The seashell grew slightly warm in her palm, as if heat were seeping from deep within its weathered textures.
Bai °• N đ v đ l i g h t •Â° Cheng knelt before the nameless stone tablet, the galaxy in her silver eyes ceasing its flow.
What they reflected was no longer the trajectories of the stars, but something older and more primal behind that line of crooked handwriting on the tablet.
"Believe..."
She softly read aloud the first word she had just written.
The phantom of the book of commonality hovered in her palm, ink spreading across the blank page as if guided by some invisible hand, slowly extending into the subsequent sentence:
"The stars can speak."
As the words were written, the surrounding world suddenly fell silent.
It wasn't a deathly silence, but a state of pure listening, near-vacuum, left behind after all noise had faded.
The swaying of nameless wildflowers on the hillside, the flow of the distant sea of stars, the low hum of ship enginesâall of it vanished.
In their place came the voice of a child.
"I heard it."
The voice was very faint, as if coming from three thousand years away, yet it was as clear as if it were right by her ear.
"You've finally come."
The hillside began to change.
It wasn't a collapse and restructuring, but like a faded canvas being soaked with fresh water, revealing the more vibrant colors beneath.
The rough stone tablet still stood in place, but tiny, glowing patterns began to grow from the soil around it.
Those patterns spread into rings, one after another, like tree rings or the timekeeping symbols of some ancient civilization.
Light rose from the patterns, weaving into a blurry image in the air.
A child crouched on the hillside, looking up at the starry sky.
The starry sky was not the one of the present.
There were no experimental labels, no observation outposts, no fragments of the Mirror Abyssâonly a pure sea of stars, unpolluted by any definition.
The child wore simple homespun clothes and was barefoot, holding a seashell to his ear with both hands. His eyes were bright, so bright they seemed capable of holding the entire sea of stars.
"The stars are singing," the child said to the seashell, his voice full of earnestness. "Listen, they're singing a very, very old song, so old that even time has forgotten the lyrics. But they remember the melody."
Of course, the seashell did not answer.
But the child smiled, as if he had received some kind of confirmation. He carefully placed the seashell on the hillside, pulled a sharp stone from his shirt, and began to carve words into the ground.
He carved the very line on the stone tablet:
"There was once a child here who believed the stars could speak."
The words were carved slowly, each stroke forceful, as if he wanted to chisel this belief deep into the earth.
After finishing the last stroke, the child looked up toward a certain direction in the starry sky.
In that direction, a pure white light was currently brightening from the depths of the sea of stars.
The initial signal of the Observer Group establishing their first Experimental Field, three thousand years ago today.
The child saw that light.
But he was not surprised or afraid; he just watched calmly and then whispered:
"They're coming."
"They're coming."
The scene began to accelerate.
The light spread across the starry sky, turning into phantoms of countless optical cables and gears, beginning to weave the boundaries of the Experimental Field.
Transparent grids appeared in the sky, evaluation markers surfaced on the ground, and cold streams of data began to flow through the air.
The child still sat on the hillside.
He was not cleaned up because this hillside, this child, this starry sky, and even this belief that "the stars can speak" were not within the initial framework of the experiment.
They were overlooked.
Judged by the Observer Group's logical models as random variables with a probability infinitely close to zero, they were simply ignored.
And so, the child continued to live there.
Every day he would sit on the hillside, talking to the seashell, talking to the starry sky, talking to the earth. No one listened to his words, no experimental recorders collected them, and no evaluation programs analyzed them.
He just spoke.
Speaking of how the stars' song had changed to a new melody today, how the wind carried the sighs of a distant ocean, how a seed in the soil had just dreamed of blooming.
When he spoke, the surrounding patterns would light up.
Those patterns recorded his words, recorded his belief, recorded how this corner overlooked by the Experimental Field had continued to exist in an "invalid" way for three thousand years.
Until one day.
The child was no longer a child; he had become an old man sitting on the hillside, looking up at the starry sky for the last time.
The Experimental Field had entered its third millennium.
All branch civilizations of ST-774321 were operating within the Observer's evaluation systemâsome were cleaned up, some were corrected, and some struggled to survive within the limits allowed by the rules.
But here, it was still overlooked.
The old man was very old, so old that even straightening his back was difficult. But he still picked up that stone used for carving and, beneath the original line, carved another line in smaller letters:
"The stars really do speak."
"It just takes someone willing to listen."
Having finished, he put down the stone, lay back on the hillside, and closed his eyes.
His body began to turn into points of light.
Not decomposed by the cleanup protocol, but aging naturally, dissipating naturally, like falling leaves returning to their roots, like dewdrops evaporating.
The points of light did not enter the Experimental Field's recycling system.
They drifted in the air, merged into the soil, seeped into the stone tablet, and finallyâgathered into that seashell.
The seashell emitted an extremely faint glow and then fell silent.
The patterns also dimmed.
The hillside returned to its original appearance, only with the addition of a stone tablet and a seashell.
The vision dissipated at this point.
Bai Cheng was still kneeling in the same spot, the seashell in her palm as warm as before.
On that page of the book of commonality, beneath the ink of "The stars can speak," a second line quietly emerged:
"And those who hear will become the new Singers."
The earring of the oath of starlight began to grow hot again, but this time it wasn't an alarm, but a gentle resonance.
It resonated with the echoes settled for three thousand years deep within the seashell, beneath the stone tablet, and in every grain of dust on the entire hillside.
That wasn't a powerful force.
Not the violence of a Spear of Thunder that could tear through the void, not the scale of the Emerald Network that could cover the sea of stars, nor the precision of mirror technology that could refract history.
That was simply... belief.
A child's belief in speaking to the stars.
A belief an old man still held onto before his death.
A belief that had existed silently for three thousand years in a corner overlooked by the experiment.
"This is the Primal Echo," Bai Cheng said softly, the galaxy in her silver eyes beginning to flow again, but with a few warm points of light in its trajectory that hadn't been there before. "Not a civilization, not life, not even existenceâjust belief itself."
She stood up, the phantom of the book of commonality slowly closing in her palm and then automatically flipping to a new page.
The new page was blank.
But within the blankness, three prompts faintly emerged:
ăFirst Question: When the rule-makers overlooked belief, what did they overlook?ă
ăSecond Question: How does an existence judged as 'invalid' prove its validity?ă
ăThird Question: If the stars really do speak, what are they saying?ă
Bai Cheng looked at these three lines in silence.
She knew these were not exam questions.
This was an invitation.
