Chapter 37: The Weeping Stone
The restoration was not a rebirth. It was a refurbishment.
In a sterile white chamber, they repaired him. Not healers, but technicians. They used beams of coherent logic to stitch his frayed meridians. They infused him with a bland, universal energy source—"Archival Standard Qi"—that was stable, flavorless, and utterly without tribulation. It was the spiritual equivalent of plain rice.
They gave him a uniform: dark grey, simple, durable. A tool belt with standard-issue containment glyphs, a data-slate, and a neutralizer wand that emitted a field of "calm, rational discourse" designed to pacify low-grade emotional anomalies.
They gave him a new title: Collector First Class Xiao Feng. It came with a crystal identity sigil that hummed with Archive authority.
They did not give him back his storm. His sorrow. His focus. Those were deemed "unstable experiential data." They left him with the hollowed-out framework of his Dao—the capacity for consumption, but no fire with which to cook.
He was a gun loaded with blanks.
Forty-eight hours after his choice, he stood in the departure bay. Fang-7 was not there. They were being "individually assessed." Lin, Kaelan, and Lian were in a "holding and orientation" wing. He had been allowed no contact.
Only Lum stood with him, next to a small, disk-shaped transport vessel that looked like a floating, brushed-metal coin.
"Your destination is pre-programmed," Lum intoned. "The transport is autonomous. Locate the Weeping Stone. Contain it using the provided protocols. Return. Your performance will be evaluated."
Xiao Feng nodded. He felt nothing. The emptiness was a settled fact.
He boarded the vessel. The interior was a white pod with a single seat. The door sealed with a sigh. Through a transparent section, he saw the Archive Enclave—the quartz mountain, the silent libraries—recede into a speck, then into nothingness as the vessel slipped into a non-space corridor.
Time passed. He slept. He ate the bland nutrient paste that extruded from a wall slot. He practiced activating the neutralizer wand. It emitted a soft, blue pulse that made him feel mildly bored and agreeable.
After an interval, the vessel shuddered and dropped back into conventional reality.
The Sun-Scorched Expanse lived up to its name. A cracked, red-dirt basin under a white-hot sky. A single, struggling village of mud-brick huts clustered around a dusty well. The heat was a physical weight.
His vessel set down on the outskirts, silent and unseen by a perception-dampening field. He stepped out into the blistering air. The uniform regulated his temperature, but the lifelessness of the place seeped in.
The villagers saw him approach. They didn't run. They just… watched, with wide, oddly guileless eyes. A man with a deeply lined face approached. He spoke, and his words had a raw, unfiltered honesty.
"Welcome, stranger. You are from the sky. You are here about the Stone. It makes us say what we feel. It is very tiring. My wife told me this morning she has never liked my cooking. It is true. But I wish I did not know."
Xiao Feng felt the anomaly before he saw it. A faint, shimmering field of… compulsive authenticity. It pushed against his own numb emptiness, trying to find something real to pull out. It found nothing, and skittered away, confused.
"Where is it?" he asked, his voice flat.
"In the old quarry. Behind the village. It weeps water that is not water. It makes the air taste like confession."
Xiao Feng walked through the village. Children stared, then suddenly burst into tears, crying about stolen toys or hidden fears. Adults spoke to each other with brutal, unvarnished truths. There was no malice in it. It was just… exhausting. The Stone was broadcasting a field of pure, undefended emotional reality.
The quarry was a shallow pit. And in its center sat the Weeping Stone.
It was a lump of porous, grey rock about the size of his head. From its pores, a clear, viscous fluid seeped slowly, dripping to the ground where it evaporated into the shimmering field. The air here was thick with it. The weight of unsaid things.
He activated his data-slate. It scanned the stone. Readings flickered: MEMETIC EMITTER. EMOTIONAL AMPLIFICATION / TRUTH-CONDUIT. ORIGIN: UNKNOWN (POSSIBLY TEAR-FRAGMENT OF A MINOR 'TRUTH-DAWN' SPIRIT). THREAT LEVEL: LOW (PSYCHOLOGICAL FATIGUE, SOCIAL DISRUPTION).
Standard procedure: Deploy containment glyphs. Use the neutralizer to dampen the field. Package the artifact.
He began placing the glyph-disks in a circle around the stone. As he worked, the field pressed harder. It couldn't make him emotional, but it could make him aware of his own emptiness.
You are hollow. You are a tool. You feel nothing. Do you miss the storm? Do you miss the hunger?
The thoughts weren't his. They were the Stone, reflecting the truth it sensed in him back at him. It was showing him his own nullity.
He finished the circle. The glyphs glowed, forming a barrier that contained the field. The shimmering air retracted, coiling around the Stone itself.
Now, the neutralizer. He raised the wand, set it to standard dampening frequency, and fired.
The blue pulse hit the contained field.
And something went wrong.
The field didn't dissipate. It resonated.
The Weeping Stone's truth-frequency and the Archive's rational-dampening frequency were not opposites. They were dissonant harmonies. They created a feedback loop.
The containment glyphs overloaded, shattering with pops of white light. The field erupted, not outward, but inward, collapsing into a hyper-concentrated point right at the Stone, and then…
The Stone screamed.
Not with sound. With pure, conceptual agony. The agony of truth being forced into silence.
A psychic shockwave, invisible and devastating, blasted out. It didn't affect the mind. It affected the soul's connection to reality.
Xiao Feng was thrown back, his wand clattering away. The villagers in the distance cried out, clutching their heads, not in pain, but in sudden, profound disorientation.
And the Stone… changed.
The weeping fluid turned black and oily. The grey rock darkened to obsidian. And from its new, dark pores, it began to emit a different field. Not truth.
Doubt.
Not simple uncertainty. A deep, corrosive, existential doubt that ate at the edges of fact and memory. The air grew cold. The villagers' cries turned to confused whimpers. A man looked at his own hands as if he'd never seen them before.
The data-slate chirped a frantic alarm: ANOMALY EVOLUTION! MEMETIC HAZARD SHIFT: COMPULSIVE TRUTH -> EXISTENTIAL DOUBT. THREAT LEVEL ELEVATED: MEDIUM (PSYCHOLOGICAL DISSOLUTION). RECOMMENDATION: IMMEDIATE FALLBACK, REQUEST SPECIALIZED CONTAINMENT.
He had broken it. His Archive tool had broken the anomaly, making it something worse. This was his first test, and he had failed catastrophically.
The Stone's new field washed over him. The numbness inside him was no longer a defense. Doubt began to seep into the emptiness.
Are you sure you saved the world? Or did you just bury the problem? Are you sure the Archive will care for your friends? Or are they already being dismantled? Are you sure you ever had a destiny, or were you just a hungry rat who got lucky?
The questions were poison. They found purchase in the hollow places.
He stumbled to his feet. He had no power to fight this. No storm to rage, no sorrow to weigh it down, no hunger to consume it.
He had only what the Archive gave him. And it had just made things worse.
He looked at the black, doubt-weeping stone. He looked at the confused, terrified villagers. He looked at his own empty hands.
And then, deep in the cold, silent cellar of his being, something reacted.
Not his old hunger. Something older. More fundamental. The first principle.
The principle that had been there when he was a slave digging graves. The principle that had made him push his worthless Qi into the black shard. The principle that was not rage, or sorrow, or cunning, or empathy.
It was defiance.
A silent, stubborn, wordless NO.
Not a shout. A bedrock refusal.
I will not be erased by doubt. I will not be a failure. I will not let this thing poison these people.
It was not power. It was will. Pure, undiluted, human will.
And his Dao, the empty framework of consumption, recognized it. It had no tribulation to feed on. So it fed on the only thing available: his own defiant will.
He didn't open his mouth to consume. He opened his soul.
He walked toward the Doubting Stone, through the chilling, mind-eroding field. Each step was agony of the spirit. Each doubt was a shard of ice in his mind.
You are nothing. You have always been nothing.
NO.
They will all leave you, or die, or forget you.
NO.
Your path ends here, in the dust, a failure.
NO.
He reached the Stone. The black, oily fluid dripped onto his boots. The doubt was a screaming whirlwind around him, trying to un-write his story.
He knelt. He didn't have a technique. He had an act.
He placed his hands on the cold, dark rock.
And he did not try to contain it. He did not try to silence it.
He acknowledged it.
He let the doubt in. He felt its corrosive truth: that the universe was uncertain, that stories could end, that heroes could fail.
And then, with his defiant will as the fuel, his empty Dao performed a miracle.
It consumed the doubt, and left the truth behind.
It was a subtle, profound alchemy. The Stone'field wasn't just negated; it was processed. The corrosive, soul-killing doubt was stripped away, metabolized by his defiant will, and what was left was… the simple, clean, unadorned fact of uncertainty.
The black oil cleared, turning back to clear water. The obsidian lightened to porous grey. The screaming field dissolved into a gentle, sighing breeze that carried no compulsion, only a faint, sad reminder that nothing is forever.
The Weeping Stone was just a stone again. A sad, lonely little artifact that had been scared into being a monster.
Xiao Feng collapsed beside it, gasping. He hadn't used borrowed power. He had used the one thing that was truly, irrevocably his: his own stubborn refusal to break.
The villagers slowly recovered, blinking as if waking from a bad dream. The man looked at his hands again, and this time, he recognized them, flaws and all.
The data-slate had stopped screeching. Its new reading flickered, confused: ANOMALY… RESOLVED? HAZARD DISSIPATED. ENERGY SIGNATURE: TRANSFORMED. CAUSE: UNKNOWN (COLLECTOR BIORESONANCE?).
Lum's transport vessel appeared silently overhead, extending a retrieval beam.
Xiao Feng looked at the now-harmless stone. He looked at his hands. They were still empty. But they were his.
He had not gotten his old power back.
But he had found a new one. A quieter, harder, more fundamental power.
The power of No.
He picked up the neutralizer wand, the tool that had caused the crisis. He looked at it for a long moment. Then, he dropped it into the dust.
He picked up the Weeping Stone, now just a damp rock, and carried it to the retrieval beam.
He was Collector First Class Xiao Feng. He had resolved his first anomaly.
Not by Archive protocol.
By being more stubborn than doubt itself.
As the vessel ascended, taking him back to the silent, waiting Archive, the hollow ache inside him wasn't gone.
But it now had a foundation. A foundation of defiant, unbreakable will.
The hunger was dead.
But the refusal had just been born.