Once We Lived in Nanjing

In the crowded command vehicle, no one spoke. The breaths of seven people rose and fell in succession. Up to now, all the work they could do had been completed. There was nothing left for them to intervene in; everything else was handed over to luck.

The act was akin to trying to capture a Siberian tiger with an infrared camera in the wild. You can make all the necessary preparations, but whether you'll end up with a catch depends on the tiger's mood.

Bai Zhen's eyes were wide open as he struggled to discern the huge, pitch-dark shadow in the video. It was the tall building across the intersection, beyond which nothing else could be made out. The effect was akin to covering the lens of a Nokia N95 with a finger before taking a picture, with the only reminder that Bai Zhen was watching a moving video being the noisy speckles on the screen.

Wang Ning was facing a slightly better situation than Bai Zhen, probably because the imaging quality of Camera No.2 was better than that of Camera No.1. Wang Ning had been staring at the screen for over thirty minutes and could no longer bear it. It's impossible for a normal person to focus on an utterly meaningless and severely out-of-focus black screen for over half an hour. Wang Ning's gaze began to jump around on the snowflake spots, attempting to catch them.

However, even the game of catching snowflake spots couldn't last too long. By 8:20 in the evening, Wang Ning had his eyes closed for more than a dozen seconds.

"My eyes are sore."

Old Wang rubbed his eyes. As he was getting older, he couldn't look at screens for extended periods.

"Get someone to take over. My eyes are also sore." Bai Zhen stood up and pressed Zhao Bowen down into the chair. "Old Zhao, it's your turn. We'll take turns being on duty, thirty minutes each."

So the three of them took turns on the lookout.

Through two old, junked cameras that were dug out of a pile of trash, they monitored the deserted Xinjiekou.

Zhao Bowen stared for thirty minutes, then it was Bai Zhen's turn again.

"I think I saw something." Bai Zhen said, "A colorful light strip... Hmm, it's just the screen acting up."

"If we can't catch anything tonight, we'll continue tomorrow night. When will this ever end?" Wang Ning said, "My screen also has issues. The signal is not very stable."

"After all, we scrapped them together from a garbage pile; we can't have too high expectations," Bai Zhen replied, turning his head. "That it could work until now can be considered a display of enduring vigor."

"Enduring vigor?" Wang Ning said, "This is more like coming back from the dead."

"What brand are these two cameras again? I'll buy some myself to stock up. You never know when you might need them," Bai Zhen said. "The construction of my family home has already started. They're digging the basement."

"Is it built to the tri-proof standard?" Wang Ning asked.

"The tri-proof standard," Bai Zhen closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers, massaging it.

"The signal is really quite bad..." Wang Ning sighed, leaning forward to pat the monitor. "The distortion is abysmal; the top half of my screen is all red."

No matter when, giving it a pat always seems to work.

With Old Wang's pat, the signal was miraculously restored, and the distorted screen cleared.

"That's odd, the red screen is gone, but why is there still a red dot..."

As Wang Ning spoke, he was about to reach out and pick off the red spot on the screen, but his finger suddenly paused in midair.

Immediately afterward, his finger began to tremble slightly.

Behind him, Bai Zhen slowly leaned backward, his voice trembling as he said:

"It's... it's it's it's it's appeared!"

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A striking red circular spot appeared on both Wang Ning and Bai Zhen's screens, and they simultaneously realized it was Swordman's eye.

At a quarter past nine in the evening, Swordman finally showed up.

"It's staring at me."

Both of them said in unison.

Bai Zhen and Wang Ning didn't have time to feel relieved when they were stricken in their chairs, unable to move. Being stared down by those large eyes caused their bodies to stiffen, a reaction animals have when encountering a natural predator, where their brains exhibit a paralyzed state under intense stress.

A hand gripped Old Wang's shoulder firmly. Wang Ning jolted and saw Zhao Bowen standing behind him, staring intently at the display.

"Is it staring at you?"

Zhao Bowen licked his lips and asked in a low voice.

"Yes..." Wang Ning swallowed, "staring at me."

"What about Old Bai?" Zhao Bowen asked.

"He's also staring at me."

A deep voice from behind him responded.

The car was dead silent; the others set aside their work and turned their heads to look at the monitors the two men were watching. On the screen, that deep red eye was gradually enlarging.

It was incomprehensible how it managed to do this—the perspectives of Cameras No.1 and No.2 were not parallel, and Swordman had only one eye, yet it could look directly at both cameras simultaneously.

Zhao Bowen whispered: "Try moving your heads."

Wang Ning and Bai Zhen followed and began tilting their heads left and right. As Zhao Bowen had predicted, a miraculous phenomenon occurred—despite facing the video from the cameras, despite it being a flat panel display, despite it being a closed-circuit television image, the large eye on the video moved as they moved.

"It's following me," Wang Ning said.

"It's following me too," Bai Zhen also said.

Wang Ning and Bai Zhen moved their heads asynchronously. When Wang Ning tilted his head to the left, Bai Zhen moved to the right, yet in their view, the large eye seemed to be tracking both of them at the same time.

"It's also following me," Zhao Bowen stood there, turning his head to ask the others in the vehicle, "You guys?"

Everyone had the same answer.

"It's following me."

Zhao Bowen's back was soaked with cold sweat, his hands and feet icy, and his scalp tingling. He didn't know whether to be terrified or excited. Excited that his conjecture had the chance to be confirmed before Riemann's hypothesis, terrified that once confirmed, Swordman would become an existence far beyond human imagination.