chunqiu

The work this skill is for

The historian rarely says it directly. A title can be safe while a verb is not. A citation can be dutiful while a silence is not. This skill reads for judgment embedded in diction: the words chosen among near-synonyms, the repetitions that betray unease, the omission that does not quite manage to disappear.

It does not proofread and it does not fact-check. It reads the paper as an act of positioning.

What it asks

Use this skill to answer four questions:

1. Which word choices carry verdicts?
2. Where does the prose pause, repeat, or refuse to land?
3. How is antiquity being used as a mirror for the present?
4. What one sentence does the author most want to say without writing?

Input

Target: $ARGUMENTS

• workspace directory → read <ws>/final.md
• .md file → read it directly
• empty → ask what to read

Method

Read for the following force lines:

• Where the prose pauses, the pen fears.
• What repeats must repeat for a reason.
• The harder something is scrubbed clean, the blacker the original stain.
• Seemingly unrelated digressions are often leakage.
• What follows 然而 / 虽然 / however / granted is often what the author actually thinks.
• Passive voice and omitted subjects often hide accountability.

Pay special attention to verdict-bearing distinctions:

• rank-marked death verbs (卒 / 薨 / 崩)
• punitive verbs (诛 / 弑 / 戮)
• adjectives that moralize without declaring themselves
• conspicuous absences where the argument ought to name someone or something directly

Do not flatten the reading into ideology-hunting. The task is not to accuse; it is to hear the pressure in the prose.

Output

• workspace mode → <workspace>/analysis/{stem}_chunqiu.md
• single-file mode → analysis/{stem}_chunqiu.md

Report structure:

1. Diction verdicts — key verbs and nouns, with the implied judgment they carry
2. Repetition and pause — recurring phrases, abrupt transitions, elisions
3. Mirror of antiquity — where historical material is borrowed to gesture at a present concern
4. One unsaid sentence — the line the paper circles but never writes

Guardrails

• Never overwrite the source.
• Do not turn suggestive silence into false certainty.
• If the text is too flat to justify this reading, say so plainly.
• Negative space matters: the point is to preserve the shape of the unsaid, not to vandalize it.