8. Cognitive Drift

Wei began to feel the pressure on the second day.

It was not pain.

It was not a physical threat.

It was a pressure without a source, the kind that rises when the air in a room becomes too heavy for the lungs to process.

It was the friction of a world trying to reject a foreign object and finding that it lacked the teeth to chew him.

The Annex of Quiet Reflection, designed for tranquillity, began to suffer from a subtle, pervasive vertigo.

People entering his chamber paused for half a heartbeat too long, their eyes sliding off him as if he were a smudge on a lens. Then, they resumed their tasks with a jerky, over-compensated motion, acting as if nothing had happened. They forgot to introduce themselves, or worse, they introduced themselves twice, repeating the same greeting with the exact same inflection, unaware of the loop.

Reality requires continuity.

When the thread is cut, the mind tries to tie the ends together, even if the knot is ugly.

The first crack in the routine appeared with the tea.

It was mid-morning. The light filtering through the paper screens was soft and diffuse. A young attendant entered the room. She placed a cup of jasmine tea on the low table, bowed with practised grace, and left.

Wei did not drink it. He sat, breathing the void, letting the steam rise and dissipate into the nothingness of his presence.

Minutes later, the door opened again.

The maid entered again. She carried the same lacquer tray. She wore the same expression of polite servitude. She carried the exact same cup.

She walked to the table, her movements fluid, until her eyes landed on the tea that was already there.

She froze.

It was not a freeze of surprise. It was a freeze of failure. She looked at the cup in her hand, steam curling from the rim. Then she looked at the cup on the table, where the steam was curling in an identical pattern.

Then she looked at Wei.

"I thought I’d already—" she began.

Then she stopped.

Her brow furrowed, not in confusion, but in pain.

Her eyes glazed over, the pupils dilating and contracting rapidly as her mind tried to reconcile two contradictory timelines.

The tea in her hand trembled, the china rattling against the wood of the tray.

"I’m still here," Wei said gently.

His voice seemed to snap the loop.

"Yes," she replied, a strange, disjointed relief flooding her face. It was the relief of a sleepwalker being told they are awake, even if they are still dreaming. "Of course. I... the kitchen is slow today."

The excuse made no sense. It didn't have to. It just had to fill the silence.

She set the second cup down next to the first and left quickly, walking with the stiff, unnatural gait of someone trying to hold a dream together with both hands.

Wei watched her go, something unsettled flickering behind his eyes. He looked at the two cups sitting side by side. They were not similar; they were identical. It was as if the universe had stuttered.

"That keeps happening," he said later, as the shadows lengthened across the floor.

"Yes."

"They don’t remember me correctly."

"No," I corrected. "They remember you. But they cannot place you in the sequence of cause and effect. You are an event without a precedent."

"Is that because of you, Mistress?" he asked, looking at the corner where I stood.

"No," I said. "It is because reality requires continuity. You interrupt it. To look at you is to lose one's place in the story."

He absorbed that in silence, his gaze returning to the twin cups of tea.

The liquid in both had gone cold, but neither had evaporated.

The System is built on cause and effect.

He is an effect without a cause.

Therefore, the System attempts to write the cause again. And again.

On the third day, the examiners attempted to measure the error.

A monitoring team arrived, dressed in the heavy, insulated robes of the Department of Metaphysics. They did not speak to Wei. They treated the room like a hazardous collapse zone.

They attempted Proximity Testing.

They marked distances on the polished wooden floor with chalk. One pace. Two. Five. Ten. The lines were drawn with geometric precision, cutting the serene beauty of the room into a grid of interrogation.

Volunteers—junior disciples who had likely been promised extra rations or merit points—stepped forward one by one.

They stood at the designated points, reporting sensations to a scribe who stood well back near the doorway, his brush hovering over a scroll.

"I feel... nothing," the first volunteer said at ten paces. He sounded confused, looking at his hands as if expecting them to be numb. "Just... empty."

"Record: No sensation at perimeter," the scribe muttered, marking the paper.

The second volunteer hesitated at five paces. He swayed slightly, like a reed in a wind that wasn't blowing. He looked at Wei, then looked away, then looked back, his brow furrowed.

"I feel like I’m about to forget why I came in here," he said, his voice trembling. "It feels like... like waking up and not knowing the day."

"Cognitive drift," the scribe noted, his handwriting becoming tighter, sharper. "Proceed."

A third volunteer, a burly man used to physical labour, took one step too close.

He crossed the three-pace mark.

He didn't flinch. He didn't cry out. He simply stopped.

His breathing levelled out instantly. His posture lost its tension. He became a statue of flesh.

"Report," the scribe ordered, his voice echoing in the quiet room.

The volunteer didn't answer. He stared at the space above Wei’s head.

"Report!" the scribe barked, stepping forward but refusing to cross the ten-pace line.

The volunteer blinked slowly. It was a heavy, languid movement, like a lizard sunning itself on a rock.

"I can’t tell if I’ve already spoken," he said, his voice flat and devoid of intonation. "Have I? The words feel like they are in my mouth but also in the past."

"Step back," the scribe said sharply. Panic cracked the edge of his professional tone.

The volunteer didn't move. He stared at Wei’s shadow, which seemed to be pooling on the floor darker than the light should allow.

"It’s very quiet here," the volunteer whispered. "It’s so quiet that the noise of my blood is annoying."

Wei felt it then.

I saw the flinch run through his shoulders.

He felt it not as an external force but as a distortion radiating outward from his own chest.

It was subtle and uneven, a ripple in a pond. The closer people came to him, the more effort it took them to remain contextually intact.

Their narrative began to fray. Their sense of now began to dissolve into a vague sometime.

He pressed his hands together, hiding the tremor in his fingers.

"I don’t want to hurt them," he said quietly.

"You are not," I replied, watching the volunteer's aura flicker and dim.

"But something is."

"Yes."

"What is it?"

"The difference," I said. "The difference between what is real and what is you."

The scribe signalled to the guards. Two men rushed in, grabbed the volunteer by the arms, and dragged him back. As soon as he crossed the five-pace line, the volunteer gasped, shaking his head violently as if waking from a nightmare. He looked around wildly, saw Wei, and scrambled backward, crab-walking across the floor until his back hit the wall.

That was when fear entered the institution.

Not panic. Not yet.

Panic is loud; panic is chaotic.

This was something colder.

This was the unease of men who realise the structure of the room is wrong but cannot find the error with a measure.

It was sharp enough to change the tone of the reports. I could hear the shift in the ink as it hit the paper in the administrative wings.

The words changed from Observation to Hazard.

Containment protocols were adjusted overnight.

Surveillance increased, but physical proximity decreased. Observation windows were added to the walls of the chamber under the justification of "improved insight", but really, they just wanted to stop sending people inside. I watched the workmen install the thick, reinforced glass. They worked quickly, refusing to look directly at the boy sitting in the centre of the room.

Guards were posted—not to restrain Wei, but to ensure no one lingered too long.

Exposure Limits were discussed in hushed meetings.

Time quotas were proposed.

No one allowed inside for more than fifteen minutes.

One report, drafted by a senior scholar with shaking hands, suggested rotating personnel every hour to prevent "cognitive anchoring errors". They were afraid that if they stayed too long, they would forget how to leave.

Wei read none of this.

He had no access to the slates or the scrolls.

He felt it instead.

He felt the way footsteps slowed outside his door, heavy with hesitation. He felt the way conversations died instantly when he approached the glass. He felt the way people misjudged the width of hallways around him, stepping too wide or too narrow, stumbling over their own feet because their depth perception warped in his vicinity.

He was becoming a gravity well for mistakes.

By the fourth afternoon, the oppression of the room had become too much. He walked into the garden attached to his chamber.

It was small, enclosed by high white walls that blocked the view of the city. It was meant to be a sanctuary. A perfect arrangement of rocks, moss, and stunted trees.

Wei walked to the centre near the koi pond. The water was still. Too still.

A sparrow fluttered down from the roof tiles. It was a small, brown thing, common and unburdened by the weight of the heavens. It landed on a stone lantern near Wei’s shoulder.

It looked at Wei. It tilted its head, a spark of simple life.

It opened its beak to chirp.

No sound came out.

The silence that followed was absolute.

It wasn't just that the bird was quiet; it was that the concept of the chirp had been deleted before it could manifest.

The bird remained there. Beak open. Wings half-spread.

It was frozen in a stutter of instinct.

It didn't fly away. It didn't finish the song. It just hovered on the edge of an action that could not complete itself in his presence.

The biological impulse to sing hit the wall of the void and simply ceased to be.

Life flows; the void is a dam.

Wei stood frozen, too. He stared at the bird, his chest heaving. He wanted to reach out, to touch it, to push it back into the flow of time.

But he knew that if he touched it, he might unmake it entirely.

He turned away, unable to look at the silent, broken thing.

He walked back inside, closing the paper screens behind him, shutting out the garden that he had inadvertently paused.

"It feels like I’m standing still," he said to me that evening.

He was sitting in the corner of the room, as far away from the door as possible. He was staring at the white wall, tracing the grain of the plaster with his eyes.

"And everything else is... adjusting," he whispered. "Like water moving around a stone. But the water is getting tired."

"That is containment," I said.

He turned to look at me. His face was pale, the grime of the streets finally washed away, leaving him looking younger and more fragile than before.

"You said containment comes before violence," he said.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because violence requires certainty," I replied. "You cannot strike what you cannot define. Containment is what systems do when they do not yet know what they are allowed to destroy."

He nodded slowly, processing the cruelty of the logic.

"Are they going to name me?" he asked.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because the moment they do," I said, "they will believe they understand you."

"And then?"

"And then they will act decisively. To name an issue is the first step in eliminating it."

He was quiet for a long time. The silence in the room deepened, heavy and thick. Outside, beyond the glass, I could sense the guards changing shift. They did it quickly, without speaking, swapping positions like men escaping a burning building.

Finally, Wei looked up. His eyes were dark, reflecting the void that lay beneath his skin.

"If this is containment..." he said softly. "Why does it feel like they are the ones being held still?"

I did not answer.

Because that was the fracture widening.

Wei had noticed the truth that the scholars were trying desperately to ignore.

Containment was supposed to isolate Wei from the world. Instead, it was revealing how much effort it took to keep the System coherent around him. The walls weren't keeping him in; they were barely keeping the reality out there from dissolving into him. The bolts, the wards, the glass—they were holding the universe together, not the boy.

The belief that this was solvable still existed in the high towers of the administration.

But it was thinning.

And once belief collapses, procedure follows.

That is always the order.

First, they try to measure.

Then, they try to cage.

And when the cage starts to rattle not from the inside, but from the outside, they realize there is only one option left.

The tea would stop coming. The tests would stop.

And the executioners would begin to sharpen their blades.