Chapter 248: Fourteen Minutes' Scar

There are thirteen minutes and twenty-two seconds left.

Kaiwen's time-reporting voice was like ice water dripping into everyone's spine. The sky began to show anomalies—invisible energy gathered in near-Earth orbit, the atmosphere was ionized, and dawn was twisted into an eerie purple-green halo. As the logic-cleansing beam preheated, even the wind stilled.

Han Qing stood before the grafted sapling, hand pressed on the door formed by the crack. Mist's urgent message trembled through the crystal paper crane: "Deep in GuiHuaYuan… there is something you must see. About why 'they' became harvesters."

Su Yu grabbed his wrist: "During the beam's preheat, space is unstable—going in now is too dangerous—"

"Danger is outside." Han Qing looked at the sky, the purple-green halo spreading, "If that light falls, inside and out are the same. But if I can see the 'why,' maybe I can find the 'what to do.'"

He paused, voice soft: "Chen Mo said every wound has a source. It can't be healed, but it can be understood."

Just as Han Qing was about to enter, Xiao Yu's forehead light seal suddenly burst with unprecedented brightness. She closed her eyes, voice like murmuring in a dream: "I saw…… the frequency pattern of the cleansing beam. It's not aggressive, it's 'formatting'—erasing all irregular emotional waveforms, turning everything back into a smooth line."

She opened her eyes, data streams reflected in her pupils: "But what if we actively become 'irregular'? If we set Earth's emotional frequency to the most chaotic, unstable state—like a cup of water being wildly stirred—the formatting program would fail for lack of a 'rule template'!"

Aili instantly understood: "Like a virus mutating faster than antivirus software updates?"

"Yes!" Xiao Yu's light seal projected a dynamic diagram in midair: countless colorful waveforms jumping wildly, utterly lawless, "But we need at least eighty million different emotional anchor points vibrating simultaneously to create a sufficiently 'chaotic' frequency field."

Among the four thousand Light Spheres, Curiosity-17 floated forward: "We four thousand entities can each simulate ten thousand different 'first-time' memories—this is the Silent Observers' data processing limit. That makes forty million anchor points in total."

"We're still short half." Kaiwen's hand trembled as he pushed his glasses up.

Zhao Xiaoshu suddenly spoke: "Bridge Space… contains all the 'imaginary friends' I've created over seven years—three thousand seven hundred forty-two of them, each with a full personality and memory. I can 'borrow' them out."

Lao Zhao pressed his son's shoulder: "Your body—"

"Dad." The fifteen-year-old boy lifted his head, eyes like tempered steel, "If that light falls, there will be no 'afterward.' I want my friends… to at least see the real world once."

Han Qing pressed his hand on the door; the cracks began to glow. He turned back and gave three instructions:

To Su Yu: "If I don't come out in half an hour, take everyone to the south of the ruins—under the soil where Chen Mo buried sesame, there's an underground shelter that can hold for three days."

To Lao Zhao: "At the bottom of the tea cabinet, there's a packet labeled 'Last.' If… if it really comes to that, brew it and drink—don't stint."

To Efficiency-1: "Keep putting out your aesthetic arguments. Send them to every Silent Observer still hesitating. Tell them——"

He drew a deep breath, gazing at the ever-brightening purple-green light in the sky:

"—Wipe us out, and you'll forever lose the chance to understand 'why sesame tangyuan is hot.' And that 'why' might one day be the only question you wish to ask when you feel empty in a perfect, pristine universe."

Then he stepped into the door.

The silence inside was heavier than before. Mist already waited at the entrance, its bodily patterns flickering with anxious frequency. It didn't use gestures, but directly seized Han Qing's hand, pouring a tactile memory into him——

A young civilization's 'first time.'

Not an Auditory Civilization's, but an even older sight Han Qing had never seen: countless semi-transparent bubble-like lifeforms drifting in a nebula. They communicated through color, expressed emotion through temperature, and the whole civilization was a slow, beautiful, purposeless dance.

"This is the previous life of the Thirteenth Civilization." Mist conveyed via touch: "They called themselves 'Dreamers.' The sole meaning of their existence was to create and appreciate beauty."

The memory shifted: Dreamers discovered an ultimate creative method—infusing their own emotional frequency into a dying star; at the moment of the star's explosion, the emotion would be amplified into a 'gorgeous ripple' spanning star systems. That was the pinnacle of their art.

"But once… something went wrong." Mist's memory turned painful.

The scene switched: a Dreamer poured all their emotion into a dying star, awaiting that grandest 'death blossom.' But the star didn't explode—it suddenly stabilized, due to a fluctuation in some cosmic constant, and it lived on.

And that Dreamer, all their emotion was eternally trapped inside the star, forever unable to release, forever stuck in the state of 'about to blossom but never able to blossom.'

"Other Dreamers tried to save it, but each attempt only prolonged its agony." Mist's tactile memory began to tremble: "Finally, they made a decision——"

The image froze: the entire civilization collectively rushed suicide-style into that star, using all their strength to trigger an artificial supernova explosion. The trapped Dreamer finally 'blossomed,' and the beauty of that explosion supposedly sent lifeforms across three neighboring star systems into a collective aesthetic shock lasting a hundred years.

But the Dreamers who survived were changed thereafter.

"They can no longer create beauty." Mist's message carried sorrow: "Because every act of creation reminds them of that trapped kin's eternal torment. So they began…… to collect beauty. To gather the beauty other civilizations forge at their most extreme moments, trying to use others' 'perfect blossom' to fill the bottomless black hole within themselves."

Han Qing understood.

The Thirteenth Civilization were not born harvesters. They are sufferers of artistic trauma-induced stress disorder.

Mist led Han Qing to the deepest part of GuiHuaYuan. There were no osmanthus trees, only a massive, slowly flowing 'mirror'—that is, the Auditory Civilization's collective maintenance of an 'Empathy Archive' using the memories of all its survivors.

Within the mirror lies the concrete manifestation of the Thirteenth Civilization's wound that can never heal:

A star imprisoned in transparent crystal; inside the star, a semi‑bubble‑like lifeform struggles eternally. Each of its 'about to blossom' moments is reset, forever halted 0.0001 second before blossoming. That 'unattainable' pain frequency, even through the mirror, sends a tearing ache to the tear‑drop fruit on Han Qing's chest.

"The Auditory Civilization chanced upon this memory while fleeing." Mist explained, "We've kept it here not to study the enemy, but to…… understand. For only through understanding might we find a path besides confrontation."

Han Qing pressed his hand to the mirror. Instantly he was drawn into the perception of that bubble‑like lifeform——

No time. No space. Only the eternal 'almost.' Almost free. Almost blossoming. Almost beautiful. Almost ending. But never 'is.' That is a punishment ten thousand times crueler than death.

He jerked his hand back, gasping for air (though in the silence it was merely the violent heaving of his chest).

"Now you know." Mist's tactile whisper was light: "They harvest because they can no longer create. They long for the beauty of death, because their own civilization died in an 'unfinished life.'"

Just then, the mirror suddenly showed a crack.

It was not a physical crack, but a collapse of the memory layer—because the external cleansing beam's preheat made GuiHuaYuan's energy field fluctuate. The scar scene within the mirror began to twist, and the trapped bubble‑like lifeform suddenly turned toward Han Qing.

It 'saw' him.

Not through eyes, but through resonance between scars. Han Qing's chest‑scar garden—those transparent flowers born of loss, pain, and struggle—vibrated strangely with that eternal 'almost' anguish.

The mirror began to draw Han Qing's memories outward—Chen Mo's death, the sowing on the ruins, Lao Zhao's seven‑year wait, Xiao Yu's burden, Efficiency-1's lopsided circles, the four thousand Light Spheres' choices, the temperature of sesame tangyuan……

All these 'living,' chaotic, imperfect memories surged like a flood into the imprisoned star.

Then, something unimaginable happened.

Inside the star, the eternally struggling bubble‑like lifeform suddenly…… ceased its struggle.

It stilled for 0.3 seconds—an eternity longer for it. Then, summoning all its strength, it sent a faint but clear tactile message to Han Qing outside the mirror——

It was a question.

A life trapped in the 'almost' state for 130,000 years, posing the first and only question:

"Is the outside world…… still hot?"

When Han Qing exited GuiHuaYuan, the outside countdown still had four minutes and seventeen seconds left.

The sky's purple‑green light had become blindingly bright, impossible to stare at. The four thousand Light Spheres and over three thousand Bridge Space projections were vibrating wildly, trying to build a frequency shield chaotic enough.

Su Yu rushed over: "What did you see?"

Han Qing gave no answer. He lifted his gaze to the light, hand pressed to his chest—beside the eighth transparent flower in his scar garden, a brand‑new deep‑purple fruit had sprouted.

That is the fruit of scars talking to scars.

He whispered, his voice only he could hear:

"It turns out the most terrifying thing is not that the enemy has no wounds. It is that their wounds... have never been asked 'Does it hurt?'"