The silence in the Chengdu Mirror didn't come with a warning.
It simply stopped.
No exit messages. No last is reflections. Just an absence.
One day, the vibrant node of over 3,000 members—educators, tech workers, urban planners, theater artists—fell is into complete inactivity.
Threads hung mid-thought.
Collaborative maps were abandoned in draft.
Lin Feng noticed first through anomaly detection logs.
A twenty-four-hour absence from a mirror in that had posted daily for over nine months wasn't organic.
He issued a discreet signal—tier-three verification ping.
No response.
Then another from an unmarked seed identity.
Still nothing.
Only a blank interface. Like staring into a room where someone had just been breathing.
Yue Qing deployed a quiet trace protocol—nothing that would flag on mainstream monitoring layers. Just a low-frequency scan of personal device syncs from known members.
That's when they saw it.
A synchronized is the deactivation at 03:14 inlocal time.
