The next morning, Yan returned to the shrine practice room with the memory list folded inside his notebook. He chose the memory of Lian and the station workers. He did not offer it as fuel for a promise to become stronger. It was one part of his life, and he wanted to know how the scripture’s focus moved around it.
Qinghe checked the copied sequence against the line on the wall. “The next circulation begins here, then returns to the first intention. Do you want the word read aloud?”
“I know the line. I’ll ask if I need it.”
She nodded and set the monitoring slate beside the lamp. Gu waited outside with Mera, watching the shrine ward from the threshold. Ning had gone to the assembly hall to bring the new loss register for the village records.
Yan began the circulation. The method tried to smooth the sharp associations that connected the workers’ names with fear and loss. The System reversed that intrinsic dulling into clearer feeling. He remembered Lian’s laugh when he ruined the tea, then the heaviness of standing beside the furnace ledger after the crew collapsed. Lian had made the tea on a night shift when rain struck the roof too loudly for anyone to sleep. Yan had poured too quickly and spilled half the cup across a slate. She had called it a better cup now that it had a written pattern at the bottom. He could hear the joke in her voice without confusing…
