The dumbest man alive still knows something I don't."
Sōgen sat alone at a tea stall, eyes closed, breath steady.
He wasn't meditating.
He was listening.
Not to sounds. To thought residue.
Every Concord user gave off "mental ripples" through their seal when engaged in problem-solving or memory recall.
It was subtle. Only Sōgen could feel them directly — because his own seal was the anchor seal.
He'd designed it that way.
All roads led back to him.
---
A farmer was having trouble with his irrigation system.
His thoughts ran through every failed fix — buckets, ditches, rope.
Then a breakthrough: tilt the channel slightly, let gravity do the work.
Sōgen absorbed it, catalogued it, added a tag to the Network.
Another user, in another village, might request tips on crop layout next week.
The system would route the farmer's deduction to them instantly, as a "memory nudge."
Like a thought that just... popped into their head.
---
But there were limits.
The seal only worked on mortals.
Chakra-rich minds — shinobi, even Academy students — had too much active flow. The seal shorted out under chakra strain or instinctual resistance.
They felt the intrusion.
Mortals, on the other hand, welcomed it.
It made them feel… less alone.
Like someone cared about what they knew.
And in return, they gained access to skills they could never afford to learn.
---
Sōgen's primary concern now?
Reinforcement.
He didn't want users talking about the seal — not to ninja, not to anyone.
So he added an emotional clause to the seal's structure:
Any attempt to explain the seal outside of Concord triggers discomfort — headaches, disassociation, stuttering.
It wasn't pain.
Just mental disincentive.
You could talk about it — but your brain wouldn't want to.
And if pushed hard enough, users would just forget how to form the sentence.
---
A security feature disguised as plausible confusion.
He called it the Oath of Quiet Thought.
---
At this point, 17 users were active.
Farmers, cooks, a widow, a fisherman, two teenagers working in a sawmill.
Their knowledge was pouring in — small things, but pure things.
One woman's method for keeping bread soft overnight.
A child's game that accidentally trained reflexes.
A merchant's mental math shortcuts when dealing with stingy buyers.
Sōgen compiled them into "modules."
The Passive Concord Archive.
A digital brain without a machine.
---
But then…
Something changed.
A user named Kenta — a street performer — began dreaming of Sōgen's seal.
But the dream showed two seals.
One mirrored. One inverted.
And when he woke up, he could guess the next card someone would flip.
Only once or twice a day. But still.
Precognition?
No… Pattern anticipation.
The seal had rerouted excess processing power into predictive heuristics.
> "His subconscious is simulating hundreds of likely behaviors."
Sōgen felt a chill.
He hadn't written that into the system.
The Network had begun evolving without his intervention.
And it wanted to grow.