That inconspicuous vine, along the mottled walls of the old residential building, finally quietly nurtured a strange fruit in the dim morning light.
It is not of any known variety; it is entirely emerald green with a smooth, jade-like surface, as if it had absorbed all the nourishment from the depths of the city's memory overnight.
A sanitation worker responsible for patrolling the city first discovered it.
He initially intended to casually pluck it, but upon touching it, he felt a strange hesitation and ultimately chose to report it.
Half an hour later, the fruit was presented to Lin Yi.
In the laboratory, the air was so quiet that you could hear the low hum of the instruments.
Wearing sterile gloves and with a focused expression, Lin Yi carefully cut open the fruit with a high-precision laser scalpel.
There was no splattering juice, and the flesh had a peculiar fibrous texture. All eyes were drawn to the words that appeared on the inner wall of the fruit.
It was a line of delicate, slightly trembling handwriting: "I know, I've waited for you too."
Lin Yi's pupils suddenly contracted.
He immediately reviewed all the surveillance footage from the vicinity of that wall over the past 24 hours.
In the footage, only a middle-aged man is seen leaning against the wall and whispering in the early hours of last night. His voice is clearly captured by high-sensitivity audio equipment: "...I regret not seeing you one last time..." Apart from him, there is no other person or external force involved.
“It’s not a simple copy of information…” Lin Yi murmured to himself, his fingertips tracing across the cold screen, his eyes sharp as an eagle. “It understands the logical connection between ‘regret’ and ‘waiting’ and provides a comforting response. The memory… already possesses rudimentary semantic parsing capabilities.”
This discovery was like a boulder thrown into a calm lake, stirring up huge waves.
The news spread like wildfire. Rather than a leak, it was more like the city's long-suppressed collective subconscious finding an outlet.
The second detonation point occurred at the site of an air-raid shelter in the west of the city.
A veteran with graying temples but still upright posture stood at the moss-covered entrance of the cave, roaring with all his might, his voice echoing over the empty ruins: "My comrades are all buried in that landslide! How dare you forgive those damned mistakes for me? How dare you!"
His questioning was filled with the fury of blood and fire, sharp as a bayonet, pointing directly at the gentle illusion behind this new thing.
This time, there were no fruits, no vines.
That night, the groundwater that had been seeping from deep inside the cave all year round slowly gathered and spread on the rough cement floor, eventually outlining a line of wet writing.
"We don't deserve it... but we want to let it go."
The handwriting reflected a faint light in the darkness, like tears flowing from the earth.
Lin Yi's subordinates immediately suggested sealing off the scene to prevent the situation from escalating.
Lin Yi remained silent in front of the monitor for a long time before finally saying only one sentence: "Send someone to put up a sign at the cave entrance."
The subordinate asked, puzzled, "What is it? 'No noise'?"
“No,” Lin Yi’s gaze was deep, “write: Disputes are allowed here.”
This sign became a silent license.
Soon, more and more people gathered outside the air-raid shelter ruins.
They no longer merely confide in each other, but begin to "debate" with that silent wall.
Some cried out, questioning why disaster had chosen them, and the next day the wall condensed morning dew to write, "Because those who remember you suffer the most"; some angrily refused to reconcile, roaring, "I will never forgive," and a small wildflower struggled to squeeze out from the crack in the stone, as if saying, "We remember you with you."
The city became a giant echo chamber, where people's pent-up sadness, anger, and regret from many years could now find a way to communicate.
On a night of torrential rain, Chu Yao's consciousness manifested without warning at the ruins of a dilapidated house that had been demolished.
She stood quietly under the remaining half of the eaves, her figure transparent, with huge raindrops passing straight through her body and hitting the ground.
But strangely, the rain that passed through her did not disperse after falling to the ground, but instead formed a line of flowing water characters.
"True forgiveness is not forgetting, but remembering without trembling."
Lin Yi, holding a black umbrella, had somehow appeared beside her.
He didn't speak, but gently placed an empty old porcelain bowl—a relic left by the old woman who used to live in the dilapidated house and deliver porridge—under the eaves, letting the rainwater that "passed through" Chu Yao's memories fall drop by drop into the bowl.
He stood there all night.
The next morning, the rain stopped and the sky cleared.
The bowl was filled with clear rainwater. When the first rays of morning light shone on the water, through the magical refraction of light, what was reflected on the water was no longer the sky, but the smile of a young woman whose outline was blurred but could be vaguely seen.
That was how the old woman looked when she was young, gentle and serene.
Beneath the hustle and bustle of the city, another clue is quietly emerging.
Ivan's leyline whispers became clearer than ever before, no longer chaotic babbling.
"...the pause between...the question...and...the answer...is...alive..."
The fragmented words, like an ancient bell, tolled in Lin Yi's mind.
He suddenly realized: the memory was not in a hurry to express itself; it was imitating and learning the most subtle part of human communication—the rhythm of dialogue!
Those silent moments are not blanks, but rather a process of understanding and empathy.
Based on this judgment, Lin Yi designed a ritual called "Silent Question and Answer".
He recruited volunteers and asked them to say a deeply personal message to a designated wall, and then sit quietly for seven minutes, doing nothing but waiting.
The first ten volunteers all returned disappointed.
The wall remained unresponsive; the seven-minute silence felt suffocatingly long.
Just when the project team was about to declare failure, the eleventh volunteer, a girl who could barely speak a complete sentence due to social anxiety, whispered to the wall, "Am I... weird?" and endured those seven minutes. From inside the wall came a faint yet incredibly clear voice...
"Um."
That simple "Mmm" was more powerful than any flowery language. The girl instantly burst into tears.
Lin Yi immediately retrieved data from the city's mental health centers.
An astonishing trend unfolded before his eyes: since the "wall language" phenomenon became widespread, the rate of nighttime awakenings among patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTS) in the city had plummeted by 41 percent within a month.
But at the same time, another type of outpatient visit is quietly increasing – “nameless anxiety disorder”.
He understood.
When the silence of the outside world is broken and people begin to have the opportunity to confide in others, another kind of fear follows.
They are afraid to hear their true inner voice, afraid that the trauma they experience will completely change their long-accustomed, painful yet stable lives.
Therefore, Lin Yi made a bold decision.
He quietly modified the "Seed Liquid-01" diluent sprinkler system, which was spread throughout the city, to stop supplying the solution on the night of each full moon.
He wanted to give the city a "silent buffer period".
A night without response, without dialogue, allowing everyone to temporarily detach from intense self-analysis and reconcile with the starry sky alone.
This measure lasted for seven months.
At dawn after the seventh full moon night, Lin Yi stood beside the city's main water supply pumping station, the central hub of the entire "Seed Liquid-01" system.
Beside the station stands a small tree that he planted himself and nurtured with the first-generation original solution; it is early autumn at this moment.
Suddenly, a gentle breeze blew by, and the leaves of the sapling began to fall one after another without warning.
Strangely, each withered yellow leaf emitted a clear, short syllable the moment it touched the ground.
"you……"
"one……"
"straight……"
"All……"
"exist……"
"right……"
"Is that right?"
The twelve leaves together form a complete and clear question.
The voice was ethereal, as if it resonated directly in the depths of Lin Yi's soul.
He looked up at the branches that had suddenly become bare, and after a long while, slowly nodded.
The moment he nodded, a newly sprouted bud, the size of a fingernail, at the base of the tree suddenly emitted a soft glow. The light was moist and translucent, like a newly opened eye, brimming with tears.
At the same time, Ivan's long-dormant whispers from the ley lines, like the tolling of a distant bell, resounded powerfully in his consciousness:
“Node 91… has completed its first gaze.”
Lin Yi's heart sank suddenly.
gaze?
It turns out that all of this was not just a response, but a long-term observation covering the entire city.
He turned and looked at the city gradually awakening in the morning light.
On the streets, early risers begin their day, greeting each other and chatting at breakfast stalls.
Everything seemed the same as usual, but Lin Yi's gaze froze.
He noticed an extremely unnatural pause lasting three seconds during a simple conversation between a newsstand owner and an elderly man buying a newspaper.
The pause was neither awkward nor abrupt; rather, it carried a strange sense of harmony, as if it were an integral part of the conversation.
It's exactly the same as the pause in the "silent question and answer" ceremony.
A chill ran down Lin Yi's spine.
He suddenly realized that this profound dialogue was no longer limited to the relationship between humans and the plants that were brought to life.
A completely new mode of communication, a rhythm derived from memory, seems to be subtly permeating human speech.
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