Gods in the Flow of Time

"I can be small": supreme power in the discourse of effeminacy This is the most shocking sentence in the whole article and the most worthy of questioning. On the surface, this is a complete concession—giving up status, giving up the protection of the system, and giving up dignity itself. But then, it was this weakest voice that said the most powerful words of the night: "If you chase him out, the result will be that the two children will have no father." As a critic, I must ask: Is this a sacrificial sacrifice of sobriety, or a delicate finality? This sentence was based on two children who had never appeared as a fulcrum, freezing the actions of everyone present - Shen Zhiwei did not chase them out. She seemed to give up all rights, but in fact she exercised the highest power of the night: the power to end the suspense. Saying the most irrefutable words in the most humble posture is an ancient rhetoric technique of retreating in order to advance. Ask about the status again. Confucianism talks about "correcting the name". If the name is not correct, the words will not go smoothly, and if the words are not smooth, the things will not be accomplished. The girl said, "Anyone without status will do." But status is never just her business—the lack of status will ultimately be borne by the unborn child. She can be small, but children cannot "be small." A word of "anything goes" is an advance of another person's life. The weapon that Sui Xiuna displayed was history itself: "The patriarch of your old Shen family, what you are most proud of in your life is promoting the passage of the first law after the founding of the Republic, the monogamous Marriage Law." The descendants of the legislators have personally created a situation that requires someone to "do it small." This is the most poignant irony in the whole article: the system can be enacted overnight, but the transformation of human nature takes generations. Engels sternly pointed out that individual marriage has had its shadow since its birth. This chapter of the novel is almost a literary footnote to that assertion. The Illusion of the Listener: Omniscientness, Incompetence, and Expropriated Empathy Wen Fang was relaxed when he appeared, and even "hahaha" in his heart: Fortunately, he is a "firm celibate". The last sentence of the full text is: "Everyone in the room has their feet rooted, including the virgin Wen Fang who is wearing headphones." The author specifically mentions the word "virgin", which is not just a joke - it implies that the person who has heard everything is the person with the least experience in the game. Complete information does not equal complete understanding. This is the first layer of the listener's illusion. The second level is ethical. Wen Fang prepared an excuse for himself: "Whether he listens or not depends on whether he wants to--besides, the recorder is still coldly storing everything in storage." The machine is recording, so people don't need to get involved. But his body betrayed this rhetoric: when he heard Sui Xiuna's voice, "my heart became more stable"; when he heard the truth, "my head was about to explode"; when he tightened his grip on the headphones, "his knuckles turned white." Levinas said that the face of the other is itself an ethical imperative, and you cannot look at a face without being claimed by it. Wen Fang couldn't see his face, but his voice also formed his face - the trembling voice, the broken voice, and the stubborn voice that lasted until the end were all giving him orders. Empathy is never a choice, but a requisition. The author has buried a very subtle metaphor here. While monitoring the collapse of the family, Wen Fang grinds coffee, and the "warmth of caramel and nuts" spreads into a mist in the room; he cooks beef ball noodles, using other people's marital crises as background sounds to accompany the meal. This is a dangerous moment for aestheticizing and living other people's pain—other people's tragedies become the soundtrack of one's own little life. But then, the noodle soup overflowed, and the fire was extinguished with a bang. The life of the observed overflows the container of observation and directly interferes with the observer's own stove. It's a statement: No one can really see fire through a glass. The deeper irony is at the end. When the third person said, "If you chase him out, the result will be that the two children will have no father." "Everyone in the room was shocked, including the virgin Wen Fang who was wearing headphones." The word "virgin" is very harsh: Wen Fang is proficient in fighting, shooting, lurking, and runes, but he has no personal experience in the kind of life he monitors day and night - intimacy, entanglement, betrayal, and responsibility. Linguistic polygraph Shen Zhiwei did not say a complete sentence in the whole article. "Half... Half... Half a year", "I met... Two years ago... During... Exchange... Exchange activities... With other schools...". This is not just a physiological reaction of fear, but a linguistic manifestation of moral collapse. Heidegger said that language is the "house of existence" - when the foundation of a person's existence collapses, his language will inevitably collapse at the same time. Stuttering is not because you can't find the words, but because you can't find a "self" that can make these words stand. Two years of concealment had already eaten away at the foundation beneath his language.

The test of death, a statement of power against power The most important sentence in the whole article is Lu Yanhao's sentence: "The scary thing is not that I will die, but that I have been living and become a stumbling block to progress. I want to use my death to test whether our career over the years is tenable." This is a complete reversal of ordinary power logic. The instinct of all power is to declare "As long as I am here, order will exist"; but what he declares is "Without me, order will still exist, and order will be established." This is almost the political version of Popper's falsificationism - a system that requires a "fixing needle" to operate is precisely proof of the failure of the system, because it mortgages stability on something that is bound to disappear: life. This text has a sharp and almost cruel sociological interpretation based on the mythical system of contemporary online literature: the popularity of thermal weapons has weakened the advantage of "hard fists", but "living long" is still the talisman of aristocratic families. Why is "living long" so deadly? Because time is the basis of all compound interest. Wealth, knowledge, connections, and realm all increase exponentially based on lifespan. Living longer is not about a few more years than others, but a few more eras - a strong person in the Sixth Earth Realm can survive three generations of opponents and watch all variables return to the mean with his own eyes. Death was once called the "great equalizer". Regardless of whether you are rich or poor, high or low, it is nothing but dirt. But when the state of cultivation can be directly exchanged for life span, even death itself has become hierarchical. This is the ultimate form of inequality: instead of rich people buying better coffins, rich people don't get into coffins at all.

Ai Haifeng's scientific questioning is actually quite solid: From the perspective of information theory, how can a person's lifelong memory and cognition be poured into a baby's brain in the blink of an eye? The eyewitness testimony also contradicts the statement that "the body that has just died must be used to seize the body." What's even more rare is his honesty - after finishing the argument, he still leaves "surprises cannot be completely ruled out." A good knower always leaves a seat for uncertainty. Going deeper is Locke's identity issue: Even if the memory is really transferred, will a baby with all the memories of a saint still follow the breeze? I'm afraid it's closer to "a newborn who has read all of Sui Qingfeng's diaries" - when the body, desires, relationships, and life stages are all changed, the memory is no longer an identity, but just a legacy. Lu Yanhao's answer completed a dimensionality reduction blow. He bypasses metaphysics and goes straight to the philosophy of history: "One cannot step into the same river twice." Meaning always depends on the interpreter. The sage's experience is handed over to a baby, just like a classic is handed over to the future - the sage has no say in how to read it in the future. No information is destined to be effective, which is the dissolution of all determinism.

Tuluska's drunken words are the most pungent sociology in the whole article: "Every generation is working hard to pile things high. What are they piled high? What are the possibilities of building high-level warriors?" This insight goes beyond the popular understanding that "rich people are from aristocratic families". What the aristocratic family monopolizes is not wealth, but possibility - the probability advantage of "generation after generation of masters in the sky realm." This is the embodied version of Bourdieu's capital theory: economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital will eventually be converted into some heritable and reproducible advantages. The essence of class is not possession, but the ability to continue possession. Even more subtle is the setting of "the higher the martial arts, the fewer heirs". The peak of ability and the continuation of bloodline constitute a paradox, so Hu Xingjian must rescue an "evil breed" of unknown origin and bring him into his family - the elite's deepest fear is not competition, but generational annihilation. The fact that the Hu family can turn 365 days into 364 days in a year just shows that the highest form of power is not to do things, but to modify the weights and measures themselves.

Invisible glass house: the irony of the metal box Wen Fang just made an impassioned speech - "She should not be locked in an invisible glass room and let her learn how others breathe in the mirror." But at the end of Chapter 34, a slap in the face to all humanitarian discussions: In Sui Xiuna's phone, a brand-new metal box is turning sound waves into level signals, which are transmitted to the monitoring equipment a hundred meters away. The glass house has been built. Just can't see it. This is a perfect literary presentation of Foucault's Panopticism, but colder than Foucault: the monitor and the monitored share the same "goodwill" at this moment. The Disaster Office sincerely believes that it is protecting this child, just as parents truly believe that checking their children's mobile phones is protecting their children. Surveillance "for your own good" is more dangerous than naked imprisonment, because it even hides the object of resistance - you cannot resist something you don't know exists, nor can you resent someone who claims to love you. This also answers and subverts Wen Fang's own proposition. He said, "Freedom is a human attribute, not a social attribute; society as a structure must pursue stability." Monitoring equipment is the proof of this proposition: society, a "living body", instinctively pounces on all uncertainties just like fleas. The questioning of the republican view of freedom (Pettit) emerges here: is freedom "free from interference" or "free from the possibility of arbitrary interference"? If the answer is the latter, then even if Sui Xiuna and his wife never knew about the existence of surveillance and were not subject to substantial interference throughout their lives, they would never be truly free - because the switch is always in the hands of others. And their laughter when discussing their children's surnames is flowing into the recording device verbatim. This is the most disturbing tenderness in the whole story.

Ai Haifeng's sentence may be the most important sentence in the whole article: "Once the suspicion is solidified, the child will be nailed to the board. Wherever she goes, the board will follow." Wen Fang said frankly: "Without my intuition, my logic told me that this baby girl is not simple." But his turn was crucial - what he wanted to explore was not "what she is", but "what kind of weirdness makes these threads intertwined." He refuses to define the unknown as a threat. He even said the most courageous words in the whole article: "If the body-stealing saint from thousands of years ago can reverse the pursuit of modern society by hundreds of millions of people, it will prove that all of us are indeed wrong, without regrets. Until then, we will follow her." This is Popper's fallibility theory: a truly confident society is not a society that can defend against all subversions, but a society that allows itself to be proven wrong. There is another detail worth pondering: the baby was named "Sui Yi" - Yi, the god of shooting the sun; and the person who is suspected of taking her away was the Arrow Saint thousands of years ago. Sui Xiuna was surprised to say that the orphanage "is a fortune teller", which sent chills down the reader's spine. A name is the first gift a person receives from fate, or it may be the first plank of wood. This ambiguous text has not been solved, but it exactly demonstrates the core dilemma of labeling theory: we can never tell which naming is a blessing and which is the beginning of imprisonment.

The moment Tuluska pulled out the Civil Code and read out Article 13 of the Law of Justice. Niu Yangyang shouted in horror, "This "Justice Law" is intended to seize family property. Tuluska's answer revealed the legislator's painstaking efforts: "Those who earn wages for everyone should not let them freeze to death in the snow. If you save people, your family will be destroyed. Who dares to stop for strangers?" Herein lies an age-old ethical dispute: Do good deeds require reward? Kant would insist that the only legitimate motivation for moral action is duty itself, and that good deeds mixed with interest are no longer purely good. But the designers of the "Justice Law" clearly stand on the other side - the system should not be based on saints and sages, but on ordinary people who know fear, can calculate, and have parents to support. "If you save a baby and die, you will be compensated for a baby in your family." This statement sounds cold and turns the baby into a compensation item, but the other side of it is that the country recognizes that good deeds have a price and is willing to use the system to bear this price. This is exactly the logic behind Confucius' criticism of Zigong for refusing money for redeeming people: raising the threshold for doing good means making ordinary people dare not do good. The "Justice Law" is the legalization of "Zi Lu Shou Niu". But the questioning cannot stop here. Please note the reaction of the official of the Population Department - he immediately thought of using this system as a cover for his identity: "It would be best to have such a stubborn person to support, who can just replace the baby we want to protect. This would be perfect." No matter how good the system is, it will become a tool in the hands of the enforcers. The system cannot guarantee motivation, only process. This is the sobriety we must retain when understanding all good laws: good intentions can be legislated, but they cannot be enforced into the hearts of the people.