Chapter 304: Defense Tea Gathering

In the pistil of the thirteenth flower, three micro black dodecahedra separated.

They floated to three positions in the Scar Garden, each beginning to deform—no longer perfect geometric shapes, but showing subtle differences:

·Committee A (originally the first one): its surface showed faint silver-white patterns, like an old circuit board

·Committee B (originally the second one): its edges became slightly rounded, and when refracting light it displayed a 0.3-degree dispersion

·Committee C (originally the third one, the most silent): it remained closest to the original shape, but its base gained an extremely fine crack

"Individual identity activated." Committee A's voice became clear, slightly hoarse, as if it hadn't spoken alone in a long time, "The defense begins. Please answer the three core questions in order."

Lao Zhao suddenly stood up.

He walked to the grafted sapling, plucked three new leaves, and brewed them with water at three temperatures—85°, 78°, 92°—corresponding to the "tone frequency difference" just spoken by the three committee members.

"Earth custom," he said calmly, placing the three cups of tea before the three positions, "Before an important talk, let the tea 'warm up the atmosphere'."

Committee B's surface dispersion increased by 0.1 degree—it was scanning the tea's chemical composition, temperature curve, and the steady pulse frequency of Lao Zhao's wrist (72 beats per minute, no abnormal fluctuation).

"Accepted." The silver patterns on Committee A's surface flickered slightly, "First question, Han Qing answers: If 'selective concealment of pain' is the core of resilience, then is an 'emotionally transparent society' necessarily fragile?"

Han Qing did not answer immediately.

She walked to the east side of the Scar Garden—there lay the stems of eighty-seven transparent flowers that had withered, like a small, semi-transparent forest of tombstones.

"The answer is in these stems." She reached out and touched one of them, "Before each flower withers, it releases 'candid spores.' But the spores do not force transparency—they only evoke the 'part willing to be heard.'"

She turned to face Committee A: "Emotional transparency ≠ forced exposure of all pain. Transparency should be like these stems—you know there's a root below, you know it once bloomed, but you don't need to dig up the root and put it on display."

Committee A remained silent for five seconds. Its silver patterns began to flow, as if recalculating.

Han Qing's memory replay (Teaching Scar record)

She knew who should answer the second question—the trickiest one: "If this theory holds, is the Committee's goal of 'absolute rational cognitive transparency' fundamentally mistaken?"

She looked at Lao Zhao and nodded.

Lao Zhao was stirring his tea with a small spoon—he habitually does this when thinking, as if the answer would rise from the center of the vortex.

He put down the spoon, walked to in front of Committee B, not looking at the dodecahedron but looking behind it—there was the kitchen window, outside which the twelve flowers of the grafted sapling swayed slightly in the night wind.

"My wife makes dough," Lao Zhao said, his voice like chatting about neighborhood gossip, "It hasn't fermented for seven years. She always says, 'I'll try again tomorrow.' I ask her, 'Knowing it might fail, why do you still try?'"

Committee B's dispersion stopped.

Lao Zhao continued: "She said, 'Because the act of 'trying' itself is the dough and my conversation. Whether it ferments or not is the result. But whether to try or not is my choice.'"

He pointed at Committee B: "You pursue 'absolute transparency,' like insisting the dough must ferment every time. But sometimes the dough doesn't ferment—yet it remembers the warmth of your hand. That 'remembering' is more important than fermentation."

Absolute Luminance-4 suddenly slid up beside Lao Zhao.

Its prism surface glowed with a warm-colored halo lasting 11.2 seconds—breaking its own record.

"Data supports," its voice rarely took on an "urgent" fluctuation frequency, "According to three-month data from the Quilt Project: the system's overall stability increased 4.3% while retaining 0.8% of 'undefinitized data.' Of that 0.8%, 72% were later found to have 'latent support value.'"

It projected a set of light diagrams—that was its covert "shadow value tracking experiment," fully compliant, as it belonged to a subtopic of the Emotional Environment Optimization Experiment.

Committee B's dispersion vanished completely. It silently turned toward Absolute Luminance-4, its surface beginning to show patterns resembling the vortex in Lao Zhao's tea cup.

"The third question," Committee C spoke, its voice the softest, but the crack at its base slightly opened, "What should be the lawful quota for 'shadow'?"

The whole venue fell silent.

This question has no standard answer—give too much, the system might lose control; give too little, resilience will be weakened.

Xiao Yu suddenly raised her hand.

Her light seal glowed, but not in translation mode, rather in creation mode—she was drawing a frequency spectrum out of thin air.

"The answer is in the 'cough sound.'" She closed her eyes, her fingers tracing in the air, "Stars cough seventeen times…… each interval different."

On the spectrum she displayed, the intervals between the seventeen light points varied in length—some tight, some loose.

"The shadow quota shouldn't be a fixed value," Xiao Yu opened her eyes, her light seal glowing steadily, "It should be… like the cough intervals, dynamically adjusted according to how deeply the system 'needs to breathe' at the moment."

She pointed to the grafted sapling: "Just like a tree, the shadow is a little smaller on sunny days, a little larger on rainy days—but the tree itself doesn't know 'how much shadow it should cast today'; it simply lives, and the shadow naturally appears."

The crack at the base of Committee C widened another 0.1 millimeter.

It remained silent for a full minute—for a Committee-level processor, this is the manifestation of "deep confusion."

Then it said, "Your metaphor has a logical loophole. The system needs quantifiable parameters. 'Naturally occurring' cannot be controlled."

But as it spoke those words, a thread of extremely faint milky-white light seeped from the crack—its frequency exactly matched the color of the File-7 sphere.

File-7 suddenly rolled up to in front of Committee C.

It began to sing, but this time not the janitor's little tune, rather an extremely simple three-note loop, like a heartbeat.

Mold residue arranged itself on its surface into a pattern—that was the original code fragment from when the Committee was first formed, long archived as "useless historical data."

In the song, Committee C's crack stopped expanding.

The milky-white light steadied, forming a miniature rotating galaxy pattern—exactly matching a certain image in File-7's core memory.

Committee A's silver patterns ceased flowing.

"The defense is over." Its voice returned to calm, the hoarseness lessened, "Report conclusion: the value of pain lies in its 'transformability,' not in its existence itself. Emotional transparency should preserve the 'privacy of the transformation process.' The absolute rationality goal must incorporate the 'dynamic shadow quota' concept."

The three dodecahedra began to return to the pistil.

But before fully merging, Committee C—the most silent one—suddenly said to File-7, a whisper only the few nearby could hear:

"That song…… I seem…… to have heard it somewhere……"

Then it vanished.

The thirteenth flower slowly closed, and at its pistil bore a tiny, half-black, half-white fruit.

Its size was only one-tenth that of the ninth "Balance Fruit," but its shape was exactly the same.