Lin Cilán has three rules for life:
1. If it can be analyzed with data, never rely on intuition.
2. If an equal exchange will do, never appeal to personal ties.
3. If it can be handled quietly, don't waste words.
Then she fell into the "Silent Temple," a place where speaking hastens collapse, writing vanishes on its own, and every building is in a state of eternal death.
For the first time, her professional background in historic building preservation came in handy: not to write preservation plans, but to create "final memory records" for these buildings.
Her unusual trait, auditory hallucinations at 612 hertz, suddenly became a superpower: it wasn't an illness. She could hear sutras being chanted among the rubble.
Her refusal to be self-sacrificing was put to the test. When a Tang dynasty bell tower asked her in its final voice, "Am I worth remembering?" she calmly replied, "Show me your structural stress diagram. If it's beautiful enough, I'll consider it."
Later, rumors began to circulate through the temple:
"Don't mess with that woman who keeps drawing blueprints in the ruins."
"She completed a damaged scroll of the Diamond Sutra last time, and it created an area where the laws of physics behave strangely."
"She even made Shen Xiu, the forbidden-text monk, tremble while pouring tea. He's a living library with thirty thousand volumes of forbidden scripture branded onto his skin."
Welcome to a new world where structural engineering combats theology, surveying instruments measure life and death, and calm logic gives meaning to collapse.
Here, the most dangerous weapon isn't force, but a sufficiently coherent philosophical system. Lin Cilán happens to have one.
