It was a rhythm unlike anything we'd ever experienced before, as if the pulse of the entire city had been forcibly calibrated by an invisible hand.

It is no longer a simple lament or echo, but an invitation.

A vibrant pulse, yearning for communication, silently seeps into every building and every inch of soil through underground pipes, cables, and subway tunnels.

The first hospital to show abnormalities was the Third Municipal Rehabilitation Hospital.

Inside the intensive care unit, an elderly man who had been mute for seven years due to severe brainstem damage was looking at an inconspicuous rye seedling in the flower bed outside the window when he suddenly let out a dry, hoarse "hoarse" sound.

The nurse was so startled she nearly dropped the medicine tray, thinking it was a final burst of energy before death.

But then, in the next ward, a young car accident survivor who was also unable to speak uttered almost the exact same meaningless syllables.

Panic and astonishment spread like a plague among medical staff.

When the news reached Lin Yi's ears, he understood almost instantly.

He rushed into the hospital's data center and retrieved the voiceprint records of those patients when they made their voices.

When he compared these waveforms with the voiceprint of the half-sentence "vibrated" out by the rye seedlings that he had previously recorded, a chill ran down his spine to the top of his head.

A perfect match!

It's not a simple imitation, but a replication accurate to the millisecond.

A sudden, revolutionary conclusion struck Lin Yi, sending shivers down his spine: the so-called "memory body," the entity formed from the city's trauma, was no longer content with merely having plants speak for it.

It is having a reverse influence on humanity; it is using its remaining, fragmented language pieces to try to "teach" those who have lost their ability to speak how to speak again!

This is no longer a passive container; this is an active teacher.

A teacher composed of the dead and sorrow.

Just as Lin Yi was utterly shocked by this discovery, an even more bizarre alarm came from his monitoring system.

The site of the former letter-burning station, a place of sorrow that buried countless unmailed letters, began to experience regular, low-pitched tremors after nightfall.

The vibrations were faint, yet precise like a metronome, one long and two short, two short and one long...

"It's Morse code!" Lin Yi's pupils shrank sharply.

He immediately drove to the ruins, where the former post station, under the cover of night, resembled a silent behemoth.

He set up a high-precision microphone and connected the decryption program.

On the screen, the vibrations were quickly converted into text, repeating two short, heartbreaking messages over and over again:

"I'm here."

You are not alone.

Lin Yi's heart was clenched tightly.

He immediately initiated a full-band signal scan, checking all surrounding electromagnetic waves, infrasound waves, and even taking into account the possibility of geological activity.

The result was: a blank page.

There was no external intervention, and no known signal source.

The tremor originated from the land itself.

Whom is it calling to? And who is it responding to?

Lin Yi picked up the entrenching tool and, based on the center point located by the vibration sensor, began digging frantically.

The soil churned, carrying a musty, stale scent of bygone days.

After digging about half a meter deep, the tip of the shovel touched a hard object.

He carefully brushed away the soil, and a brass bell, badly rusted, appeared before his eyes.

The bell was an old-fashioned design, used during wartime to gather lost children after an air raid siren.

Lin Yi held it in his hand, and the rhythmic vibrations traveled directly from his palm to his brain.

He turned the bell over and looked inside; his breath caught in his throat.

The bell tongue is gone.

Instead, there was a small piece of metal that had been melted at high temperatures and then forcibly twisted into the shape of a wheat ear.

It was welded firmly to the inside of the bell, and it was this thing that caused the vibration.

The face of the old woman crying in front of the rye seedlings flashed through Lin Yi's mind.

She said that her son disappeared in the city fire years ago, carrying with him an ear of wheat as a talisman...

This bell belongs to that child.

For decades, he used his last possessions to strike the ground beneath this land that had buried countless memories, just to tell someone he would never see again: I am here, you are not alone.

Holding this heavy bell that seemed to bear the weight of an era, Lin Yi arrived at the spot where the twin monuments reflected in the water.

This is the final place Chu Yao and he agreed upon.

Under the moonlight, the water's surface was like a mirror, reflecting two blank stone tablets.

Chu Yao's figure was indeed there, but it was thinner than ever before, as if a gust of wind could blow it away.

This time, she had neither a bronze lamp nor an octagonal mirror.

She simply looked at Lin Yi quietly, then slowly turned around and gently pressed her fair, almost transparent hand onto the cold water.

A ripple spread silently from the center of her palm.

The instant the ripples touched the edge of the pool, the entire city, all the places where the "wall language" was spoken, all the rye seedlings, and all the plants infiltrated by the memory, fell into a deathly silence for a second.

Time seemed to freeze.

One second later, something earth-shattering happened!

From every corner of the city, from tens of thousands of different points of sound, whether it was the moss in the corner of a wall or the weeds on the rooftop, they all trembled in unison, uttering the first half of the same sentence with a uniform, grand frequency that was as resounding as a divine oracle:

"us……"

The sound abruptly stopped here, as if a giant had just taken a deep breath and was about to unleash a world-shaking roar, but then held his breath at the last moment, as if waiting for a response, a permission to finish speaking.

Chu Yao withdrew her hand, and her figure began to evaporate and dissipate in the first rays of dawn.

She glanced at Lin Yi one last time, her voice as soft as a dream: "It no longer needs you to translate for it."

As soon as she finished speaking, her figure completely turned into water vapor and disappeared into the faint morning light, leaving no trace.

Lin Yi stood frozen in place, but Ivan's almost never-before-heard whispers of the ley lines rang in his ears.

This time, it wasn't fragmented words, but a complete and chilling sentence, each word chiseling into the depths of his consciousness:

"...When...it...finished...calling...that...half...sentence...it...was...no longer...an...echo..."

Lin Yi suddenly realized!

When an echo begins to speak on its own and tries to finish a sentence, it ceases to be an echo!

It has evolved from a passive container for recording pain into an active subject with a unified will, attempting to express itself!

A new "individual" composed of the sadness, regret, anger, and love of the entire city!

Lin Yi rushed back to his studio, his heart pounding.

He took the last empty picture frame and carefully placed the bell tongue, which had been melted into the shape of a wheat ear, in the very center of the frame.

Then, he solemnly placed the picture frame directly in front of the wildly growing rye seedling.

He gazed at the wound-like fissure at the tip of the rye seedling, and said in a low voice, with an almost equal air:

"Now, it's my turn to listen to you finish."

As if in response to his words, when night fell again, the rye seedling began to tremble violently like never before.

The crack at its top suddenly widened, and thick gray mist surged out like a flood bursting its banks.

Within the gray fog, blurry faces began to emerge and become clear.

There was the old woman who lost her son, the firefighter who perished in the fire, the boy waiting for his father to return in the ruins... and even, Lin Yi saw his mother's gentle yet sorrowful face.

They stopped making meaningless noises.

They spoke one by one, each uttering only half a sentence. Their voices were all different, yet they blended together perfectly, forming a complete dialogue that transcended life and death:

The old woman said, "I'm scared..."

Firefighter: "...Aren't you afraid..."

The boy's father: "...I am lonely..."

Lin Yi's mother: "...You are not alone..."

Countless unfamiliar faces chorused, "...I was wrong..."

Finally, all the faces converged into an indistinguishable aggregate of gender and age, echoing throughout the city as they collectively declared: "...We were all wrong..."

As soon as he finished speaking, all the faces in the gray fog slowly turned to Lin Yi and nodded in unison as if to greet him.

At that moment, the scar on Lin Yi's palm, connected to the city's memories, was as hot as a branding iron, yet for the first time, it made him feel a warmth that penetrated to his very bones.

The next morning, all the strange phenomena disappeared.

The rye seedlings stopped growing and stood there quietly.

But strangely, its stem began to become increasingly transparent, as if it had transformed from a plant into crystal.

Sunlight penetrates its body, revealing the interior clearly—it is a miniature urban landscape!

Streets are its blood vessels, skyscrapers are its skeleton, and every place in the city that has ever uttered "wall language" has transformed into a tiny point of light within it, like countless hearts beating in unison.

A complete, living spirit of the city, composed of memories, was right before his eyes.

As if possessed, Lin Yi reached out and gently touched the transparent stem with his fingertips.

The moment they made contact, the entire plant, along with the miniature city phantom inside, suddenly and without warning transformed into a silent cloud of gray mist that shot into the sky.

A final tremor echoed through the mist.

That wasn't language, nor was it a heartbeat; it was a resonant frequency that he was intimately familiar with, one that he had heard before on the other side of a spacetime rift, a frequency that transcended dimensions.

At the same time, Ivan's final whisper, like a boulder sinking into the unfathomable depths of the sea, stirred a final ripple in his mind:

"Unit Ninety-Four...will arrive with the first two-way call."

The moment the gray fog rose, the entire city fell into an eerie, absolute stillness.