Three years later, a park stood where the city wall had been.
One ten-metre section of concrete had been preserved. On the former Lower City side, the soot and checkpoint numbers remained. On the former Upper City side, the gilded crests. A broad passage had been cut between them, and children ran through it without noticing the boundary.
Thousands of people gathered here on the anniversary of the victory. The government gave speeches, the Eternal Legion demonstrated rescue manoeuvres, and vendors sold toy mecha-forms. Half the figures still bore the words 'War God Fan', though the real Fan Yuan did not receive a coin from their sales.
The official holiday was called Common Network Day. Fan Yuan disliked the name: it made it sound as though the whole country had agreed one day and never argued again. In truth, the arguments had never stopped.
In parliament, representatives of the former Upper City demanded compensation for confiscated assets. The Lower City's workers' councils accused the government of rebuilding too slowly. The Eternal Legion debated whether red-level access could be used during natural disasters. None of these questions had a ready-made right answer.
Fan Yuan considered that a good sign.
In the past, order had meant that decisions were hidden. Now hearings dragged on for hours, newspapers berated ministers, and citizens filed lawsuits against the Eternal Legion itself. Sometimes the courts ruled against the service.
Su Zhihu was once fined for damaging a privately owned warehouse during a rescue operation.
"I prevented a reactor explosion," she protested.
"And you could have warned the owner thirty seconds earlier," the court replied.
She paid the fine, then changed the notification protocol. It turned out the world did not collapse when a hero admitted even a small mistake.
"You should have registered your name," Nalan Qingxin said, examining a toy equipped with nine golden cannons he had never possessed.
"Then I'd have to explain to children why the figure has no power."
"We could release a rare 'Teacher Fan' edition. With exercise books and a disapproving expression."
"It would frighten the customers."
Nalan Qingxin was serving her second term as head of the open register and intended to step down after her third. Once again, the whole country knew her name, but no longer because she was the heiress to a wealthy clan. She still argued with Fan Yuan whenever they met, but she no longer tried to prove her superiority at any cost.
Vierlia appeared in her rector's uniform. The new mass-produced prosthesis had indeed proved unreliable, so she had forced the entire batch to be replaced. The engineers feared her inspections more than frontline trials.
"You're both late for the ceremony," she said.
"We arrived early."
"Early by civilian standards. For my students, this is late."
"Which is why we aren't your students."
"Fan Yuan, one day I will make you observe proper order."
"Only voluntarily."
Vierlia rolled her eyes. They had been repeating that joke for three years and had no intention of stopping.
Su Zhihu was conducting a demonstration exercise at the other end of the park. The first forty captains stood around her, not in formation but in a circle. After the manoeuvre, every group publicly reviewed the command decisions, including Su Zhihu's own mistakes.
Once, she would have considered that an attack on her authority. Now she was the first to ask who disagreed.
Huangfu sat in the shade of the preserved wall with his students. He had aged after the war, walked with a cane and claimed that teaching was harder than commanding an army. In the textbook, his name appeared beside not only the victory at the front, but also a chapter about his years of silence.
"Isn't it a little harsh?" Fan Yuan once asked.
"Not harsh enough," Huangfu replied. "The young must know that good intentions do not turn cowardice into strategy."
Nangong Ci remained in a secure rehabilitation centre. She had refused an offer to shorten her term after she helped save the capital. She worked with the archives of missing Lower City residents and helped find the families of those who had died in the laboratories.
Fan Yuan and Luo Jun's sister visited her once a month.
During their latest visit, Nangong Ci showed them a list of eight hundred and seven names.
"We found them all," she said. "Twenty-three were alive. At least the rest have their names back."
"What will you do after you're released?"
"I don't know. Every answer I had before began with the word 'destroy'."
"You don't have to decide now."
"I've learnt that. It's irritating."
She looked at Luo Jun's sister.
"Will you come to the hearing in nine years?"
"I will. And I'll tell them about my brother again."
"Good."
That 'good' did not mean friendship or forgiveness. Only a willingness to live until the day she would have to hear the consequences of her decisions once more.
After the ceremony, Fan Yuan and Chi Yuyan left the park before the others.
They climbed the hill beside the old school training ground. A small memorial stone bearing Fan Yuan's mother's name stood there. The wall had once begun beyond the hill, and the lights of the Upper City had seemed impossibly far away. Now an ordinary tram ran along the former security strip.
Chi Yuyan laid white flowers beside the stone.
"You kept your promise," she said.
"Not quite. I promised to become the strongest commander."
"You did."
"And then I stopped being a commander."
"Then you exceeded your promise."
The hair at her temples was still white. A dragon scale sometimes appeared on her palm, but Chi Yuyan no longer tested her maximum output. She wore a slender ring that Fan Yuan had given her without a system, a contract or a solemn speech.
He wore one just like it.
They had married in the spring, in the school yard. Vierlia planned the ceremony to the minute, Nalan Qingxin disrupted the schedule with a long toast, Su Zhihu brought all forty units, and Huangfu forgot his prepared speech and spoke from the heart.
Fan Yuan first proposed without a ring. They were repairing an old simulator after lessons when he suddenly asked whether Chi Yuyan wanted to spend her life with him, in a world without prompts from the system.
"That is the worst proposal I've ever heard," she said.
"So that's a no?"
"No. It's a demand for a second draft."
The next day he arrived with flowers, a ring and a speech he had written in advance. He forgot half the words, got the order wrong and ended by asking the same question again.
Chi Yuyan said yes.
At their wedding, they made no psychic contract, only ordinary promises to each other. No power prevented them from breaking those promises. They would answer only to the person beside them. That was precisely what gave the words their weight.
Fan Yuan expected the system to appear at a moment like that, offering a task or a reward.
It did not appear.
And Fan Yuan liked that far more than any reward.
Now they sat beside the stone and watched the lights come on across the city. Not gold above and grey below. Ordinary windows on the same land.
The swarm creatures that had broken away left the atmosphere two years ago. The smaller units transmitted one final signal: beyond the Solar System, they had found an uninhabited star system and no longer needed human sources. The military continued to monitor them, but the war did not resume.
"Doesn't the silence frighten you?" Chi Yuyan asked.
"Sometimes."
"Do you miss the voices?"
Fan Yuan considered the question.
"Not yours. You're all too loud as it is."
She nudged him with her shoulder.
"What about the system?"
"No."
"Not at all?"
"It used to tell us what to do next. Now we have to decide for ourselves."
"And how does that feel?"
Fan Yuan looked at the passage through the old wall, at the tram, the children and the single sky above the city.
"At last."
The next day, he returned to the school. Pupils with all manner of sources waited in the classroom. Someone had drawn a golden dragon on the board and written beneath it: 'The Eternal War God'.
Before the lesson, a new pupil approached him. The boy was hiding an old identity card in his pocket, issued before the reforms. It bore a grey F.
"My father says rank doesn't matter any more," he said. "But he still gets upset when he sees that letter."
"Habits outlive laws."
"What if I really am weak?"
Fan Yuan did not tell him that an SSS bloodline lay hidden inside everyone. That would have been another version of the same lie: that the right to respect had to be earned through secret might.
"You may be weaker than others in battle," he said. "You may be stronger. We'll find out. But even if you never become a fighter, you are still entitled to an education, a doctor, a voice and a future of your own."
"Just like that?"
"Not just like that. Because you're a person."
The boy took out the card.
"Can I throw it away?"
"You can keep it. So that one day you can show people how little the old system knew."
The pupil placed the card on his desk. After the lesson, they discovered that his source did almost nothing to enhance weapons, but could stabilise other people's channels after an overload. In the old army, he would have been a useless F-rank commander. At the new school, he was assigned to the rescue programme.
Fan Yuan recorded the result without a letter, then erased the word 'God' from the board.
He left only 'Eternal' and wrote a question beside it:
"Who makes the decision?"
The children raised their hands.
Fan Yuan's story did not end when he received the highest rank. Nor when he defeated the Heart of the Swarm.
It ended in a world where no child needed a god to prove their right to a life of their own.
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