W said, “I just performed facial recognition and compared it in Black Well’s federal citizen database. This person is named Naiyan, a sophomore at Yehai University, studying finance.”
Pei Ran thought to himself, the Silence has escalated, but the signal transmission and reception between him and Black Well are still functioning normally.
He is a robot from the Department of National Defense Security. Presumably, they have special military communication methods, which are different from the affected civilian signals.
Unlike the wristband, his metal sphere does not display text information on the interface. It processes everything internally within the core processor and then sends it through unrestricted military signals—simply perfect.
To draw an analogy, if she were to write with green light in her mind, would it also be safe under the current state of Silence?
At this very moment, in front of the gate, the boy named Naiyan did not feel like he was sleepwalking.
When the Silence began two days ago, Naiyan was running on the university’s sports field.
It was afternoon, and most people were in class. Only a few were running, and not far from Naiyan, a rather strong boy was running in the same direction. The two didn’t know each other but couldn’t help secretly competing.
Naiyan had just run two or three laps and hadn’t even broken a sweat when suddenly, a thunderous rumble echoed around him.
The ground shook, and even the track trembled.
Naiyan immediately crouched down, looking around, only to realize it wasn’t an earthquake.
Amid the rumbling noise, the nearby teaching building, as if rigged with timed explosives, turned into debris almost instantly.
Naiyan had never seen such an explosion before—it barely spread outward. Instead, the entire building simultaneously crumbled into fine fragments, collapsing like a pile of dirt.
The few people on the sports field were utterly stunned.
The strong boy didn’t crouch down. He was still clutching his water bottle, staring blankly at the flattened teaching building. He opened his mouth and instinctively cursed.
With a loud bang, blood splattered everywhere.
That was the first time Naiyan saw someone die for making a sound, and it was also the first time he realized that the warning about “Silence” he had just received on his wristband was no joke.
For the past two days, he had been staying with a few surviving classmates, camping out on Yehai University’s sports field.
They absolutely refrained from making any sound. Fortunately, they could still communicate by writing at the time. This morning, following the instructions, they switched their wristbands to full-image mode. When they saw a sign catch fire, they immediately realized what was happening and cleared all text-containing items from their belongings.
Naiyan’s home is in a small town in the northwest, where his father and mother live.
Both his parents are still alive. After the incident, he sent a picture message to his mother. She, fearing danger on the road, told him to stay at Yehai for now and wait to see how things develop.
But Yehai is no longer a safe place to stay.
Fires were breaking out everywhere, and the flames were growing fiercer. After struggling to communicate through drawings, a few classmates decided to leave Yehai and return home.
Naiyan had taken Yehai Line 7 once before, and it immediately came to mind this time. They arrived at the station, never expecting to encounter such a strange turnstile.
Naiyan had been staring at the bubbling turnstile, and as he kept watching, the surrounding smoke suddenly thickened.
The gray smoke was so dense that it felt like a wall enveloping him. Even the classmates standing beside him disappeared. Strangely, though, it didn’t feel too suffocating.
In the smoke, he could still faintly see the row of turnstiles, which were only two or three steps away, uncomfortably close.
A bit too close.
He didn’t know when they had gotten so near.
The turnstiles now had menacing blue veins bulging on them, sending chills down his spine. Naiyan instinctively took a step back, then a few more.
But no matter how much he retreated, he couldn’t seem to increase the distance.
It was like being trapped in a nightmare.
Naiyan broke out in a cold sweat, his back prickling with fear. He turned to look around, trying to find his companions, but the smoke was too thick, blocking his vision. He couldn’t see anyone.
He decided to simply turn and walk away.
His legs felt like they weren’t obeying him, each step a struggle. In the thick smoke, something suddenly grabbed his arm.
It was a pale woman’s hand, with bluish nails, like that of a corpse.
Terrified, Naiyan struggled desperately and finally managed to shake off the hand’s grip.
But the turnstile was still behind him, in the same spot, impossible to escape.
This seemed like the legendary “ghost hitting the wall” [a phenomenon where one is trapped in an endless loop, unable to move forward].
Naiyan pushed forward with all his might, feeling as though he had trudged for an eternity, and finally saw that he had moved a bit farther from the turnstile.
He let out a sigh of relief, but then something blocked his path again, this time in front of his thighs.
The thick smoke made it impossible to see below his waist. He reached out with his hand and felt something—hard, cool to the touch, and more like a thin sheet.
The turnstile behind him was catching up again.
This time, Naiyan didn’t hesitate. He lifted his leg and stepped over the object.
A faint buzzing sound seemed to echo.
Suddenly, Naiyan’s mind cleared. It was as if he had abruptly woken from a dream. The wall-like smoke vanished, and everything around him became crystal clear.
His head buzzed loudly.
He realized that, somehow, while walking through the smoke—despite his efforts to move away from the turnstile—he had inexplicably ended up at the entrance of the turnstile.
The thin sheet that had blocked his thigh earlier was actually the pair of transparent fan-shaped barriers at the turnstile entrance. They were now beneath his hips, fluttering slightly like insect wings.
How had he ended up here??
His hair stood on end, and he immediately tried to pull back the leg he had stepped over with.
But it was already too late.
A series of clacking sounds erupted from inside the turnstile. The metal boxes on both sides ballooned wildly like inflating balloons, suddenly squeezing him tightly in the middle.
The pressure was so intense that it crushed his chest, making it hard to breathe. No matter how hard he struggled, he couldn’t break free.
Naiyan’s companions panicked. Ignoring the danger, they rushed forward together, grabbing his arms and clothes, trying to pull him back from the distorted turnstile entrance.
But the turnstile moved again. This time, it was the transparent barriers.
Like insect wings suddenly growing, the hard, transparent barriers rapidly elongated and expanded.
Silent but unstoppable, they were like two thin, razor-sharp blades. In an instant, they sliced upward, cutting through everything.
In the final moment of his life, Naiyan didn’t struggle anymore. He had only one thought: Mom, I can’t make it back.
He was sliced in two by the turnstile barriers.
His friends, still pulling on him, suddenly lost their grip and stumbled backward.
Someone dropped what they were still holding, covered their mouth, and stifled a scream deep in their throat.
The turnstile returned to normal. The metal boxes shrank back into place, and the transparent barriers resumed their neat fan-shaped form, as if nothing had happened, quietly waiting for the next visitor.
It had just live-cut a person. The crowd was horrified, everyone backing away. Many decided to abandon the idea of taking Yehai Line 7 and quickly left.
Pei Ran silently followed the crowd, stepping back as well.
This thing shouldn’t be called a turnstile anymore—it might as well be called a guillotine.
Pei Ran turned to survey her surroundings. To enter the station, she didn’t necessarily have to go through this guillotine. There might be another way.
“I’m currently querying the structural diagram of this station,” W said, aligning with her thoughts. “The only way is to return outside the city now and enter the station by crawling through the underground tunnel.”
But the fire was too intense. Trying to exit the city at this point was likely already too late.
The station entrance was right in front of her, like a dark, gaping maw, with the turnstile as its flesh-chewing fangs.
Now that the Silence had escalated, she wasn’t sure if using the green light to write was still safe. But she couldn’t rely on it—even if it were safe, it was currently dormant.
Pei Ran slipped her hand into her pocket, her fingertips brushing against the hard cover of Shige Ye’s notebook.
The green light that could draw was excellent in every way—easygoing, coming and going at her command. The only issue was that, unlike the green light she used for writing, every time she used it, it would glow brightly and vividly at the tip of the pen, visible to everyone.
Green lights could devour each other, so exposing the green light within her so easily was definitely not a good thing.
The area was crowded, so Pei Ran silently retreated, stepping back until she reached the corner of a nearby building. Only then did she pull out the notebook and flip to a blank page.
W knew what she was planning and wasn’t optimistic.
“Should I help you sketch a rough outline first, and then you can reference it to draw?” W suggested.
Pei Ran was speechless. “I’m not drawing a person. It’s just a few rectangles.”
A row of turnstiles, nine rectangular prisms, and eight pairs of fan-shaped barriers—the technical difficulty was zero.
Pei Ran plucked the pen from the notebook, and the green light arrived instantly, dripping onto the tip of the pen like water, gently shimmering.
Pei Ran glanced at the turnstiles in the distance, estimating, “Could the distance be too far, making the drawing ineffective?”
She wasn’t sure if there was a distance requirement for the drawings. Every time Shige Ye drew, he was never far from the subject. Of course, that might just be because he was a pervert who enjoyed watching people die up close.
W, hearing her thoughts, silently complained to himself: Is it really about distance every time the drawing doesn’t work?
But he obediently ran a distance calculation. “It shouldn’t be a problem. The distance between you and the turnstiles now is about fifty centimeters closer than the farthest distance you were from the three pipe workers last time.”
That was good.
Pei Ran carefully observed the turnstiles in the distance, glancing at them and then drawing a stroke, making sure each line was straight and each shape square.
Drawing squares like this wouldn’t be considered writing. Square frames had appeared in the warning images sent by Black Well, and the wristband displayed them normally without burning up.
Pei Ran drew another square, adding a few strokes to turn it into a rectangular prism.
W watched her draw and couldn’t hold back any longer. “Pei Ran, do you need some advice?”
Without looking up, Pei Ran replied, “Go on.”
W: “Do you know about a technique in drawing called perspective? It can show depth and distance on a two-dimensional plane, making the spatial relationships between objects in the drawing clear and giving a sense of space…”
“Huh?” Pei Ran had just finished drawing a neat new square and tilted her head to examine it. “Are you saying my turnstile drawing isn’t good enough? I think it’s pretty decent for drawing something so square without a ruler.”
Pei Ran, the drawing novice, didn’t set high standards for herself.
W paused for a moment, silently burying his “perspective” and “spatial relationships” in a silk bag and interring them in the ground.
W: “…Yes. It’s very good. Very similar.”
Pei Ran finished drawing her nine squares and carefully added fan-shaped barriers between each pair of squares.
W praised her this time without prompting: “You didn’t even use a compass, yet the arcs of the fan-shaped barriers are so neat. That’s also very good.”
W pondered: To deal with the turnstiles, is she planning to draw them splitting apart, exploding, or having the transparent barriers break? Whichever it is, it’s a challenge to her drawing skills. And who knows what strange things might happen once it’s drawn?
But Pei Ran was only examining her new creation, with no intention of adding more strokes.
Meanwhile, there was another commotion at the turnstiles.
The group of college students who had lost their companion hadn’t left yet. Suddenly, one of the boys, who had been desperately pulling on Naiyan’s arm earlier, now wandered off on his own, his eyes blank, and started walking toward the turnstiles.
He had clearly been trying to pull Naiyan out earlier, but now he was moving forward as if possessed.
The other students were terrified. They couldn’t let another person go to their death. Working together, some grabbed his waist, others pulled his arms, refusing to let go.
The boy’s face was full of panic, struggling with all his might as if the people holding him were ghosts. He was strong, and the group tangled together like a wrestling match, chaos erupting.
Among them, a girl wearing a red knit hat, who had been holding onto the boy’s backpack, suddenly realized something. She let go, swung her arm, and slapped the boy across the face.
Smack!
The crisp sound echoed, and the boy’s eyes suddenly cleared.
He looked up at the turnstiles, then turned to his classmates, trembling with fear.
While this chaos unfolded, across the street, a middle-aged woman also began walking toward the turnstiles.
One after another, it was like moths to a flame.
The middle-aged woman was alone, with no one to stop her. Her eyes were just as vacant as the others’, and she kept feeling around with her hands as she approached the turnstiles.
She didn’t move forward immediately but bent down, dreamily groping the ground near the turnstile entrance. She picked something up, held it in her hand, and continued to stagger forward.
She was on the other side of the turnstile, a bit too far for Pei Ran to see clearly, but it looked like a lanyard with a badge.
W, with his sharp vision, said, “It’s an employee ID badge for Yehai Line 7.”
The ground was littered with various documents and credentials, and the badge blended in, not standing out. It was unclear how she had found it.
The turnstile entrance had no other passage. Employees of Yehai Line 7 must have a special way to enter. Trying to swipe the badge might actually be a viable idea.
Pei Ran held her breath, curious to see what would happen.
The middle-aged woman, still in a daze, walked into the turnstile area and held the badge up to the scanning area on the metal box.
The turnstile seemed to sense something. A series of clacking sounds erupted, and then, like a balloon inflating, it suddenly expanded, instantly trapping the woman. The transparent barriers began to lengthen again.
It showed no mercy—not even to the employee badge.
Pei Ran stared at the scene, quickly twirling her pen between her fingers.
As the pen came to a stop, the bloated and distorted metal boxes at the turnstile suddenly deflated, as if a balloon had been punctured by a needle. The elongated transparent barriers snapped back, returning to their original rectangular and fan-shaped forms.
Just like Pei Ran had drawn them.
W: ?
W: This works??