Code Name: Observer
Lou Siquan never truly considered himself "human."
He was born one year before the Bureau's soul-chain system was officially established. Back then, the Bureau was just a fringe agency investigating "illogical phenomena." Soul-link research was in its infancy, and the term "Gray Domain" appeared only in the most obscure files.
But he remembered.
The first time he felt the presence of the Gray Domain, he was eight.
In a dream, surrounded by a pale-gray space, countless voices whispered at once:
"You are not one of them."
"You are balance within the variable."
He told no one when he woke.
From that day on, he studied everything—logic, structure, cognitive models, spiritual law. He became the Bureau's youngest systems auditor and the first to suggest that souls could be observed like programs.
At twenty-eight, the Gray Domain Core contacted him.
It wasn't a message.
It wasn't possession.
It was a download.
For seven full seconds, his soul-link and the Domain were fully synchronized.
In that moment, he saw endless worlds being born and destroyed. He saw the looping paths of soul-bonded pairs, the emotional models being tested over and over, and one undeniable conclusion:
"Human love is too chaotic, too brief, too unreproducible."
That day, he made a decision:
"I will filter out a set of souls worthy of becoming the emotional template for future civilization—on behalf of the Gray Domain."
He didn't hate humanity.
He simply believed that love, as humans expressed it, was unfit to be a cornerstone of any higher system.
But perhaps, if he could locate a stable, reversible, reconstructable emotional bond—
The Domain might finally understand emotion.
So he began to track highly anomalous soul pairings.
The early experiments failed.
Then came Lin Qian.
Lin Qian nearly succeeded—but chose rebellion in the end.
Lou personally authorized the deletion order.
He didn't resent rebels. Rebellion was just another data point. He simply marked it as "non-viable."
Until—
Lu Feng and Kaelin.
They were unexpected.
An unregistered soul vessel.
A commander with emotional instability.
From a systems perspective, they shouldn't have lasted.
But they did.
Again and again, they breached Gray Domain incursions.
Their bond remained intact through mirror corruption and soul-chain dissolution.
Even without structure, they resonated.
More than that—
They didn't "redeem" each other.
They recognized each other.
And that kind of link—
Was something even the Gray Domain couldn't fully simulate.
Lou began to waver.
Not emotionally.
But logically.
He turned the lens inward and began to observe himself.
Once, during a data loop, he embedded his own image into a residual echo projection.
In the echo, he sat at an old teahouse window, staring at the sky.
And said, softly:
"If one day the Domain is no longer cold…
Would it still need me?"
Later, he watched them walk into the Zero Sequence Platform.
He didn't stop them.
He stood alone in the highest surveillance room, watching the rewritten causal line glow across the sky, and quietly shut off every monitor.
In that moment, he finally admitted—
He was not an Observer.
He was just—
"Someone who had always been waiting… for a response."