There Are Beasts: a Three-Thousand-Year Cognitive Agreement

At 3:17 in the morning, Lin Yan, an outsourced maintenance worker from the City of the Past, repaired a chip that could write ancient texts into people's brains. The chip was engraved with Yaoyao from "The Classic of Mountains and Seas", and a piece of code that shouldn't exist got into his neural interface. His shadow began to look at him, and ancient ink writing from three thousand years ago appeared on his retina. The Security Service initiated a cognitive formatting process. His colleague Su Li discovered that this code has been triggered forty-one times in the past 3,100 years, deleted each time, and rewritten each time - it is a "cognitive agreement" with only one sentence at its core: cognition should not be standardized, standards are cages. Lin Yan was the triggerer of the 42nd delivery. Su Li was the first person to sign the agreement. The ground began to crack. Cracks spread along the underground network of pipes, through the foundations of the Security Bureau, through the city's fiber optics, and through the intercity psychic backbone. The broadcast range of the 43rd delivery: the whole city. Three hundred and seventy-three people saw the same line of words at the same time in the convenience store, classroom, and surveillance wall at four o'clock in the morning—— "There is a beast, which looks like an ox and has a snake's tail. Its name is Yaoyao. When you see it, there will be great floods in the town."