Prologue · No One Would Pick It Up
If it lay on any riverbank, you wouldn’t bend down.
Dusty grey, the size of a fist, pitted on the surface, its corners dulled by something. It was righteous in its ordinariness. When geologists first placed it in a display cabinet, the label read “Silicate mineral of unknown composition”—placed beside actual silicates, no one felt anything out of place.
The draft of Gao Fangwen’s Memoirs contains a description of it. Gao Fangwen was the person who brought it back from Neptune’s underground fissure. He wrote:
“The stone was in the dark, as if it had always been there. When I picked it up, it didn’t react. Leng Yan asked what it was. I said I didn’t know.”
The memoirs break off here.
No one knows how Gao Fangwen later “knew” what it was, nor whether that dusty grey stone picked up from the fissure was the same one as the green light that later illuminated the entire laboratory. Here lies the first crack in the records.
We only know that from that day on, something that should not exist was added to human history.
I. Four Pieces
In the surviving interstellar archives, there is a record of unknown origin and unknown author, repeatedly transcribed across secret documents of different civilizations, word for word:
“Of the origin of the universe, the foundation of all things’ operation, only four pieces remain.”
Four pieces.
This was the only “fact” among all narratives regarding the Source Stone that no civilization ever refuted. Not because everyone believed it, but because no one could prove it false—you would first have to gather all four pieces before claiming there were “more than four.” Yet no civilization had ever gathered them all.
The piece in human hands was brought back from beneath Triton in 2068. This was the known, documented piece. Gao Fangwen brought it back to Earth, Claude rekindled it, and then it vanished. No one knows where it is now.
The second piece was said to be in an extremely distant nebula that belonged to no known galaxy. The inhabitants there were not flesh and blood, but some form of light, or spheres. For generations, they guarded that stone like guarding the last unextinguished candle in a temple. This record was likewise of unknown origin. Some said it was a spoken account brought back by an interstellar caravan; others said it was pure myth.
For the remaining two, there weren’t even myths.
Four stones, scattered across darkness measured in light-years. They never communicated with one another, yet were as similar as children born of the same mother—the same dusty grey exterior, the same emerald light, and the same truth: anyone shone upon by it suffered a dead heart.
II. Emerald Green
Regarding how the Source Stone was “activated,” no archive ever provided reliable steps.
Not electrification, not heating, nor any physical means. It was unlike a battery; it had no switch. All experimental records pointed to a vague, disturbing direction: it shone only when it “wished” to.
Claude’s laboratory log (which was later classified as top secret, then mysteriously leaked from classification, leaving only surviving pages today) recorded a scene of activation:
“Light filled the entire room. It was green, a pure green, unlike any known light source. It wasn’t glaring, but if you looked at it long enough, you felt it was looking back at you. Temperature didn’t change, instruments gave no readings, yet it was undeniably glowing.”
“You felt it was looking back at you.”
A scientist who spent his life studying light and waves wrote such a sentence.
Everyone exposed to this green light fell ill, without exception. Necrodelirium.
No one knew if the light itself was toxic, or the stone was toxic, or if the stone released something uncapturable by instruments the moment it activated. Three hypotheses, all supported by some, none backed by evidence.
In the final entry of the log, Claude used a phrasing very unlike him, writing:
“Perhaps it was never ‘activated.’ Perhaps, in a certain moment, we were seen by it.”
The log ends here. The content after this entry, like Gao Fangwen’s Memoirs and Biography of Claude, was neatly clipped away.
III. The Undying Cancer
Necrodelirium. Official designation name: Necrodelirium.
Popular names were many. “The Undying Cancer,” “The Cursed Malady,” and an older name no longer used today—“The Disease of Those Who Saw.”
The symptoms were uniform and horrifying. Patients would suddenly lose control of their bodies: facial muscles twitching unrestrained, forming expressions no normal human would make; sharp cries issuing from their throats, belonging to no language. You called his name, no reaction. You shook his shoulders, he kept crying out. His eyes were open, but behind those eyes, no one was there.
The body moved, but the heart was dead.
Like brain death, yet not entirely. People with brain death do not move. People with Necrodelirium moved—they walked, grabbed, and in late stages, some cases would bite.
The earliest cases appeared after the return of the 2068 expedition. While Gao Fangwen and Leng Yan brought back the stone, something else had followed.
No one knew how it spread.
Some said water. After a city’s water system was contaminated, an entire block fell ill within three days—yet another block on the same water source remained completely unharmed.
Some said air. Yet it never traveled with air currents; it was like a thing that selected its targets.
And still others raised the most disturbing possibility:
Perhaps every one of us has long been afflicted. Most people’s symptoms simply haven’t been triggered yet.
This hypothesis was neither disproven nor confirmed. It hung there, like that green light—not glaring, yet impossible to avoid.
IV. The Leather Trunk
The stone’s last documented “appearance” was tied to a man named Shi Xunchao.
Regarding Shi Xunchao, public archives contained only a few sparse lines: identity unknown, affiliation unknown. He took away a leather trunk.
Only later did people learn that inside that leather trunk was the Source Stone.
Shi Xunchao left with the trunk and then died en route.
An unnatural death. The archive’s wording was “unnatural death,” nothing more. No autopsy, no crime scene, no suspects. The government immediately sealed all related records, releasing only a single sentence to the outside world:
“The whereabouts of the Source Stone are being actively investigated.”
They investigated for a long time.
The stone was not found. Shi Xunchao’s body, however, was found—in a place it absolutely should not have been, absurdly far from where he died, so far that no transport within that time frame could have reached it.
No one explained this. It was assigned to those “unresolved” files, sinking away alongside Shi Xunchao’s name.
That stone vanished once more.
It was always like this. Picked up by someone, rekindled, then slipping away from that person’s hands. It belonged to no one. With every change of hands, it left something behind—a corpse, a top-secret file, a renamed discovery, or a biographical writer falling off a cliff.
Then it changed its name, found a new pair of hands, and kept waiting.
Epilogue · It Is Watching
If you were to ask someone who had studied the Source Stone (supposing you could still find such a person, and he was still sane): What exactly is the Source Stone?
He would likely fail to answer. He would say it is a mineral, then say it is not a mineral. He would say it possesses energy, then say it is unlike any energy. He would repeatedly say that word—“the Source”—and then stop, as if choked by the word itself.
The Source Stone never tells you the future. On this point, everyone who touched it agreed.
It only lets you see one thing: between the you of this moment and that thing far greater than you, are you connected, or severed?
Of those seen by it, some went mad, some died, some lived four hundred years, and some simply could never speak a complete sentence again.
And in some corner of the universe where no one could search, a dusty grey stone, too ordinary for anyone to pick up, quietly, patiently glowed, and then went dark.
It never sought anyone out on its own.
It was simply always there.
—End of Chapter 3.