It’s as if this city has no time

On the​‍⁠⁠⁠​‌‍​⁠‌‍​​⁠⁠‍‍⁠⁠​‌⁠⁠ plane, An was expressionlessly sucking on the nearly bare stick of his lollipop. An Yu observed him for a long time and, based on his rudimentary understanding of An, sensed that he was not in a good mood.

Ning explained apologetically, “An hates densely packed insects. He regretted agreeing to this mission a bit after hearing High Peak’s briefing just now.”

An Yu immediately tried to soothe him. “It’s fine. You have so many butterflies; one butterfly per water ant should be enough.”

Before Ning could translate, An looked up at him with a cold gaze. “The great white morpho butterflies are not meant for catching bugs. They are there to protect you. Please cherish the butterflies.”

An Yu was taken aback, not expecting An to voluntarily speak such a long sentence.

An frowned and pulled his hood lower, ducking his head. “Annoying.” He added irritably, “If the insect swarm comes, I’ll use the butterflies to protect myself. I won’t have time to look after you, so be mentally prepared.”

An Yu was speechless.

He couldn’t help but doubt Codex’s mind-reading ability. After a moment’s hesitation, he tentatively asked, “For my bonded support, is it okay if I choose you and Ning?”

An’s fingers, resting on his lap, curled slightly. He leaned back and the hood completely obscured his eyes.

“Whatever.”

Ning’s expression relaxed into a smile. “Thank you for your trust.”

Only then did An Yu let out a silent sigh of relief.

Flame was in the pilot’s seat, with Lumen sitting beside him, staring blankly at the thick clouds outside the window.

An Yu hadn’t seen many beautiful people in District 53. Genetic evolution might have some connection to appearance; the high-level personnel at the Spire were all good-looking, but Lumen’s beauty was on a completely different level.

His stunningly vibrant features were the most unremarkable thing about him; it was his aura that made his beauty so captivating. Whether his brow and eyes were cold, or when he was sitting quietly alone, he made it impossible for people to look away.

Flame pressed a few buttons on the autopilot panel. “Eat some rations before we land. You’ve barely eaten anything since last night.”

“Not hungry,” Lumen said, continuing to look out the window without turning his head.

“Lacking in your awareness to obey orders, and now you’ve lost your manners as well?” Flame’s tone cooled. He tossed two energy bars onto the console between them. “Rose and raspberry.”

After a short while, Lumen finally reached out and took one. The way he ate was the polar opposite of An Yu’s; he chewed for a long time before swallowing a single bite.

An Yu frowned, wrestling with his thoughts for a good while before hesitantly typing a note in his terminal’s memo app.

—”Commander Flame fits Ling Qiu’s stereotype of a powerful figure who enjoys taming beautiful people. Codex glimpsed in Lumen’s thoughts that he has suffered terrible treatment. But I feel that Commander Flame isn’t quite like the shameless elites Ling Qiu mentioned either.”

The memo was a new assignment from his Commander, requiring him to observe his high-level officer companions. The Commander had said that knowing and utilizing people was an essential quality for the Spire’s number one high-level reservist.

An Yu had grown accustomed to the various assignments his Commander gave him on a whim, but whenever he heard the word “reservist,” he felt a subtle unhappiness.

He had once asked Zhu Tao what the point of being a junior high-level officer was. Zhu Tao had said it was to become a new high-level officer and lead all Protectors of a similar aberration type in the event their direct Commander died or left the Spire. But Zhu Tao had also said that while the Commanders had vastly different personalities, they were all, without exception, powerful and steadfast. Such an extreme situation was impossible, so the main task of a junior officer was to grow freely, basking in the admiration of those on the Ladder and the care of their Commander. They were the most fortunate people in the Spire.

An Yu stared blankly at the few incomprehensible lines in his memo.

Qin Zhilu was a very good Commander.

Just as he was still unable to calmly recall the scene of Ling Qiu’s death, he was utterly unwilling to imagine the day his own “reservist” status would be promoted to a regular officer.

Flame’s voice came from the front. “Landing in five minutes.”

An Yu snapped back to reality, exited the memo app, and used the last few minutes before landing to stuff a few large mouthfuls of bread into his mouth.

It was dinner time. The little octopus chibi was also sitting seriously at its desk, eating. The bento box contained a balanced meal of meat, vegetables, and rice. He ate meticulously, one bite of vegetables for every bite of rice.

An Yu poked him and typed:

A familiar voice suddenly came through his earpiece.

The owner of the voice sounded as stern as ever, but perhaps there was a hint of leisure.

In the moment An Yu froze, Qin Zhilu tapped on a keyboard on the other end. An Yu could almost picture the look on his face, the way his eyebrow would be raised, just from his tone. “You have already entered District 34’s airspace. I just ran a terminal link test and confirmed there is no signal interference in District 34. Unfortunately, a few strange conversations appeared in the return log.”

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“No! Commander… I’m not…”

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“Is that so.” Qin Zhilu’s tone was faint, making it impossible to guess his thoughts. “What’s the difference between him and me?”

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“But—” An Yu’s heart stopped. Ling Qiu had never taught him how to handle a situation like this. He acted on pure instinct, speaking rapidly, “But he’s just a piece of code. He isn’t powerful, he  can’t give me a sense of security. It’s just for killing boredom.”

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He even wondered how the Commander’s AI would react upon hearing he was about to be deleted.

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“An octopus?”

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“Being remote doesn’t mean I’m not participating in the mission. Although I won’t be speaking continuously, I will remain online on the public channel. You can speak up at any time,” Qin Zhilu said in a business-like manner, before his tone suddenly shifted. “I’ll write the battle report for you. You just focus on the mission.”

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As his voice faded, the feeling of the seatbelt tightening suddenly intensified. A few seconds later, the plane landed on a patch of open ground in front of an abandoned factory in District 34.

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A gust of wind blew past, scorching hot, and in an instant, a throbbing pain started in An Yu’s temples.

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Before sunset, there were quite a few people on the streets of District 34, mostly local workers coming out for dinner. They wore old, colorful linen shirts and ate while drenched in sweat.

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An Yu and his team walked down the street, their attire and appearance completely out of place, not to mention the several mechanical spheres hovering around them.

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“Mm,” An Yu’s gaze swept over the cramped and towering buildings on both sides. The exterior walls were mottled with gray and yellow, revealing the concrete bricks and tiles underneath. Messy cables were strung and tangled between the buildings, jumbled up with the clothes-drying poles on the balconies. There were people on some of the balconies; a little girl in a floral tank top and shorts looked down from above, her young eyes just as numb, not lingering on anything.

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If this were District 53, ordinary workers couldn’t possibly afford to eat like this at every meal. This was the kind of food for those in the outer city with legitimate jobs or small businesses.

An Yu came to a conclusion. “District 34 isn’t poor.”

As he spoke, everyone around him glanced over, looking as if they wanted to say something but held back.

“Really,” An Yu added. “To be precise, half of the workers have eggs in their bowls. They’re loaded.”

“You’ve just redefined ‘loaded’,” Flame said, retracting his gaze. “But I understand. People in a Bait City with this level of material comfort shouldn’t be living so numbly. According to the data, District 34’s pillar industry isn’t manufacturing. The workers are just the lower-income group in this city. There are several decent cultural industry companies here, as well as a sizable hospital. People from nearby Bait Cities often come here for medical treatment.”

An Yu nodded. “Yes, that’s what I meant.”

There was something wrong with this state of collective apathy.

His gaze suddenly caught a little boy sitting on the ground in a nearby building’s doorway. He was hugging his foot, and on his ankle was a large, bleeding scrape. The wound had not been treated in time and was already somewhat inflamed.

Tears welled in his eyes. He repeatedly blew on his ankle, then tried to suck on it, spitting afterward.

An Yu walked over. “How long has it been?”

The little boy looked up. The hot wind blurred his vision. He looked at An Yu for a long time before saying, “Fourteen days.”

“Don’t you think that’s strange?”

“I must have been poisoned by some insect when I fell. There are too many insects I don’t recognize,” the boy said, wiping his mouth with a dirty sleeve. “Every time the wound is about to heal, it festers and breaks open again. There must be something dirty still inside.”

He lifted his foot again, about to suck on it, but An Yu reached out and held his shoulder. “Don’t suck on it.”

He took out Bili’s ointment and applied a little to the wound, then stared at it without blinking.

The hot wind brushed against his face, seeming to stir a ripple in his golden eyes as well. A moment later, the little boy looked down in amazement. The pain was rapidly disappearing from his ankle. He watched as the wound healed at high speed, but just as the skin was about to close completely, it paused for an instant.

An Yu frowned, the pupils in his taut gaze slowly dilating.

A few seconds later, the wound opened up again.

Large tears dripped from the boy’s downcast eyes. He let out a sob. “I knew it. It’s not going to get better.”

An Yu said nothing more and turned to leave.

The other four watched all of this from a short distance away. Flame said thoughtfully, “Time acceleration… to think you can use it so skillfully…”

The other three were stunned and remained silent for a long time. Finally, Ning spoke up, “An wants to ask, why didn’t it succeed in the end? Are you not yet proficient with this ability?”

“It’s not that it didn’t succeed, it’s that I didn’t engage with that thing,” An Yu said in a low voice.

The climate in District 53 was on the colder side, and he was having trouble with the hot wind. He pulled his hood over his head as well, looking at the time on his terminal.

“The moment the wound was about to heal, a force tried to reset his time. That’s the real reason his wound keeps breaking open.”

He paused, then added, “High Peak told us not to alert the target. If I had forcibly intervened, that thing would have discovered me.”

In his earpiece, Qin Zhilu spoke up. “Well done.”

“Thank you, Commander,” An Yu said quietly, looking at the little octopus chibi on his terminal who had finished its meal and was now working out, lifting a dozen dumbbells with its dozen tentacles. “Commander, I’ve discovered a strange phenomenon.”

“What is it?”

“It’s as if this city has no time.”

Along the way, they had passed more than forty small restaurants. Through the wide-open doors of each one, he had gotten a clear view of the interior.

There were no clocks on the bare walls, but there were faint marks where clocks had once hung. The only two places that had digital clocks had blank screens. The bus that had passed by earlier only displayed the route number and environmental data on its electronic screen, but not the time. Most importantly, the little boy had a distinct watch mark on his tanned arm, but his wrist was also bare.

An Yu took a deep breath of the scorching air and slowly exhaled.

“The mechanical clocks have vanished, and the digital time has disappeared from all the screens,” he said. “Although I used to sleep all the time, the first thing I did when I woke up was to check the calendar and the clock. It’s hard to imagine how people in a city that has lost its tools for measuring time are supposed to live.”

The importance of time
Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future.Time dictates all forms of action, age, and causality, being a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events (or the intervals between them), and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience. Time is often referred to as a fourth dimension, along with three spatial dimensions

Throughout history, time has been an important subject of study in religion, philosophy, and science. Temporal measurement has occupied scientists and technologists, and has been a prime motivation in navigation and astronomy. Time is also of significant social importance, having economic value (“time is money”) as well as personal value, due to an awareness of the limited time in each day (“carpe diem”) and in human life spans.