Chapter Seventeen: The Sea of Butterflies
Mu Ye's training lasted for weeks, like an endless winter. Zhong Si was like a string stretched to its limit, trembling repeatedly on the verge of collapse.
His body was thin, and the dark circles under his eyes were growing increasingly pronounced, but deep within his violet eyes, something that had been forcibly honed was gradually revealing a sharp edge.
He learned to control his trembling under Mu Ye's cold gaze, to swallow his painful groans, and even to glean a faint, possibly existing pattern from seemingly meaningless and tedious information.
He no longer passively endured the pain by merely clinging to his memories of West Asia, as he had done at the beginning. A survival instinct, or rather, a pride that refused to be completely crushed, drove him to actively adjust his breathing and try to find a "driftwood" to temporarily take refuge in the flood of information.
He began to observe the rhythm and preferences of Mu Ye's questions, trying to predict the direction of the next test.
Even in his extreme exhaustion, he unconsciously developed some clumsy, unique ways of encoding memories. None of these subtle changes escaped Mu Ye's eyes, which were like those of a precision sensor.
That morning, Zhong Si was taken to a room inside the Mu Ye Intelligence Center that he had never been to before. The room was larger than the previous training room, but the furnishings were surprisingly "normal"—a large oak table, several high-backed chairs, and instead of a mountain of documents, a huge telegraph receiver in standby mode, and an object covered with black velvet that resembled a display board.
There were no maps on the walls, only a huge, smooth blackboard. The light in the room remained constant and cold, but it had lost some of the oppressive feeling of a laboratory and gained a more formal and... solemn atmosphere.
Mu was already waiting at the table. Today she was wearing a simpler, dark black dress. When she saw Zhong Si, she didn't immediately start the test as usual, but instead gestured for him to sit down across the long table.
“No individual tests today,” Mu Ye said, his voice as steady as ever, but Zhong Si keenly caught a very subtle, unusual seriousness in his tone. “We will conduct a comprehensive simulation analysis.”
You need to process a highly obfuscated and edited fragment of a real intelligence stream. The goal is to find valuable gems amidst the flood of information and deduce possible event profiles. There is no time limit, but the entire process will be recorded.
Zhong Si's heart skipped a beat.
Comprehensive simulation…real intelligence flow…these words combined meant a training far more difficult than any he had ever undertaken before. He took a deep breath, forcing himself to calm down, and nodded. Xiya's face flashed through his mind, bringing a faint warmth and strength.
Mu walked to the telegraph machine and pressed a few switches. The machine emitted a low, warm-up hum. Then, she lifted the black velvet cloth covering the display panel.
Below are not pictures, but a dense array of paper scraps of various colors and shapes pinned to a board—newspaper clippings, blurry corners of photographs, fragments of handwritten numbers and codes, and even a few seemingly unrelated fabric samples and stamps. All these elements are arranged haphazardly, like a collage by a madman.
“Over the past 72 hours, there have been signs of unusual fund flows and personnel movements in multiple areas of London’s underworld. These,” Mu Ye pointed to the dazzling display board and the telegraph machine that had begun spitting out paper tape, “are all the unfiltered fragments of raw information we intercepted from different channels during the same period. Noise accounts for more than 95 percent. Your task is to make these fragments speak.”
Zhong Si looked at the paper strip that was constantly extending and covered with codes and symbols, and then at the display board that looked like an abstract painting, and felt a wave of dizziness.
The amount of information was overwhelming and completely disorganized, like being thrown into a maze made up of countless broken pieces of glass, each reflecting distorted light, yet unable to piece together a complete image.
He walked to the display board, his purple eyes slowly sweeping over the chaotic fragments. The dates on the clippings, the shadows in the corners of the photos, the texture of the fabric fibers, the place of issue of the stamps, the repeating patterns of the telegram codes... individually, they were meaningless.
He sat down at the long table, picked up the telegram tape, and forced himself to read the incomprehensible characters. At first, his brain worked like a rusty gear, struggling to categorize and reason using the logical analysis methods he had learned, but he quickly hit a dead end. There was too much noise; the effective signals were almost completely drowned out.
Time passed by, second by second.
The only sounds in the room were the rhythmic clicking of the telegraph machine and the occasional rustling of Zhong Si turning pages. Mu sat opposite him, like a lifeless statue, his silver-gray eyes calmly watching the troubled boy, offering no hints or urging.
A wave of frustration washed over him. Fine beads of sweat appeared on Zhong Si's forehead, and his stomach began to churn with tension and anxiety. He felt it was impossible for him to complete this task.
This was simply impossible. He looked up at Mu Ye with almost despair, hoping to see a hint of giving up, or at least a little impatience, on her face.
But there was nothing. Mu Ye's eyes remained calm and unwavering, as if to say, "This is reality. Intelligence work often involves finding the possible in the impossible."
Just as Zhong Si was about to give up and admit defeat, a strange shift occurred. Extreme anxiety and pressure seemed to break the last thread of "rational analysis" in his brain. He stopped trying to "understand" or "reason," and instead...emptied his mind.
He no longer stared at any particular fragment, but instead let his gaze wander, like a defocused lens, taking in the entire display board and the ever-extending telegram as a huge, flowing whole.
A strange thing happened: the originally chaotic and conflicting fragments of information began to gradually shed their inherent, trivial appearance in his perception.
What he saw was no longer specific text, images, or code, but an endless ocean composed of countless shimmering points of light and flowing lines. Each fragment of information transformed into a point of light or a ripple in this sea of information butterflies.
Noise is like the dim plankton in the ocean, while truly valuable signals are like a school of fish disturbed in the deep sea, emitting a faint glow at a special frequency.
His consciousness seemed to transform into a light butterfly, fluttering and dancing above this vast sea of butterflies. He no longer needed to swim laboriously, but instead, with an indescribable intuition, he sensed the faint and hidden "gravity" and "resonance" between the points of light beneath the surface of the sea.
His fingers moved unconsciously, picked up a charcoal pencil, and walked to the smooth blackboard. He didn't write down any logically rigorous deductions, but began to draw. Not concrete objects, but dots, lines, and extremely simple symbols.
He first drew a dot slightly to the left of the center of the blackboard, and next to it marked an abbreviation code "K-7" that he had inadvertently glimpsed from a telegram tape and that was repeated three times.
Then, he drew another dot in the upper right corner. The position of this dot corresponded to the angle of a specific clock tower in the background of a blurry photo on the display board. The time of the photo was taken subtly overlapped with the timestamp of a certain signal in the telegram.
He connected the two points with a dotted line, the arc of which coincided precisely with the nighttime closure section of a less popular horse-drawn carriage route mentioned in another clipping.
Next, the third dot appears in the lower left corner. This dot is inspired by the texture of a piece of dark blue woolen scrap—it is extremely similar to the fibers of a certain club carpet that he remembered when he returned from a mission in West Asia…
The fourth point... the fifth point...
He drew faster and faster, his movements becoming more fluid and less hesitant, even possessing an almost intoxicating quality.
The dots were connected by lines of various colors and shapes, gradually forming a complex, abstract, yet subtly revealing star-like network on the blackboard. He marked some intersections with circles, writing brief words beside them: "Funds gathering?" "Personnel transit?" "Motives unclear."
He was completely immersed in this strange "seeing," forgetting his fatigue, his fear, and even Mu Ye's existence.
He was no longer the pitiful creature shivering in the ruins, nor the apprentice struggling in training, but rather a spirit dancing with information itself, a prophet who could hear the whispers of the "Butterfly Sea".
Mu finally moved.
She slowly stood up without making a sound, walked to the blackboard, and quietly watched the "analysis diagram" that Zhong Si was gradually forming, a diagram full of spirituality but not a product of traditional logic.
Her gaze was sharp as a knife, sweeping rapidly across every point and every line, comparing and verifying them with the original fragments of information with lightning speed.
For the first time, an extremely subtle change appeared on her face. The lines of her lips, which had been frozen for millennia, seemed to loosen by a mere tenth of a millimeter. And deep within her silver-gray eyes, as black as the permafrost of Siberia, a tiny, yet real, spark flashed suddenly, then vanished just as quickly.
That wasn't praise, joy, or even surprise. It was... recognition. A professional recognition, in its purest sense, of the astonishing potential and precision of a rare "tool."
Like a master sculptor discovering the potential of a peerless jade within a stubborn rock; like a weapons master finding a rare metal with a perfect crystalline structure. This recognition, stripped of all emotional color, is cold yet incredibly heavy.
Zhong Si drew the last stroke, as if he had exhausted all his strength. The charcoal pencil slipped from his fingertips and made a soft sound on the cement floor.
He staggered, grabbing the edge of the blackboard to steady himself, breathing heavily, his body drenched in sweat, his face as pale as paper. He tumbled back to reality from that mystical state, his brain throbbing with pain as if it had been hollowed out, waves of nausea rising in his throat.
He raised his head and looked at Mu Ye with a somewhat blank expression, as if waiting for the final judgment, for a cold denial, or even harsher instructions.
Mu Ye's gaze shifted from the blackboard back to Zhong Si. She looked at him for a few seconds; her gaze was still sharp, but it seemed to have lost some of its previous pure scrutiny, gaining instead an extremely complex and unfathomable depth.
She said nothing. She didn't comment on whether his "star chart" was right or wrong, nor did she point out its jumps and uncertainties. She simply turned around, walked to the table, picked up a piece of red chalk, and lightly drew a tiny, yet incredibly clear, checkmark on one of the circles Zhong Si had marked.
Next to that circle, Zhong Si wrote: "Suspected point of intervention by a third party. Overlaps with the docks commonly used by the 'Razor Gang,' but the flow of funds is abnormal."
The red hook on Mu Ye's face silently confirmed this.
Then, she put down the chalk and, in a calm, even voice, gave the instruction to end today's training, but this instruction was completely different from the usual ones:
"Analysis terminated. Record sealed, classified as 'Raven's Eye'." Her gaze swept over the prophetic pattern on the blackboard, composed of dots and lines, before finally settling on Zhong Si, who was trembling slightly from exhaustion.
“You have proven your worth, Zhong Si.”
Her tone was devoid of warmth, but the words themselves, and the red checkmark, were like a bolt of lightning, cleaving through the chill and despair surrounding Zhong Si.
"Now, go back and rest. Tomorrow... there's a new mission."
After Mu finished speaking, she stopped looking at him and began to personally tidy up the telegram tape on the table and the fragments on the display board, her movements still precise and efficient.
Zhong Si stood there, stunned, for several seconds before he realized the meaning behind Mu Ye's words. His value…was recognized? Not as a burden, not as an object of pity, but as…valuable? An indescribable warm current, mixed with immense exhaustion, slight dizziness, and a faint yet genuine sense of accomplishment, overwhelmed his taut nerves. His legs gave way, and he almost collapsed to the ground, barely managing to move out of the room, supporting himself against the wall.
Behind him, Mu Ye paused slightly as she packed her things. She looked up at the boy's staggering figure as he walked away, then glanced at the unconventional yet crucial "Butterfly Sea Star Chart" on the blackboard.
The brief glimmer of approval in her cold, black eyes had vanished, replaced by a deeper, more complex set of thoughts.
She did see it. The butterfly that emerged from its cocoon was no ordinary butterfly. However, she couldn't say for sure where this "sea of butterflies" would ultimately fly, whether it would bring fortune or misfortune.
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