At 8:14 on Monday morning, Qin Yue attended a funeral where nobody was sad.

The deceased was a firefighter named Luo Jian. He had entered a burning apartment three times and failed to return from the fourth. His wife wore white. His adolescent son held the helmet recovered from the debris. Two hundred colleagues stood beneath a bleak sky while an orchestra played a melody traditionally associated with grief.

Nobody cried.

They discussed Luo Jian's death with courtesy and precision. His captain commended his courage. The mayor affirmed that the city would allocate compensation. His widow proofread the insurance form during the final salute. When the coffin descended, the boy checked his phone and asked whether they could leave before traffic became hectic.

Qin Yue felt such anguish that she nearly fell.

The absence of grief was not calmness. It was abnormal, an abrupt cavity inside every face. People understood the vocabulary of loss but not its weight. In the aftermath of death, they could organize, calculate, and proceed. They could not mourn.

At the Municipal Archive, Qin Yue searched for records of public grief: condolence letters, cemetery petitions, memorial footage, poems, testimony from disaster survivors. Every file opened as a blank white page. The database had not merely censored sensitive material. It had removed the concept that connected the documents.

Her colleague Ren Bo leaned over the compartment wall. He was a systems engineer with untidy hair, a sarcastic temperament, and an illegal talent for accessing restricted networks.

“What are you trying to retrieve?” he asked.

“Evidence that people were sad yesterday.”

Ren blinked. “Why would sadness require evidence?”

Qin Yue showed him a photograph stored on her analogue camera. It depicted Luo Jian's widow crying outside the hospital the previous evening. On the developed image, the woman still wept. Digital copies showed her smiling politely.

Ren's skepticism vanished. “That is impossible.”

At 11:59 p.m., every screen in the archive activated. A black circle appeared above a line of white text.

EMOTIONAL REVISION 02 WILL COMMENCE IN SIXTY SECONDS.

TARGET: ANGER.

PUBLIC BENEFIT: 17.4% REDUCTION IN CONFLICT.

Qin Yue ran to the main terminal. The countdown ignored every command. She pulled the emergency lever. Electricity failed, but the message remained luminous in the dark.

Ren grabbed her wrist. “If it can erase grief, what happens when it erases anger?”

Through the archive windows, midnight spread across the city like an eclipse.