The Old Man cursed. “She’s not attacking governments or banks. She’s attacking being human . If no one remembers sorrow, no one remembers love’s cost. No one remembers loss. That’s not peace, Lin. That’s lobotomy.”

The deletion stopped.

“I want you to remind her what sorrow actually is. Not the data. The weight. The smell of the hospital room. The sound of the flatline. The way the rain didn’t stop for three days.” The Old Man was crying now. “She’s erased her own humanity to save us from ours. Show her why it was worth keeping.”

A long pause. “It’s not a what . It’s a who . Chu Que Wu Shan was a ghost in the old war—a defector, a poet, a saboteur. They say she could rewrite a person’s memory like editing a line of code. She disappeared twenty years ago. The rumor was she died in the Wushan mountain range, her body never found.”

“Once I had climbed the bitter peak of Wushan, no other cloud could ever touch my sky.”

Lin’s blood went cold. He tried to remember his mother’s face. He could see her smile. But the sadness of her funeral? Gone. He tried to recall his first heartbreak. The girl’s name was still there, but the ache, the sleepless nights—erased. Like someone had taken a scalpel to his past and excised only the pain.

The terminal screen flickered, casting a pale glow across Officer Lin’s face. The message was short, cryptic, and marked with the highest clearance level he’d ever seen: .

Still nothing.