The silhouette of the colossal figure of light and shadow lay silent in the night sky, like a magnificent tombstone sculpted by the stars.
However, Lin Yi's gaze had already shifted from that familiar face to the newly sprouted wall plants at his feet.
He showed no emotion, but slowly squatted down and gently placed his palm on the thickest part of the plant's root.
It was a cool yet vibrant touch.
The next second, the transparent ear of wheat in his palm, which served as the access key, emitted a faint vibration unlike any he had ever shown before.
It is not a passively triggered feedback of memory echo, but an active resonance of synchronous frequency, like two precisely tuned tuning forks responding to each other across time and space.
Lin Yi's pupils suddenly contracted.
He immediately pulled up the real-time data streams from the seven core resonance wells.
Rows of cold numbers rapidly refreshed his retina, eventually settling on a set of shocking contrasts.
In the past twelve hours, the total energy output of the light filaments of the 37 large silent light stations in the city exceeded the total emotional energy input by all residents by 47 percent!
Energy cannot be created out of thin air.
This extra portion, as if guided by an invisible hand, is flowing back to the core area of the malt site in a way that is invisible to the naked eye.
He suddenly looked up and gazed once more at the enormous phantom of his mother.
It was not a passive image, but a massive energy aggregate, a beacon actively drawing power.
“I see…” Lin Yi murmured to himself, his voice filled with a sense of shock at having his understanding overturned. “It’s not that they’re waiting for us to light a lamp… it’s that they’re trying to call us home.”
The next morning, the air was slightly cool.
Lin Yi stepped into the West City Nursing Home once again.
Without alerting anyone, he went straight to Granny Chen's room.
The old woman sat quietly by the window, the morning light casting a soft glow on her wrinkled face.
On her lap was an old candy box, now open, containing no candy, but only a small clump of withered and blackened wheat ears.
Upon seeing Lin Yi, she didn't speak. Instead, with trembling fingers, she picked up the most intact ear of wheat from the box and gently placed it next to the old, unused oil lamp on the windowsill.
It was an extremely small, yet ritualistic gesture.
That night, at midnight.
In the nursing home's monitoring center, Lin Yi was staring intently at the screen.
In the video, the oil lamp on the windowsill of Grandma Chen's room suddenly lights up without any other source of fire.
The flames were not the usual orange-red, but rather a pure pale gold, like molten gold.
The light cast on the wall no longer created the image of the little girl running through the wheat field.
Instead, a group of elderly people wearing old striped hospital gowns appeared. Their faces were obscured, but they held hands and walked slowly down a familiar corridor.
The background is clearly the corridor of this nursing home.
"Pull up the surveillance footage from the other six rooms!" Lin Yi's voice was slightly urgent.
The screen switched, and an amazing scene appeared.
At the same moment, six other elderly people who had dreamed of wheat fields seemed to hear a silent command. They all turned over in their sleep, facing their respective windowsills, their postures as devout as pilgrims.
Lin Yi's heart skipped a beat.
A bold conclusion took shape in his mind: certain powerful, shared memory systems had evolved.
They no longer rely on the single activation method of "being told stories," but begin to spontaneously organize their journey home through a kind of collective subconscious resonance.
To verify this hypothesis, he made a decision.
He did not send any more guiding letters to the "silent mailbox," nor did he assign any lamplighters to carry out the task.
He simply ordered the city's patrol teams to grant them all system permissions, to record but not interfere, and to mark all the filaments of light that would naturally appear the following night.
The results came out on the third night.
In addition to the known light stations, nineteen new, faint but stable light sources have appeared on the city's three-dimensional light map.
These locations were all previously unplanned, and perhaps never even thought of: a toilet stall in an abandoned elementary school, an abandoned stray dog kennel under a bridge in the south of the city, and a rusty, long-disused telephone booth...
Everywhere, a "farewell witnessed by no one" has taken place.
Lin Yi personally drove to the bridge arch in the south of the city.
It was dark and damp here, and the air was filled with the smell of dust and decay.
He lit the smallest portable lamp in the corner where the stray dog used to curl up.
He didn't tell any stories or record any information; he simply sat there like a statue for three hours.
In the dead of night, when everything around was deathly silent, a miracle occurred.
On the cold ground, a series of footprints composed of extremely fine light spots appeared out of thin air.
It emerged from the darkness, cautiously circling the small lamp three times, as if confirming something, before turning around and extending towards the nearby garbage transfer station.
Lin Yi's breathing almost stopped.
He immediately checked the files, and a record popped up: there used to be an elderly scavenger in the area who died of illness six months ago.
His last social credit expenditure before his death was to buy a bag of dog food.
His final residence was that garbage transfer station.
Lin Yi took out the transparent ear of wheat and slowly extended it toward the starting point of the string of light-spotted footprints on the ground.
The moment the wheat touched the first point of light, a faint sob suddenly appeared in the lingering memories of the old man's footsteps that had previously filled his mind.
It was a dog's soft bark.
He wrote a line heavily on his portable terminal: "The boundaries of memory are wider than we imagine."
A program called "Silent Response" was then launched.
Lin Yi ordered that nameless lamp stands be installed at all nineteen self-emitting point sources throughout the city.
He announced a strange rule through the city radio: any citizen passing by these lampposts who has a feeling may light up the lamp if they feel something, but they are not allowed to say what they are thinking or talk to others.
On the first day of the plan, only three light stands were lit.
On the seventh day, nineteen light stands burned day and night. The city's subconscious was completely awakened.
Late that night, a strange phenomenon suddenly occurred at a lamppost located at the end of an alley in the eastern district.
In the surveillance footage, the flame of the lamp suddenly shot up, then condensed in the air into a clear, illusory dog paw print, which lasted for a full five seconds before slowly dissipating.
The next day, a young man was passing by that alley in a hurry, but he suddenly stopped when he saw the lamp.
He stood there blankly for a long time, his eyes filled with confusion and reminiscence, and finally murmured to himself, "My uncle... he used to say that dogs remember things better than people." He was the nephew of that old scavenger.
At the same moment, inside the underground control center of the Malt Ruins, Lin Yi was staring at the data stream of the Wall Language Plants.
He discovered that since the "Silent Response" project began, the flow rate of the silver veins in plant roots and stems has increased threefold.
Among the fragmented memories that were deciphered, images from non-human perspectives began to appear in large numbers: low-angle views close to the ground, scent markings perceived through the sense of smell, and paw print tracks left on the soil...
Lin Yi suddenly remembered something Granny Chen had casually mentioned that day: "Back then, people had nothing to eat, and even the dogs followed us, gnawing on wheat malt. They even remembered the way."
Just then, a very slight yet incredibly muffled tremor came from the floor of the entire control room, as if some ancient thing that had been sleeping for thousands of years had turned over deep within the earth.
The sound was like an echo from ancient times.
Lin Yi gripped the hot, translucent ear of wheat in his hand, feeling the resonance of memories from both humans and beasts emanating from it, and whispered, "So, it's not just humans on their way home... even those forgotten creatures are waiting for a lamp that belongs to them."
His gaze pierced through layers of data, finally settling on a corner of the monitoring screen.
There, a video is playing on a loop showing the flames from the lampposts under the East District bridge forming dog paw prints.
He took a deep breath, swiped his finger across the control panel, and brought up all the high-precision monitoring records of the nineteen self-illuminating point sources. He precisely locked the timeline to the moment the dog paw print appeared, and then to the moment afterward.
He wanted to see what kind of unknown chain reaction would occur in the city's memory network when a dog's memory was activated.
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