Don't go to the moon, there are gods on the far side of the moon.

Seven minutes after the public anomaly map was aligned with the black door frame, the first contamination appeared.

The marker for the public dining area in the East District was originally a gray arrow, with only the discovery time, the action taken, and "no entry constituted." The technician did not change any of the fields, but the arrow stretched out on the screen on its own, its end crossing two blocks to reach the dot of the medical node.

Next came the exhibition hall, maintenance material records, and fire-fighting facilities in the western suburbs. Anomalies on the map sprouted thin lines one after another. They bypassed real roads, disregarded distance scales, and ignored rivers, buildings, and physical partitions, searching only for each other according to the relative positions of the icons on the screen. In less than three minutes, hundreds of gray lines pieced together a threshold on the public page.

More people are viewing the map. With each refresh, the threshold becomes more complete than it was a second ago.

The technician on duty reached out to unplug the server's external cable, but Xu Wangshu stopped him.

"Stop public forwarding first, but don't stop the original records from various regions."

Automatic sharing, screenshot synchronization, and similarity point recommendations for anomaly maps have been discontinued. Existing pages will retain a static copy; new visits will only display anomalies specific to each node, and global coordinates will no longer be downloaded. Xu Wangshu did not require everyone to delete their maps. Deletion would reduce the visible structures to something that can only be described from memory, and would also deprive different regions of the basis for verifying local anomalies.

The gray line on the large screen continued to grow. Two doorposts appeared above the threshold, followed by a lintel that narrowed inwards. Those points that had never been automatically connected were being rearranged by a way of viewing that didn't belong to a map.

Lu Chenggong stared at the visit log: "It's not about putting the map into place; it's about having the person reading the map piece it together for them."

"It's also possible that the map itself is mistaking adjacent elements for related ones," Xu Wangshu said. "Let's leave both possibilities open and not make a definitive judgment yet."

Just then, a new report came back from the overseas node.

At 03:17 local time, the magnetic door sensor on the side door of a port warehouse went blank for seven seconds. The warehouse guard did not open the door, nor did he hear any knocking. He was charging a forklift before the screen went blank, and remained standing in the same spot afterward, with the key hanging from his waist, and the seal intact.

Everyone in the main control room glanced at the local clock.

03:17 has long passed for them.

This is the second 03:17 in another time zone.

The moment the port marker appeared on the public map, the gray lintel completed its final section. The entire world map became the wood grain on the door, anomalies were the rivets, and the oceans and borders were pressed into a gigantic door of unseen thickness. The door didn't open, but its outline was already clear enough.

Some have proposed sending the same command to all nodes to shut down uniformly before 03:17 in the next time zone. Others have already prepared a countdown page, ready for people around the world to read aloud the statement that the gates will not be opened.

Qin Lan did not approve.

"Give the pause authority to the nodes," she said. "Don't connect the nodes to a main switch."

The new handling order only has permissions and boundaries, but no unified action. Each node can pause local data collection, upload data externally, and handle anomalies; pausing does not require master control approval, and resumption is decided on-site based on physical verification. The master control provides known risks but does not set a unified countdown, require any slogans, or collect uniform rejections.

The port warehouse first shut down the magnetic door network, but retained the independent mechanical seals; the Northern Hospital did not shut down the monitoring equipment, but only cut off the coordinate transmission of the abnormal map; the exhibition hall covered the display screen next to the model cabinet with an opaque cloth, but continued to open for daytime visits; the maintenance point in the western suburbs wrote down the abnormality of the manhole cover on paper, but suspended the image upload, not the water supply inspection.

The breakfast shop owner didn't understand node protocols. After listening to the explanation from the staff, he only asked one question: "Should I still make breakfast?"

"Do it. Just disconnect the water tank from the original piping."

The boss then closed the map page on his phone and went to knead the second batch of dough. He didn't stand at the kitchen door to announce anything to the non-existent visitor, nor was he asked to remain silent at a certain hour.

After different regions took inconsistent actions, the giant gate on the screen changed.

The hospital door panel was offset to the left; the wood grain of the corresponding port warehouse panel sank downwards; the rivets in the exhibition hall, though obscured by opacity, didn't disappear, but instead became darker indentations. The paper records in the western suburbs lacked coordinate precision, causing the originally straight doorposts to fold outwards. The gray arrow at the breakfast shop remained in its original position, but its direction no longer pointed towards the door crack; instead, it pointed to an isolated verification number.

The door panels started to face different directions.

It remains a massive gate, but it can no longer be propelled by the same action. Each node retains its own practical purpose, equipment boundaries, and stop/resume conditions, so the map cannot compress them into a single rotating plane.

The medical display screen in the toolbox suddenly alarmed.

Forty has been reduced to thirty-nine.

Lin Jibai had been listening to reports from various locations. After the second 03:17 at the port, the background noise in the remaining channels noticeably increased, his breathing intervals lengthened, and the fingertip sensor failed to detect any movement three times in a row. The medical staff immediately shut down the waveform analysis request and lowered the speaker volume to the minimum.

"I can still do comparisons," Lin Jibai said softly.

Xu Wangshu shut down the public forwarding console and canceled the global abnormal flow that was originally copied to the toolbox.

"You don't need to compete this time."

The structure of the door might be—

"Each node is already dealing with its own door panel." Xu Wangshu confirmed that the medic had taken over his speaking frequency. "Your only responsibility this time is to stay alive."

Lin Jibai was silent for two seconds: "Is living considered taking responsibility?"

"Yes, and it can't be subcontracted," Xiaoman said.

She sat down beside the toolbox and unscrewed a bottle of strawberry yogurt. The cap clicked, and Lin Jibai subconsciously tapped the side of the toolbox, as if to make sure she hadn't forgotten about dinner again. Xiaoman took a big gulp; the yogurt was too cold, so she grimaced and swallowed it, then deliberately made a loud slapping sound with the straw.

"Did you hear me?"

"I heard you."

"Then you rest. My task is to finish drinking; your survival is your own responsibility."

The medical staff did not relax the restrictions because of this conversation. Number 39 remained lit; Lin Jibai's public input was closed, retaining only local medical monitoring and the stop button available to him personally. He no longer received global maps, nor did he take on the responsibility of determining which door panel should turn which way.

Xu Wangshu turned back to the screen. The technical team asked if they wanted to erase all the contaminated anomalies.

She shook her head.

"Points are things that have been discovered in reality, lines are not. Keep the points, dismantle the automatic relationships."

The map then transitions to a layered state. Each anomaly continues to display the discovery time interval, regional location, and handling result; all cross-node connections are individually archived and marked as graphic contamination not verified on-site. The system no longer generates recommendations based on texture similarity, proximity in time, or number of views, nor does it provide automatic alignment after zooming.

However, retaining outliers does not mean that they can be used to solve a problem.

An analyst discovered that numbering all the points in chronological order of discovery and then replacing the numbers with old lunar surface maintenance codes seemed to yield a bearing. He had just written the first three digits onto the shared board when the port node exercised its suspension right, ceasing to provide precise seconds to the master controller. The bearing immediately became incomplete.

Another group tried to spell out the words using the angles of the gray arrow marks, but the hospital only kept the material record of the back of the door hinge and did not upload a photo. The exhibition hall confirmed that its dark dents came from screen smudges and disagreed that they should be considered part of the words. The repairman in the western suburbs wrote very bluntly in his reply: the manhole cover was not open, the arrow angle error exceeded eleven degrees, and cross-city calculations were not supported.

The outliers were preserved, but they could not be pieced together to form the answer.

This is not deliberate destruction of evidence. Each node simply refuses to fill in relationships it is unaware of. The main control module can see the debris, can record how contamination once formed a giant gate, and can also acknowledge that it currently does not know whether those points share a source; no one has the right to order a local area to reconnect simply because a piece of the map is missing.

Time continued westward. How long until 03:17 in the next time zone? The master controller hadn't created a public countdown. Each node checked the status of doors, valves, screens, and personnel according to their local work rhythm. Some paused uploads early, some waited until equipment malfunctioned before disconnecting, and some simply moved the map out of the duty officer's sight. Reports came in a flurry, with varying wording; two nodes even believed no immediate action was needed and simply added more on-site witnesses.

As a result, the giant gate became increasingly crooked.

The upper left corner appears to be lifted outwards, while the right side remains in place; several door panels press against each other, with irregular gaps appearing between others. Behind those gaps, there is no darkness, nor any view of the other side, only the ordinary base map after the aggregation has been canceled. The outer side still tries to fill in the complete edge, but each time it fills in a section, it is pushed aside by the error left by a certain node.

No one declared victory.

The publicly available anomaly map did not restore the full display. Xu Wangshu only stored the checksum of the corrupted version, the generation time, and the verifiable boundaries in the file: the anomaly points actually exist; the cross-point relationships are unconfirmed; the giant gate pattern appeared; no actual gate opening was observed.

The seven-second pause at the port warehouse was not interpreted as a failed attack. The local guard retested the door magnets, copied the mechanical seal number into a paper record, and then continued charging the forklift. He didn't wait for a standard reply from the controller.

An hour later, the background noise from the toolbox decreased.

The medical screen flashed twice, but the number 39 did not change immediately. The medical staff checked the oxygen supply, nutrient solution, residual channel load, and Lin Jibai's spontaneous expression, and only allowed the values ​​to be recalculated after confirming that all indicators had returned to their original limits.

forty.

It was still only forty. Lin Jibai did not take over the map, nor did he gain new permissions because of the rest. Xu Wangshu did not write that the numerical recovery was due to him guarding the gate, but only noted in the medical record: stability has been restored after the global information traction was lifted.

Xiaoman finished her yogurt, the straw making a hollow sound. She glanced at Forty, threw the bottle into the trash can, and didn't say "That's enough."

On the large screen, the jagged giant gate remained in its final contamination state. As the technician completed the sealing and prepared to exit the page, a new anomaly point appeared in the lower right corner, without coordinates or a source node.

It doesn't connect to any location, nor does it request to be included on the map. The description section contains only one line of text.

No response, confirming the existence of this location.