She began to use an almost obsessive sense of ritual to replicate a disappearing soul.

Every morning, as the first rays of sunlight pierce the horizon, Granny Chen would appear at the end of the pebbly path, carrying her small tin bucket.

Her back was hunched, but her steps carried a steadiness beyond her years.

She doesn't use a spray bottle, and she certainly doesn't pour water directly onto the fragile roots of those wall-growing seedlings.

She simply raised her arm slightly, flicked her wrist, and a handful of water transformed into millions of tiny droplets, refracting rainbows in the morning light, before gently falling like a thin mist, evenly enveloping every patch of new greenery on both sides of the path.

“Old Lin didn’t look back when he left,” she murmured to the air and to the silent plants, “This road has to be sustained by us who are still alive, with our human energy.”

This strange behavior was quickly detected by the city's light path system monitoring center.

Analysts initially thought it was just an old man's memorial service, but when the data model was built, everyone gasped.

The surveillance footage was magnified and analyzed frame by frame, revealing an unbelievable pattern: the frequency with which Granny Chen sprinkled water was exactly the same as the rhythm of Lin Yi's steps during his last inspection of the light path, as recorded in the database.

Every seven steps, he would raise his hand and sprinkle water once. No more, no less, as precise as a metronome.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, Lin Yi squeezed himself into a rooftop attic of less than ten square meters.

The eastern part of the city is the old town, where the air is filled with a sense of tranquility that has been washed away by time.

The landlord was a deaf-mute old man who gestured the amount of rent with his calloused hands, his cloudy eyes showing no curiosity.

Lin Yi simply nodded, took out crumpled cash from his pocket to pay the bill, and made no demands regarding the simplicity of the room.

He was like a wounded lone wolf retreating to its den, wanting only to lick its wounds in silence.

The first thing he did after settling in was to carefully take out the fragment of the wall brick that contained his mother's last message from his pocket.

Instead of enshrining it, he buried it in an old flowerpot on the windowsill and covered it with ordinary garden soil dug from the garden downstairs.

What he wanted to bury was perhaps not just this brick, but also the self known as "Forest God".

That night, he had a long dream.

In my dream, wisps of silver light seeped from the cracks in the bricks, like the gentle breath of my mother.

But as soon as those lights appeared, they were greedily absorbed and devoured by the thick soil around them, not even a trace of them managed to escape.

At the end of the dream, the silver light completely disappeared, leaving only a deathly darkness and a faint, almost imperceptible breathing sound that seemed to come from the depths of the earth.

Lin Yi suddenly woke up with a start, his back soaked in cold sweat.

He subconsciously looked towards the windowsill, and in the morning light, a slender green sprout had indeed emerged from the center of the soil in the flowerpot.

His heart tightened, and he almost lunged forward.

However, upon closer inspection, the specks of green quickly dimmed the light in his eyes.

Without silver veins or a familiar shape, it was just an ordinary weed.

On the other hand, Granny Chen's "experiment" yielded an astonishing discovery.

She noticed that the silver veins on the leaves of the wall-flowering plants that she watered and nourished were moving at a speed that was almost a third slower than those on the "nameless paths" in other parts of the city.

But that slowness was not a sign of decay, but rather an unprecedented stability and depth, as if a rushing stream had settled into a gently flowing river.

With trembling hands, she pulled out the pocket watch her late husband had left her, brought it close to a leaf, and pressed the stopwatch, watching the silver light pulse with each beat.

Once, twice, three times... When she compared the measured frequency with a deep memory in her mind, she was terrified.

This frequency was exactly the same as the speaking speed of Lin Yi when he gave his last public speech at the completion ceremony of the Light Path!

At that moment, Granny Chen's cloudy eyes suddenly cleared.

She understood.

She wasn't watering the plants; she was using her decades of bodily memory, deeply imprinted with every habit of Lin Yi's, to replicate his existence.

And this land he created, this magical network of plants, is "learning" from this imitation, re-injecting a virtual "Lin Yi frequency" into the system.

Lin Yi knew nothing about this.

Like any ordinary retired old man, he went to the market to buy vegetables, carrying a cloth bag.

Two stylishly dressed young people were talking loudly in front of a vegetable stall, their voices neither too loud nor too soft, just enough to reach his ears.

"Hey, have you heard? That glowing pebble path in the Malt Technology Ruins Park is the starting point of the legendary 'Nameless Path,' which was supposedly carved out step by step by Lin Shen himself!"

Lin Yi lowered his head, pretending to carefully pick through the potatoes in front of him, but his fingers curled up almost imperceptibly.

“That’s right,” another person chimed in, “but now nobody can see him anymore, it’s like he’s vanished into thin air.”

The man who had spoken earlier laughed: "Gods are only effective when they're hidden."

Lin Yi silently handed the potatoes he had chosen to the stall owner, paid, and turned to leave.

He walked about ten meters away when he heard the stall owner mutter with a hint of doubt behind him: "Strange, that old man's walking posture looked so familiar..."

That day, Granny Chen made a significant decision. She stopped watering the path.

In her diary, she wrote a line in trembling handwriting: "If a road still needs people to water it to live, then it is not a real road." She wanted to see where this road, which had been forcibly injected with "Lin Yi's frequency," would go after she, the "replicant," left the stage.

That night, she also had a dream.

In her dream, she stood on a boundless grassland of light, where every blade of grass shimmered with a soft silver glow.

In the distance, a blurry figure stood with his back to her.

She tried to call out, but found that she couldn't make a sound.

The figure seemed to sense her gaze and slowly turned around.

His face was shrouded in light, making it difficult to see clearly; he simply handed her an empty bucket.

She instinctively reached out and took it. The moment her fingers touched the rim of the bucket, countless fine white mycelia suddenly sprouted from the bottom of the bucket, wrapping around her hand like lightning and tightly connecting her to that grassland of light.

Grandma Chen woke up with a start, her heart pounding.

She turned her head to look at the head of the bed, at the tin bucket she had used for half her life, where most of the water had evaporated without her noticing!

Even more strangely, countless tiny dewdrops condensed on the cold walls of the barrel. Instead of sliding down haphazardly, they were arranged closely together, forming a clear arrow pointing in the direction of the east of the city.

The next day, a miracle occurred that shook the entire city's management system.

For the first time, the city's network of "nameless paths" has experienced a large-scale "self-healing" phenomenon.

One of the most eye-catching places is a section of fiber optic cable path that was cut off due to municipal construction.

According to the procedure, this requires a professional restoration team to spend several days to complete.

However, on that very night, the mycelial networks on both sides of the break did not fall silent, but instead extended toward each other at an unprecedented speed.

Instead of connecting in a straight line, they intersected and wove underground, bypassing obstacles, and finally formed a brand new and beautiful winding path the next morning.

The curve of the path was exactly the same as the bend of Granny Chen's walking stick, which she never parted with.

Almost at the same time, in that attic room of less than ten square meters in the east of the city.

When Lin Yi woke up, he went to water the tenacious weed on the windowsill as usual.

Just as he got closer, his breath caught in his throat.

On the back of the leaf of that wild grass, a very faint yet incredibly clear silver line had quietly appeared at some point.

Those were neither words nor his mother's face.

It was a short, winding path, a miniature map.

The map's endpoint pointed directly to the vegetable market he passed by every day when buying groceries.

He took a deep breath, pushed open the attic door, and stepped onto the familiar yet completely different road.