Chapter 389: Overlooked Dissonance

When that voice lunged at him from behind, Jiang Yuan almost dropped the chopsticks in his hand.

It wasn't fear.

It was because it was too familiar.

He was so familiar that he could reconstruct the voice owner's appearance in his mind without turning—shoulder‑length chestnut short hair, inward‑curled ends, almond‑shaped eyes that curve, two shallow dimples when she smiles, perpetually energetic, perpetually chattering, perpetually hopping about like a little sparrow.

Mo Shu.

He turned his head.

Sure enough.

The young girl carried a tray piled to the brim—a serving of braised chicken with potatoes, a bowl of rice, a plate of cold cucumber salad, plus a bottle of yogurt and two oranges. That amount of food, if she said it, no one would believe she weighs only forty‑seven kilograms.

"I spotted you from afar!" Mo Shu set the tray down on the table and slid into the seat opposite Jiang Yuan, moving as smoothly as if rehearsed eight hundred times. "How's the Weird Domain? You haven't been hurt again, have you? Last time you wrapped your arm in bandages and pretended you were fine—did you think I was blind?"

She kept talking while unwrapping the chopsticks, never pausing her mouth.

Jiang Yuan's grip on the chopsticks loosened.

To be honest, after traversing that Corridor and seeing so many "things", Mo Shu's chatty demeanor across the table let his nerves, which had been taut all day, relax just a little.

Just a little. But for the current Jiang Yuan, even that little bit was a luxury.

"No injury," he scooped a mouthful of fried rice, its flavor bland, his tongue feeling as if wrapped in a thin plastic film.

"Who are you trying to fool?" Mo Shu rolled her eyes, tapped the table with her chopsticks, "Every time you say 'no injury', your tone sounds like a work report. A normal person wouldn't say those three words in that tone."

Jiang Yuan chewed the rice twice, offering no reply.

Mo Shu didn't mind and began venting about recent missions: "You know, last Wednesday there was a B Ji containment mission, the target being a thing that can crawl through sewer pipes. I crouched in the Sewer for six hours; after I came out, for three days I smelled nothing but Sewer odor. I had to shower four times before I dared to sniff the back of my own hand."

She described it vividly, even mimicking the near‑slip she had in the Sewer.

Jiang Yuan's mouth twitched—not a smile, but his muscles truly relaxed.

He recalled the Chicago incident.

It seemed like it had been ages ago. He and Mo Shu were assigned to the same squad, carrying out a sweep against North American Spider Humanoids.

That time, Mo Shu wasn't chattering.

She brandished a short blade, covering Jiang Yuan's flank, and within three minutes felled two juvenile Spider Humanoids.

To save him, her protective suit was torn open with a slit.

Trust forged through life and death carries no heavier weight.

Jiang Yuan lowered his head and kept scooping rice.

Then he stopped.

The chopsticks hovered in mid‑air, a grain of rice slipping from the tip back into the bowl.

Mo Shu didn't notice the gesture. She buried her head again to sip soup, the spoon clinking against the bowl rim producing a ding-dong sound.

Jiang Yuan's brain did one thing in an instant.

He was recalling.

After withdrawing from Chicago, the squad conducted a full equipment check and injury log. He clearly remembered that inspection—

Mo Shu's protective suit was intact.

No tear marks.

No repair marks.

A brand‑new, completely undamaged tactical protective suit.

That didn't add up.

Damage records for protective suits are filed in the inventory; the Special Forces tracks each piece with a serial number and status. A torn suit cannot repair itself, let alone become brand new without going through the logistics replacement process.

Jiang Yuan recalled that he seemed to have noticed the issue at the time.

He even vaguely remembered feeling a strong sense of dissonance, his mind repeatedly surfacing a question—

And then?

Where did that question go?

He couldn't recall.

It wasn't forgetting; that memory was wrapped in a layer of cotton, hazy, and the harder he tried to grasp it, the more it scattered, like trying to scoop the moon from water.

Cognitive interference.

When those four words rose from the depths of his brain, the hairs on Jiang Yuan's back stood up.

Fake Person's cognitive interference doesn't delete memories; it lowers their priority, causing your brain to automatically skip and ignore them, like an email tossed into the trash—it's still there, but you never voluntarily retrieve it.

Unless something pulls the trash bin open.

Like the True Sight Eye.

Jiang Yuan's heart jerked sharply.

It wasn't a single beat. It was thump, thump, thump—three rapid jumps, frequency soaring, adrenaline flooding his body in a fraction of a second.

The unassuming black curved device on the outer side of his earbone—

lit up.

A dim crimson glow seeped from its edge, clinging to his auricle like a spreading drop of blood.

Emotional fluctuation alert.

Xu Shangdong's voice exploded in his mind: heart rate, adrenaline, beta‑wave brain activity—if any of those three indicators spikes dramatically, the shielding field will collapse within 0.4 seconds.

0.4 seconds.

Jiang Yuan bit his tongue under the table.

It wasn't a gentle bite. It was with a force that seemed to want to pierce his tongue. A rush of metallic taste flooded his mouth, the intense pain like a bucket of ice water poured from the Heavenly Spirit Cover, dousing his runaway heartbeat.

Shadow Ghost.

He awakened that mass of darkness within his body.

Shadow Ghost's power spread along the blood vessels, taking over the heart's beat rhythm. 82, 78, 74, 70——heart rate curve was forcibly returned to the normal range.

The faint crimson light on the ear bone flickered once, twice.

It went out.

Returned to darkness.

Safe.

But only temporarily safe.

Jiang Yuan swallowed the blood in his mouth, expressionlessly taking another bite of fried rice.

Mo Shu opposite finished the last sip of soup, pushed the bowl aside, and tore open the yogurt seal.

"By the way, Jiang Yuan, the Investigation Bureau seems to be holding an internal drill next month—will you participate?"

She kept talking, biting the straw as she lifted her head.

Her almond eyes were round and glossy, smiling, very lovely.

"Why are you sweating?"

She tilted her head.

"Are you feeling unwell?"

Her voice was sweet, soft, concerned.

Jiang Yuan looked at her.

His right hand under the table held the True Vision Eye between his fingertips, his palm slick with sweat.

Don't look.

His reason was shouting.

Don't look, you're not ready yet. Your emotions have just stabilized, your heart rate just dropped—if what you see is something you don't want to see, you won't survive a second time.

But he already knew the answer.

From that memory gap in the protective suit onward, he had already known. He just refused to admit it.

The human brain has a rather laughable self-protection mechanism—even though all the evidence is right in front of it, it desperately seeks excuses, telling you "maybe you misremembered," "maybe the protective suit was later changed," "maybe there's some reasonable explanation."

Maybe...

Jiang Yuan opened the filter of the True Vision Eye.

Vision overlaid.

The cafeteria hadn't changed. The lighting was still warm yellow, the airflow from the air-conditioning vent still stirring the edge of the "Practice Thrift" slogan on the wall; a few tables away people were still chatting, the clatter of bowls and chopsticks mingling with laughter into a warm white noise.

But the thing in that seat opposite—

had changed.

The body showed no abnormality. Posture, arms, the knuckles gripping the yogurt box, the uniform worn, even the body's curves from shoulders to waist—all were normal.

But above the neck—

it was not Mo Shu's face.

it was not anyone's face.

It was a mass of continuously churning interference signal, like an old TV screen with poor reception, snowflake particles and color blocks wildly tangled into a clump; every few tenths of a second a half-profile could emerge—a smiling almond eye, a half-raised corner of the mouth, a patch of chestnut hair color—but before it could assemble into a full face, the next wave of the signal would scramble it again.

It maintained Mo Shu's physique and voice.

Her fingers kept turning the straw on the yogurt box.

And the tumbling signal snowflakes suddenly paused half a beat, two pitch-black holes emerging from the noise, pointing directly at Jiang Yuan's direction.

Those were its "eyes."

"Jiang Yuan?"

Mo Shu's voice came from that mass, perfectly replicating the little girl's characteristic rising tone and nasal concern.

"Your complexion looks awful—do you want to go to the infirmary to get checked?"

Sweet.

Soft.

Kind.

Exactly the same.

Including the slight drawl on the two characters "kan kan" at the end of that sentence, matching exactly how the real Mo Shu habitually speaks.

Jiang Yuan's nails dug into his palms, breaking the skin, warm fluid seeping down along the gaps between his fingers.

But his face showed nothing.

"I'm fine."

He heard himself say it.

His voice was steady, his breathing even, the standard short answer of Jiang Yuan.

"I'm exhausted from coming back—I'll just eat and then go to sleep."

He lowered his head and took another bite of fried rice.

The rice in his mouth felt like chewing ground glass. Metallic and bloody tastes mixed together, sliding down his throat, burning all the way to his stomach.

The Shadow Ghost raged inside him, compressing every blood vessel, locking each heartbeat, maintaining a shielding field thinner than a cicada's wing.

The thing opposite was still speaking.

It was talking about who would pay for the Intelligence Department dinner next Wednesday, about how the cake someone brought back from a previous mission was especially delicious, and about how Captain Wang's temper had been flaring lately.

Every word and sentence were things Mo Shu would say.

Every word and sentence carried Mo Shu's tone, her rhythm, and that subtle breathy quality when she laughs and her eyes crinkle.