertical gold—they were dark brown, the ordinary, human dark brown.

But Yao Chong noticed that he blinked less frequently than normal people.

An average person blinks 15 to 20 times per minute.

Monkey King probably only did it five times.

It's not deliberate control—it's a remnant of some predator instinct.

He no longer needs to blink frequently to keep his eyes moist, because his body no longer requires it, but his consciousness still retains a shadow of this habit.

"Let's go," he said.

The voice has changed too.

It's no longer that unique voice with a metallic quality—it's become deep and calm, like a stone that's been washed by a river for a long time.

But the rhythm of his speech remained unchanged.

Short sentences, concise and to the point, with an occasional pause at the end of the sentence—as if to confirm that the other person has followed.

Yao Chong looked at him for two seconds.

"Senior brother, you look terrible..."

"What's wrong?"

"Looks like you just came out of an internet cafe after spending the whole night there."

Wukong—or rather, the long-haired man in the old jacket—looked down at himself.

"I think it's alright."

"Are you sure the security guards at the Chinese Academy of Sciences won't stop you?"

"I'm sure."

He stepped onto the road.

Yao Chong followed.

The two walked along the road.

The grey sky hung low, and the massive form of the sovereign entity moved slowly above the clouds. Occasionally, a node of the monitoring grid would flicker, like a giant eye blinking for a moment.

But the road was quiet.

no car.

There were no pedestrians.

The roadside grass bent over in the wind, making a rustling sound.

"Senior brother, what do you think Lingtai Fangcun Mountain is in the real world?" Yao Chong asked.

What do you think?

"I suspect it's a place where the laws of physics are particularly stable. The fact that the mind imprint can be activated suggests that there's some kind of anchoring mechanism there."

"Almost. But not 'stable'—it's 'complete'."

"whole?"

"The laws of physics outside are like a garment, full of holes. Lingtai Fangcun Mountain is the part of the garment that hasn't been worn yet."

Yao Chong thought for a moment.

"So Bodhi was there not because he was hiding, but because he needed to be in a place where the laws of physics were intact..."

"Only then can he maintain himself," Wukong finished for him. "He's too old, so old that his very existence needs the support of the Great Dao's rules, which you call the laws of physics. If he stays outside for too long, he'll fade away like the things around the edge of a water stain."

"Professor Chen—Chen Dunli, was he like that too?"

Wukong did not answer.

I walked a dozen or so steps.

"Chen Dunli's situation is different; he made his own choice."

What did he choose?

"I chose to break myself apart."

Yao Chong didn't ask any more questions.

He remembered the whale fall, that night—when Liu Pan was suspended in the air, the instructions on the fragments lit up.

The last line of the instruction was left by Chen Dunli before he disappeared.

"The observer is also part of the system."

Disassemble yourself and stuff yourself into the system.

It wasn't swallowed up.

It crawled in on its own.

He said the same thing when he disappeared on the tenth night.

The only thing that puzzled Yao Chong was why Chen Dunli, who disappeared in the future, was able to leave something from the future to his past self before the whale fall.

Just a few steps later, the road extends into a cluster of buildings.

Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

It's about shrinking the distance to an inch.

Yao Chong recognized the gray office building—he had heard his teacher Chen Dunli mention it before, but he hadn't been to this area much when he was in Beijing, and this was the first time he had seen it in person.

There is a guard post at the entrance.

A man in a security guard uniform was sitting in the guard booth, looking at his phone.

After Yao Chong unlocked the door using facial recognition, Wukong walked over.

The security guard looked up and glanced at him.

He looked down at his phone again.

"...They just went in like that?" Yao Chong followed behind, somewhat incredulous.

"He saw me. But I gently touched the part of his brain that's responsible for 'someone's not right.' Not to control him—I made him feel 'it's no big deal.'"

"You control people's cognition?"

"It's not about control, it's... you know, you walk into a room, see someone, and then forget their face three seconds later? What I do is something similar, not altering their memory, but making their attention automatically drift to them."

"What's the difference between this and control?"

"The difference is—he can remember anytime, I didn't lock anything up."

Yao Chong thought for a moment.

"You care a lot about this difference."

Wukong didn't say anything.

But his walking posture changed slightly—his shoulders relaxed a little.

It was as if something had been predicted.

The two walked to the side of the office building.

Wukong stopped.

"I'm not going in."

Why?

"People from the Ninth Division have also come to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. I don't want to deal with them."

"Are you afraid of the Nine Subjects?"

"I'm not afraid of the Ninth Division. What I'm afraid of is that the Ninth Division will be afraid of me, and then they will do something stupid."

Yao Chong thought about it for a moment and felt that there was no problem with the logic.

Wukong took something out of his jacket pocket.

Three hairs.

These weren't ordinary hairs—each one was as long as a chopstick, a little thicker than a head hair, and shimmered with a faint golden hue in the grayish-white sunlight.

It wasn't dyed.

It's the kind of gold that's naturally growing inside, but it's been suppressed and darkened to the point that it's almost invisible.

"Take it."

Yao Chong reached out and took it.

The texture is strange—not the softness of hair, but more like metal wire, yet much lighter than metal wire.

It's slightly warmer than body temperature, and you can feel a faint pulsation when you hold it in your hand.

"This is……"

"Three hairs."

"I know it's a hair, senior brother, what I mean is—in the primitive physics of whales, what is this? Is it a transformation like in Journey to the West?"

Wukong thought for a moment.

Do you know what an emergency exit is?

"The kind that's a fire escape?"

"Pretty much, but this isn't for escaping—it's for calling for help."

He arranged the three hairs in Yao Chong's palm.

"The first one is for survival. If you encounter something you can't handle—not that you can't beat it, but that you can't withstand it—crush it, and I'll know."

"The second one is for asking for directions. You're lost—not physically lost, but you don't know which way to go—crush this one, and I'll give you a direction."

"The third one..."

He paused for a moment.

"The third one might be used when paying off debts."

"What debt are you asking for?"

"Your teacher's."

Yao Chong gripped the three hairs in his hand tightly.

"What does Professor Chen owe you?"

"You don't owe me anything, you owe Bodhi."

"Professor Chen owes Bodhi? Didn't he choose a different path?"

Wukong did not give a direct answer.

He looked into Yao Chong's eyes.

"You'll know later. Some things won't do you any good to know now."

Yao Chong wanted to press for more information.

But Wukong had already turned around.

"Senior brother."

"Um."

Will you come again?

Wukong took two steps and then stopped.

There was no turning back.

I probably won't be coming.

Why?

"If I keep some people here any longer, they'll get restless. I hope that next time you come to see me, you won't need me to take you."

He raised his hand and waved it.

It wasn't a farewell—it was the kind of wave that says, "Alright, alright, hurry up and go in."

Then he left.

Under a gray sky, a long-haired man in an old jacket walks back along the road he came from.

The pace was neither too fast nor too slow.

The figure grew smaller and smaller.