🛰️ Chapter 21.5: The Long Watch
Nano's Note: 🤖
✨ "Attention, readers. Chapter 7 was revised on August 18, 2025. It now contains a more complete record of Junjie's first encounter with me. If you have already processed the earlier version, I recommend re-reading to capture the full emotional arc."
đź“… GEDS: QW079931-04-26-000981-389417-Q73
🌍 April 26, 99 BCE – Mid Spring 🌿
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The valley looked no different to the untrained eye — smoke curling from cookfires, hammer strikes ringing in the forges, the slow rhythm of a people settling into the season's work.
High above, shapes moved in slow arcs against the pale sky. To a villager, they were hawks or distant kites riding the mountain winds. To Nano's tuned array, they were not birds. These were the upgraded Council drones, their hulls wrapped in adaptive camouflage, scanning in wide sweeps that brushed every hut, every field, every tool rack.
Nano's voice stayed inside Junji's skull, no more than a thought-whisper:
"Four new patterns. Better optics. Narrow-beam EM sniffers. They'll try to map everything down to the grain in your hammer handle."
Junji didn't look up. He heaved a timber onto his shoulder and trudged toward the new mill scaffolding, his expression fixed in mild annoyance. "You're saying I'm hauling beams while you get to play hide-and-seek?"
"I'm saying you look like a normal human in the middle of harvest prep. That's the point."
The "stone" pillars at the valley's edge — weather-worn to any casual glance — murmured with faint subspace distortion, jamming the drones' passive sniffers. They didn't block scans outright; that would have been too conspicuous. Instead, they blurred emissions into harmless background noise, the valley's heart beating in sync with the mountains' own magnetic breath.
Days became weeks. The drones made passes at dawn, sometimes at night, sometimes not at all. Patterns shifted without warning. At times, they drifted far beyond the valley, sweeping wide arcs over the foothills, tracing rivers upstream, skimming high ridges where the wind never stopped. Nano tracked their absence carefully, marking windows where real work could be done.
By midwinter, the drones had settled into a rhythm: in, sweep, out. They sampled air, soil, and flesh — brushing villagers with invisible sweeps — but found nothing beyond the already-logged genetic anomaly. The Council's curiosity cooled.
In the spring thaw, the last of the upgraded watchers banked away over the north ridge, climbing until even Nano's trackers lost them.
"That's it?"Â Junji thought.
"For now," Nano replied. "They've decided you're an oddity, not a threat. Let them keep thinking that."