Chapter 191: Pledge Ceremony

When the morning light pierced the mist, the healing forest had already become a living altar.

On the central clearing, three hundred memory‑bearing leaves floated in a ring, each linked by fine plant tendrils whose other ends were embedded in the soil, connecting to the awakened ecological memory repository. Han Qing stood at the center of the ring, and a star‑string instrument string detached from his chest skin, hovering before him like an invisible instrument waiting to be played.

Su Yu placed the fifty‑third paper star into his palm: "Take this. The plant network says… a physical anchor can lessen the consciousness drift during memory stripping."

Han Qing clenched the star; the paper's coarse texture felt unusually clear—this was the reality of the moment, about to become part of the pledged collateral.

Lao Zhao stood at the edge of the ring, clutching that military badge in his hand. He had thought through the night and finally decided not to be the keeper. "Your father's thing," his voice hoarse, "you have to take it in yourself, and then… see if you can bring it out."

Kaiwen performed a final check of the resonance model: "Once the ceremony begins, the plant network will extract at a rate of seven memory segments per second. The theoretical stripping time is two hours, but the actual sensation may… be very prolonged."

Aili was preparing three injection vials of different colors: "Blue eases neural pain, red maintains cardiac function, white… is the final consciousness stabilizer. It can only be used at the brink of collapse."

Three new lifeforms stood hand in hand around the outer rim, their eyes emitting a silver‑green glow that had merged into a light screen. "We are weaving a filter net on the outer edge," the first lifeform said, "to prevent Memory Fragments from scattering."

"Also to stop the torrent of the three‑thousand civilizations from crashing straight over you," the second added.

"But the fissure… has already started bleeding," the third said, suddenly pointing to the sky.

Before the ceremony began, Han Qing requested five minutes.

He said no grand speeches, only performed three small deeds:

1. He walked to the edge of the Hope Grass field, plucked a yellow‑tinged blade, and slipped it into page 43 of Chen Mo's notebook—that page about planting flowers within the fissure.

2. He retrieved the nest‑building bird feather fossil that the one‑eyed woman had brought from the mine, and gently placed it on the green stone where Chen Mo often sat.

3. Finally, he crouched, letting the stone set a ceramic rabbit at his feet. "It keeps me company," Han Qing told the puzzled child, "when I return, I'll tell it… where I went."

Having done these, he returned to the center of the ring and looked at Su Yu. Between them lay five steps, three hundred floating leaves, and the 14.7% of memories about to be pledged plus more in the future.

Su Yu suddenly began folding the fifty‑fourth star. This time she folded it slowly, each motion like performing a ritual. When finished, she didn't hand it over but lifted her hand and gently tossed it—the paper star arced, slipped through the gaps between leaves, and Han Qing caught it steadily.

"This one is different," Su Yu said, "it contains a Hope Grass seed. Chen Mo once said… seeds are the most patient things; they can endure any waiting."

Han Qing placed the two stars side by side at his chest. Through his clothing he felt the paper's faint warmth and the seed's subtle pulse.

Countdown: 42 hours.

"Begin," he said.

The plant tendrils suddenly surged outward.

They did not burst from the soil; they grew out of the floating leaves—silver‑green light tendrils interlaced in the air, swiftly weaving into an upside‑down "tree." The canopy was the ring of leaves above Han Qing's head, the trunk extended downward, its roots sinking deep into the earth, linking to the three‑thousand‑year ecological memory repository.

On the holographic screen, Kaiwen was shocked to see the system evolving on its own: "It's… visualizing memory structures! Look!"

Each branch of the Light‑Root Tree began to display image fragments: the outline of watching stars at five, the hazy glow of rescuing a pigeon at twelve, the sweat on the palm the first time a gun was gripped, the choking sensation in the throat upon hearing Chen Mo's death notice… All the memories about to be pledged were being actively "translated" by the plant network into observable light‑shadow forms.

Even more astonishing, the filter net woven by the three new lifeforms began to materialize—a cocoon‑like structure of countless fine Light Filaments enveloping the entire ceremony arena. Flowing along the filaments were the "crack‑repair" codes they had learned from the water veins.

Xiao Yu's wrist emitted a light imprint projecting a Selan script explanation:

"The ecological memory repository is executing the 'Grafting Protocol'.

Target: graft individual memories onto the collective memory's life cycle.

Conversion rate: each segment of human memory will correspond to a plant's growth rhythm.

For example: 'Father's silhouette' will be grafted onto the annual‑ring memory of a millennial ancient tree."

Han Qing closed his eyes. He could feel the first memory being touched—not extracted, but gently entwined, lifted, and then transplanted by the tender tendrils.

The first pledged memory was the dusk when his mother taught him to write.

The plant tendrils did not violently pull; they brushed away dust layer by layer like an archaeologist cleaning an ancient painting: first stripping the dusk's light angle, then the brush's feel, then the rice‑paper texture, and finally the mother's palm warmth and the eight characters—"Write the characters steadily, like a person standing steady."

With each layer stripped, that portion of memory turned into light dust, absorbed by the tendrils and transmitted along the Light Tree to the deep earth. In Han Qing's consciousness, the corresponding sensation became "second‑hand"—as if hearing someone describe a scene he should have remembered himself.

Strangely, after the memory was fully stripped, the muscle memory of "write the characters steadily" remained. His hand still recalled the stroke pressure, even though he no longer remembered who taught it.

"Emotional memory and muscle memory are stored separately," Kaiwen observed the data stream, "the original formatting protocol cleared the emotional part; now the plant network is smarter—it performs fine‑grained stripping."

The second memory concerned a comrade.

During this stripping, Han Qing suddenly spoke—not to those present, but to the deceased companion in the memory: "Lao Lu, you once said that if one day you were gone, you'd have me check what snow looks like under the Great Wall."

In the memory scene, the man with a beard grinned, "Remember to take photos, burn them for me."

The tendrils began stripping this memory. Han Qing felt heat in his eye sockets, yet his left eye could not shed human tears—the physiological‑reaction part of the memory remained, but the emotional trigger was fading.

At that moment, the three new lifeforms suddenly trembled in unison. On their woven filter net, Lao Lu's face appeared—not as an image but as a kind of "emotional contour." The face's light and shadow flowed along the Light Filaments, finally merging into a newborn sapling at the edge of the ceremony arena.

The sapling grew visibly three inches taller, its leaves showing silver patterns shaped like snowflakes.

"It remembers," the first lifeform whispered, "this tree will watch the snow for him."

When the ceremony reached the forty‑seven minute mark, an anomaly erupted.

The "useless beauty" memory torrent contributed by the three‑thousand‑civilization seeds surged three times the expected intensity. Those memories—geometric poems of the vortex civilization, misty paintings of the gas civilization, crystalline music of the silicon‑based civilization—though beautiful, had extremely low compatibility between their data structures and Earth's biological neural networks.

The filter net began to overload.

The silver‑green glow in the three new lifeforms' eyes flickered violently, and the stable triangle they formed hand in hand started to warp. Silver liquid seeped from the first lifeform's mouth corner—not blood, but a physiological overflow from consciousness overload.

"They can't endure!" Aili, already holding the white injection, exclaimed, "The memory‑structure disparity of the three‑thousand civilizations is too great; the filter net is collapsing!"

Han Qing opened his eyes at the ring's center. He had now stripped 31% of his memories, and his whole being felt a strange lightness—like shedding layer after layer of old clothes, yet also beginning to feel cold.

"Shut down civilization memory input!" Kaiwen prepared to initiate the emergency cut‑off protocol.

"No!" Xiao Yu's wrist light imprint burst with protesting light, "If we cut off, the emotional storm's energy won't be enough to shield the entire fleet!"

Lao Zhao suddenly rushed into the ring—an action that violated every safety protocol, but he didn't care. He ran to the three lifeforms, not with a wrench but with his rough palm, pressing down on the heads of the three children.

"Listen," his voice hoarse yet unusually steady, "for the seven years my son became an awareness bridge, I learned one thing—some burdens are too heavy for one person; split them into many parts, let many people carry a little."

He turned his head toward all the tuners, the medical team, the one‑eyed woman from the mine, the old man by the reservoir, and every person holding their breath in the morning light:

"We three hundred people, if we divide this bit of 'beauty,' we can finish it, right?"

No one spoke.

But the first to act was the one‑eyed woman. She walked to the edge of the filter net, raised her remaining right hand, and gently pressed a overloaded Light Filament. In the socket of her left eye—lost while protecting the nest‑building bird—tiny glowing tendrils suddenly sprouted—remnants of the plant network's imprint from the earlier treatment, now reactivated.

"The miners say," she said calmly, "coal must be hauled car by car, the mountain must be dug shovel by shovel."

The tendrils spread from her eye socket, linking to the filter net. In an instant, a portion of the vortex civilization's geometric‑poem memory stream was diverted into her body. She shivered, but steadied herself—those foreign memories of infinite fractal beauty resonated with her memory of protecting the nest‑building bird.

Next came the reservoir old man. He walked over, placed his hand on another strand of light: "The wooden boat my son built… hasn't been given to anyone yet."

Then came Old Zhou, whose mechanical prosthetic emitted a faint hum: "Made in Iron Anvil Town, it can bear the load."

One, two, ten, fifty… all the people in the Healing Forest who could stand walked toward those overloaded strands of light. No one knew what civilization's memory they were sharing, they only knew: this child is helping us, now it's our turn to help him.

The collapse of the filter net ceased.

The memory torrent of three thousand civilizations was split into hundreds of small streams, flowing into the consciousnesses of hundreds of ordinary people. Each person bore a tiny fragment—perhaps only a snippet of an alien lullaby, or a marginal brushstroke of a misty painting.

The pressure on the three new lifeforms dropped sharply; they looked at the surrounding crowd spontaneously sharing the burden, and the silver‑green light in their eyes softened.

"They…" the second lifeform said softly, "are repairing the fissure."

"With themselves," the third said.

Han Qing watched all this from the core of the ring. He had already stripped away 40% of his memories, many emotional sources fading, yet this scene before him—these ordinary people's silent sharing—was like red‑hot iron, branding the deepest part of his consciousness.

He even felt that this memory might be impossible to strip away.

Because it is too heavy.

Countdown: 41 hours.

The plant network suddenly transmitted a new message: "Collective consciousness Resonance has begun to appear. The base energy of the emotional storm has reached the critical threshold. Continue the ritual."