Jiang Nuan couldn't fall asleep.
After lying there for roughly forty minutes, she gave up the struggle, threw off the covers, and sat up.
On the sofa across from her, Ye Que opened his eyes almost at the exact same moment.
Light from before dusk filtered through the gap in the curtains, falling on Ye Que, lending him a hint of warmth.
"You're not sleeping anymore?" he asked.
"Can't sleep." Jiang Nuan rubbed her eyes. "You didn't sleep either?"
Ye Que nodded, rose from the sofa, his movements so light they made almost no sound at all.
The cream-colored fleece blanket she had thrown at him earlier was neatly folded and resting on the armrest of the sofa.
"There's still over an hour before dinner." Ye Que walked to the window, hooked a finger through the curtain gap, and glanced outside.
"Let's go find Shen Wu and take a look around the Bai estate?" Jiang Nuan suggested.
"Alright."
As she searched for clothes, she silently prayed that Shen Wu was sound asleep by now.
The kind of deep sleep that was hard to break.
Preferably dreaming some tranquil, picture-perfect dream.
Just earlier, when her eyelids were drooping and her consciousness was about to sink away, that Intelligence Officer had slammed a mental link into her head like an alarm clock, blasting the last shred of her drowsiness into oblivion.
Good.
Turnabout was fair play.
Now it was her turn to go knocking on his door.
She changed into a dark gray long-sleeved dress that Lu Shiyan had prepared for her, its tailored waist accentuating her slender figure without being the least bit revealing—every part that should be covered was securely hidden.
…That man.
Even from the distant base, he still had his reach extending all the way here.
She fastened the last button and tugged at her collar.
Ye Que was already standing by the door waiting for her.
She pushed it open. The corridor was quiet, warm-toned sconce lights running along both walls. The sprawling main residence of the Bai family was so still that the only sound was the hum of the air conditioning.
Shen Wu's room was on the second floor. Jiang Nuan and Ye Que walked over side by side, and she raised her hand to knock twice.
No immediate response from inside.
After several seconds, the door creaked open just a crack.
Shen Wu stood behind it, one side of his hair flattened.
He blinked twice, his gaze drifting across Jiang Nuan's face with the sluggishness of someone yanked out of sleep.
Jiang Nuan's heart leapt with glee.
He really had been asleep.
Karma, right?
Happy? Surprised?
Shen Wu's gaze slowly focused, the dullness in those pale eyes swiftly receding, replaced by a kind of calm that said, "I can read exactly what you're thinking."
"...Having fun, are you?" His voice came out a bit raspy.
Jiang Nuan nodded without a shred of guilt.
Shen Wu leaned against the doorframe, raising a hand to rub his eye. "I'd suggest reining in that schadenfreude. I've been asleep for less than ten minutes."
"You woke me up when I hadn't even slept ten minutes!" Jiang Nuan said with utter confidence.
Shen Wu looked at her for two seconds.
"That was work."
"This is work too." Jiang Nuan tilted her chin toward the corridor. "Come out and explore. Familiarize ourselves with the Bai estate's layout."
Shen Wu didn't move. His gaze slid from her face to Ye Que behind her.
Ye Que stared back at him expressionlessly.
The two exchanged a glance for exactly one second, then Shen Wu withdrew his gaze, stepped back, and opened the door wider.
"Give me a minute."
The door closed again.
The three of them walked along the corridor toward the staircase. Decorative paintings hung on the walls of the Bai family estate, varying in style, most of them works from before the apocalypse.
Jiang Nuan stopped in front of one large oil painting.
She remembered—this was the painting that Song Huaicheng had been looking at when she had been negotiating the lodging arrangements with the butler.
The frame was dark gold, carrying a sense of age.
The canvas depicted a colossal circular tower rising into the clouds, its structure towering yet broken and ravaged, the shaft piercing straight into churning layers of mist. At the base of the tower, countless figures, tiny as ants, knelt prostrate on the ground, gazing up toward the summit.
Jiang Nuan had seen a print of this painting before she crossed over.
A story from the Old Testament.
Humans, once speaking a single language and holding a single belief, decided to build a tower that reached the heavens, all the way to the dwelling place of God.
Higher and higher the tower rose. Then God descended with punishment, scattering their languages so that they could no longer understand one another. The builders began to argue, to split apart, to distrust one another, and eventually scattered in every direction.
The tower was never finished.
She couldn't say exactly why, but when her gaze fell on those kneeling figures at the bottom of the painting, an image flashed unbidden through her mind—the people trapped in the Exclusion Zone, equally small and equally helpless in the face of unknown terror.
A vague unease rose from the depths of her chest.
Ye Que stood two steps behind her, his six-foot-something frame carrying an imposing presence, hands buried in the pockets of his tactical pants, his posture seemingly relaxed.
But if Jiang Nuan turned her head even slightly, she would see the taut line of his jaw, and those eyes that never once drifted more than half a meter away from her—like a predator locked onto its prey.
Shen Wu stood beside her, also studying the painting.
"You recognize this piece?" Shen Wu sounded surprised.
"The Tower of Babel," Jiang Nuan said. "A painting from before the apocalypse."
"Pieter Bruegel, 1563."
A voice sounded from behind her.
At the turn of the staircase, Song Huaicheng was walking up from below, looking as though he had just returned from a stroll through the garden. His pace was unhurried, his Federation uniform jacket draped over his forearm.
Ye Que shifted subtly, taking half a step closer to Jiang Nuan's side.
Song Huaicheng glanced at him, gave a faint smile, and tactfully stopped at a slightly greater distance.
His gaze returned to the painting.
After a pause of several seconds, he suddenly asked a very abrupt question.
"Miss Jiang, do you know how the Exclusion Zones came to be?"
"Aren't the Exclusion Zones a natural disaster?" Jiang Nuan searched through fragments of memory. "Anomalous energy spontaneously accumulates and forms enclosed regions."
Song Huaicheng gave a small laugh.
As if laughing at her answer, or perhaps at something else entirely.
"Several decades ago, the concept of Exclusion Zones didn't exist in the world."
His tone grew unhurried, like someone recounting a distant piece of history.
"What appeared back then were just some anomalous energy bodies—very faint, scattered across the globe, with no fixed form."
He extended his hand and made a very small gesture.
"At first, nobody even took them seriously. The academic community called them 'low-threshold anomalous energy fluctuations'—a long, clunky name that essentially meant: no one can say what this thing is, but it doesn't seem to matter much."
"And then?" Jiang Nuan grew curious.
"Then they started killing people."
Song Huaicheng's smile didn't change, but his pace of speech slowed by half a beat.
"And they were growing. A small number of people, caught completely off guard, died in that irregular energy."
The corridor fell silent for a moment, the low hum of the air conditioning suddenly becoming startlingly clear.
"To deal with the situation, the nations of the time jointly formed the first specialized investigation unit."
Song Huaicheng spoke the name.
"The initial investigation squad, designated codename: Lighthouse."
Jiang Nuan's heart skipped a beat.
Lighthouse.
An image flashed instantly through her mind—the group photo on Lu Shiyan's office desk, one of the people in it bearing bone structure identical to Lu Shiyan's.
【LT-00】
Lighthouse.
So that's how it was.
The designation of Zero Squad wasn't chosen at random. It carried on the numbering of the Lighthouse.
Shen Wu's gaze shifted from the painting to Song Huaicheng, listening quietly as well.
But there was no surprise in her expression—as if she had already known all of this.
"The Lighthouse Squad was made up of the most elite espers and scientific researchers of their time," Song Huaicheng continued. "Their mission was to investigate the nature of the anomalous energy and find a way to contain it."
A glimmer of light moved in Song Huaicheng's eyes.
"They succeeded."
"At least, that's what everyone believed at the time."
Jiang Nuan's fingertips unconsciously tightened.
"The Lighthouse Squad proposed a theory," Song Huaicheng said. "Since this energy was scattered and disorderly, impossible to eliminate one by one, they decided to do the opposite."
"They would artificially compress the anomalous energy that had spread across wide areas, sealing it within designated zones."
Jiang Nuan already guessed what came next.
"That was the first generation of the Exclusion Zones," Song Huaicheng said.
The air seemed to freeze solid with those words.
Jiang Nuan looked at Song Huaicheng. "So... the Exclusion Zones were man-made from the very beginning?"
"You could say that." Song Huaicheng gave a faint smile. "At first, it was a good thing. With the scattered energy gathered and sealed away, random attacks dropped sharply, and the death toll fell dramatically in the early years. The news back then called the Lighthouse Squad 'Lamplighters of the Long Night.'"
Lamplighters of the Long Night.
Jiang Nuan bit her lower lip.
"Everyone thought the crisis was over."
Song Huaicheng paused.
"But not long after, something unexpected happened."
Jiang Nuan held her breath.
"The compressed energy inside the sealed zones intensified at a geometric rate."
Song Huaicheng traced a circle in the air with his finger.
"It's like pressing a flame into a sealed jar, thinking it will suffocate. Instead, it doesn't suffocate—it burns even more fiercely in the enclosed space. The temperature keeps rising, the pressure keeps building."
His fingers closed into a fist.
"Until the jar can't take it anymore, and it bursts open."
A chill ran down Jiang Nuan's spine.
The oil painting in front of her suddenly looked different.
The towering pillar, the prostrate figures—it was no longer an ancient religious allegory.
It was a prophecy.
"Moreover, the strength of the compressed energy far exceeded initial estimates."
Song Huaicheng's voice dropped lower.
"Ordinary humans had almost no resistance against such high-concentration energy. Only a small fraction of espers could withstand it."
"Even worse—"
A coldness crept into Song Huaicheng's tone.
"It was later discovered that newly generated energy had also evolved an instinct toward aggregation."
"In other words, without any human intervention, it kept gathering on its own. Over time, when naturally accumulated energy reached a critical point, a new Exclusion Zone would form spontaneously."
He paused for a moment.
"After that, the death toll skyrocketed."
"Within just twenty or thirty years, the total human population had dropped to only ten percent of what it was before the apocalypse."
No one spoke in the corridor.
Jiang Nuan noticed a shift in Ye Que's breathing.
It was a subtle change—barely perceptible unless you were standing this close—as if he was forcefully pressing something down.
For him, that number wasn't just a statistic.
Song Huaicheng turned back to the painting. The giant tower rose high; the figures knelt small below.
"History always repeats itself," he said.
"Humanity tried to wield power that was never theirs to control. In the end, the tower fell."
"Divine punishment descended."
Jiang Nuan stood in place, her blood running cold by degrees.
Ninety percent.
Ninety percent of humanity had been wiped out because of the Exclusion Zones.
The photograph surged back into her mind's eye.
Those young faces, their confident stances, the light burning in every pair of eyes.
Back then, they must have believed they were saving the world.
Everyone believed it.
But in the end, the Lighthouse became the spark that ignited the catastrophe.
Suddenly, something clicked into place in Jiang Nuan's mind.
Lu Shiyan.
That icy, almost inhumanly detached rationality on that man.
His need for control, his extreme management of every variable, his refusal to allow anything to slip beyond his grasp.
If she were him.
If her father had been a member of the Lighthouse Squad. Full of ideals, doing what everyone believed was "right."
And that right decision had destroyed the world with its own hands.
If she had grown up knowing that good intentions didn't equal good outcomes, that good will couldn't make up for loss of control—
What would she have become?
Probably someone who couldn't trust any factor outside her control.
Probably someone who gripped everything tightly in her hands, leaving no room for accidents.
Because he had seen the price of accidents.
That price was ninety percent of all humanity.
Jiang Nuan's fingers unconsciously brushed her inner left arm.
The sensation of the tracking chip beneath her skin seemed to rise to the surface—an undeniable presence.
It was his control.
And it was also his protection.
Maybe to Lu Shiyan, those two words had never been separate.
Somewhere in her chest, a dull ache pressed down.
It wasn't quite forgiveness.
It was a late, blurred kind of understanding.
