I Was Marked By The System's Arbiter

Chapter 36: Chapter 36: Corrupted Mimicry

The echo of the words "...Be perfect" did not fade. It lingered in the stagnant air, vibrating against the wooden beams of the mourning hall like a dying frequency.

Silence returned, but it was no longer the heavy, expectant silence of a funeral. It was a fractured silence.

Nobody moved.

The mourner’s arm remained bent in the wrong direction, elbow snapped outward at ninety degrees, hand dangling against its own spine like a broken pendulum. The rest of its body was completely still. Its blurred, featureless face remained pointed at Li Qiang with a patience that had no bottom to it.

Li Qiang’s mouth was open. No sound came out.

Chen Hao pressed closer to Lin Yue, his arm trembling where it touched Lin Yue’s sleeve. "Did it just—" His voice broke. He swallowed. "Did it just talk?"

"It echoed," Xu Ning said softly. She hadn’t looked away from the mourner. "There’s a difference."

"There is absolutely no difference—"

"Quiet." Lin Yue said it without heat.

Chen Hao went quiet.

Lin Yue watched the mourner’s arm. He watched it very carefully.

It didn’t reset. It didn’t correct itself. The impossible angle held, as if the figure had simply paused mid-movement and forgotten that it was supposed to finish.

Interesting, Lin Yue thought.

He shifted his gaze across the hall.

The other mourners were still mimicking. When He Rong exhaled slowly through her nose, thirty figures exhaled a beat later — a sound like a single wave pulling back from shore. When Li Qiang’s hands balled into fists at his sides, the front row’s hands curled inward three seconds afterward.

However, Lin Yue focused on the figure standing near the third pillar on the left.

When Xu Ning turned her head slightly to look at the twisted mourner, the figure by the pillar also turned. But it turned too far. Three degrees past the natural stopping point. Then it corrected, snapping back.

It was a small thing. The kind of thing a frightened person would miss entirely.

Lin Yue did not miss it.

He scanned further back. A mourner in the fifth row had bowed alongside the group during Li Qiang’s earlier drill, but it had not straightened fully afterward. It remained bent at the waist, its upper body hovering at a thirty-degree angle, absolutely motionless, like a clock that had wound down mid-tick.

Chen Hao laughed.

It came out wrong, a short, nervous exhale with no humor in it. The kind of sound a person makes when the alternative is screaming.

Half a second later, a mourner in the second row smiled.

The motion was staggered. The corners of the blurred mouth pulled upward too slowly, arriving at an expression that was geometrically correct but held for a fraction too long before fading. Like a photograph of a smile rather than a smile itself.

Lin Yue’s eyes moved to the incense burner in the corner.

The smoke from the incense rose in a thin, pale column. For approximately one second, the column bent sideways—against the direction the air was moving. Then it corrected, resuming its upward drift as though nothing had happened.

He looked at the shadow cast by the pillar to his right. The shadow did not align with the pillar.

It was off by perhaps two inches, pointing in a direction that didn’t correspond to any light source in the hall.

Lin Yue filed these observations away without expression. Something was wrong with the room itself.

"It’s not moving its arm back," He Rong said.

She had been watching the twisted mourner for some time, her arms folded across her chest, her voice carefully toneless. The way she spoke when she was very afraid, but had decided that showing fear was a liability.

"Obviously," Li Qiang said.

"Doesn’t that concern you?" He Rong asked.

"Everything in this hall concerns me. I’m dealing with it." Li Qiang retorted to her.

"Are you?" He Rong looked at him. "Because from where I’m standing, you’re just staring at it."

Li Qiang’s jaw tightened. He turned away from her and faced the hall, sweeping his gaze across the rows of silent figures. The mourners mimicked the motion, fifty heads tracking in the same direction three seconds later, like a field of flowers following a light source.

Li Qiang watched a mourner near the right wall.

When Zhao Ming shifted his weight slightly, rocking back on his heels, the mourner copied him. But the rhythm was wrong. The weight transfer happened in two stages instead of one, as if two separate instructions had been sent and both arrived late.

"It’s degrading," Li Qiang said.

"What is?" Chen Hao asked.

"The copying." Li Qiang’s voice had a new edge to it. Not fear, exactly. Something harder and less stable. "Look at it. It’s getting worse. They’re getting it wrong now."

"That might not be a bad thing," Xu Ning said carefully.

Li Qiang turned to her. "What does that mean?"

"I don’t know yet. I just think, if something is changing, we should watch before we react."

Li Qiang stared at her. Then he looked back at the mourners.

A figure near the center of the hall raised its arm. But nobody had raised their arm.

The figure held the pose for two seconds, then lowered it. The motion repeated, arm up, then arm down, and then stopped.

"Stop that," Li Qiang said. His voice was flat and directed.

The figure didn’t respond.

"Stop it." Li Qiang raised his voice. The word hit the walls and came back smaller.

"That’s wrong. We didn’t do that. Stop!" Li Qiang scolded the mourner as if it were a child doing a bad thing.

"Li Qiang—" He Rong started.

"I said stop!"

Several mourners flinched. The delay was longer this time—almost five seconds, the response sluggish, imprecise. The flinches themselves were wrong: some figures jolted sideways, some contracted inward, one in the back row simply trembled without changing posture at all.

Lin Yue noted this.

The mimicry had been precise at the beginning. He had watched it closely enough to know that the delay was consistent, the postures accurate, the scale of each movement matching the original within close margins.

Now there were errors.

There was a pattern to the errors. They had begun appearing after the tension in the hall peaked. After Li Qiang’s shouting. After the group’s fear had saturated the air to the point where it pressed against the skin. ƒree𝑤ebnσvel.com

Correlation wasn’t causation.

But Lin Yue had nothing else to go on, so he kept watching.

Somewhere outside the dimension the players occupied, something observed.

The hall existed as data. Layers of behavioral script, atmospheric calculation, and sensory projection. From the correct angle—an angle that did not exist in any space the players could access, it looked like a diagram. Variables interacting. Cause producing effect.

Gu Yanchen stood in the space between layers.

His attention was, as it had been for some time, fixed on one point. Lin Yue.

Not the others. Not Li Qiang, whose panic was producing interesting data. Not He Rong, whose manipulation was textbook. Not Zhao Ming, about whom certain questions remained unanswered.

But to Lin Yue.

The young man stood at the center of the group’s chaos like an object with no weather around it. The fear moved through the room. The fear did not move through Lin Yue. He stood, and he observed, and his expression communicated nothing, and from this strange angle, in this space between data and experience, Gu Yanchen could see something that no one inside the hall could see.

Lin Yue was finding the errors.

Not guessing, not panicking either. But finding it. Cataloguing them with the calm of someone who believed that information, gathered correctly, would eventually yield an answer.

Gu Yanchen’s expression did not change.

His eyes narrowed fractionally, for less than a second, when Li Qiang turned toward the mourners and opened his mouth again.

"Do it properly!" Li Qiang shouted.

The mourners failed to respond on time. The echo of his voice reached the back of the hall and returned before the figures had finished processing the event. When the mimicry came, it was fragmented; some figures raised their chests, some tilted their heads, and one turned sideways entirely before snapping back.

"Wrong," Li Qiang said. His voice had dropped but sharpened. "That’s not how we moved. Look at yourselves. That is wrong."

He stepped forward.

"Li Qiang." Lin Yue spoke without inflection.

Li Qiang didn’t stop.

"Li Qiang," He Rong said, her voice harder. "Don’t."

"It needs to be corrected," Li Qiang said. He was walking toward the twisted mourner, the one still frozen with its arm bent backward, the one that had spoken in his voice. "The ritual requires precision. If the reflections are wrong, then the ritual is wrong. If the ritual is wrong, we die. This is simple."

"That’s not how it works," Xu Ning said.

"You don’t know how it works." Li Qiang stopped in front of the mourner. He looked at the backward arm. Something in his face was very close to the edge of something. "None of you know how it works. You’re all just standing there shaking while I try to hold this together."

He reached out.

"Don’t—" Chen Hao lunged forward half a step, grabbing Lin Yue’s sleeve instead of Li Qiang’s. "Don’t do it, don’t—"

Li Qiang grabbed the mourner’s arm.

The texture of it, whatever it was, cloth and something beneath the cloth that wasn’t bone, didn’t matter, because the moment his fingers made contact, the hall changed.

The air suddenly felt void of oxygen. The temperature dropped so sharply that Chen Hao’s breath fogged white in front of his face.

Not visibly. Not in any way that could be easily described.

All of the oil lamps dimmed simultaneously.

For less than a second, the world felt two-dimensional. The colors bled out, leaving the room in a stark, high-contrast monochrome. A wave of static distortion passed through the space, a visual shriek that made Chen Hao and Xu Ning clutch their ears in pain.

The room dropped toward darkness, and in that fraction of darkness, something was different about the shape of the shadows, about the position of the incense smoke, about the sound of Madam Luo’s distant weeping stopped, as though a recording had been paused.

Then it resumed.

The lamps came back. The incense smoke continued its slow rise. Madam Luo’s weeping voice returned, soft and insistent.

But the mourner Li Qiang was touching had frozen completely.

It didn’t complete its backward arm movement. It didn’t correct itself. It stood in absolute stillness, Li Qiang’s hand still gripping its arm, its form flickering—not physically, not in a way the eyes could quite catch directly, but in a way the peripheral vision registered as wrong, as impossible, as a shape that was briefly somewhere other than where it appeared to be.

To Lin Yue, it looked like a corrupted film. One moment, the mourner existed normally; the next, its outline dissolved into blurred static before snapping violently back into place.

Li Qiang released it and stepped back.

He was breathing hard. His hand stayed raised slightly, as though he wasn’t certain it was still his.

"What was that?" Chen Hao whispered.

Nobody answered.

Lin Yue looked at the space around them. The other mourners had lost their synchronization, some still frozen, some continuing their delayed mimicry, some standing at slightly wrong angles as though the signal that operated them had experienced interference. In the far corner, two figures were performing different movements at the same time, a flicker of contradiction, before resolving back into stillness.

He looked at the incense smoke. It had paused in its bending, caught mid-curl, hovering.

He looked at the shadow that didn’t align with its pillar.

The shadow had moved. It no longer diverged.

For one moment, precisely one moment, during the lamps’ dimming and the sound’s stopping, something had corrected. Then the correction had ended, and the errors had returned, but slightly different from before.

Lin Yue turned this over carefully.

Something external had exerted pressure on the hall. Not the System’s natural mechanics. Not the Inheritor. Something that acted in the hall from outside it. Something that, when pressed, caused a brief correction followed by resumed deterioration.

He didn’t know what that meant.

He didn’t know if it was help or interference or simply the side-effect of something observing too closely.

The variable remained unsolved.

Near him, the frozen mourner began to tremble.

It was faint at first, a barely perceptible vibration running through its form, like a frequency too low to hear but present enough to feel in the chest. The other players stepped back without meaning to, a collective involuntary retreat. The incense smoke curled toward it, then sharply away.

From deep inside its throat, a throat that should have been incapable of producing sound, came something low and formless. Not from any language. Not the distorted echo of a human voice. Something below that. Something that sat in the ear the wrong way, like a sound played at the wrong speed, and resonated in the back of the jaw.

Li Qiang stood closest to it. He had not moved since releasing its arm. He stood there with his hand still half-raised, staring at the figure that was shaking, shaking, shaking—

Its blurred face flickered.

Just for an instant. And in that instant, the blurred nothing resolved into something.

The face that looked back at Li Qiang was his own.

Not a copy. Not an imitation. But a parody, his features stretched and distorted into a grinning, too-wide expression that no human face had ever made, the eyes too far apart, the smile reaching places a smile shouldn’t reach, and yet unmistakably, horrifyingly, his.

The expression on that borrowed face was one Li Qiang had never worn.

It was the expression of something that found this very, very funny.