As the light faded and the cold system voice disappeared from Lin Yi's mind, the vine-entwined picture frame did not return to its calm state.
Deep within the mirror, the familiar tree shadows and vines intertwined even more tightly, wriggling slowly as if they were alive.
Lin Yi remained expressionless, and sitting with it every morning had become a strange ritual.
He was like the most patient hunter, waiting for his prey to make a mistake.
For six consecutive days, the outline of the tree's reflection in the mirror underwent changes that were imperceptible to the naked eye.
On the morning of the seventh day, when the first rays of sunlight pierced through the thin mist, the familiar tree shadows were completely distorted and rearranged, outlining the silhouette of a stone house that Lin Yi had never seen before on the mirror-like surface.
The stone house stands alone against the desolate backdrop, with two old lanterns hanging under the eaves.
A lamp was lit, emitting a faint but warm yellow light.
The other lamp, however, cast a deathly silence of darkness.
One light, one shadow.
Lin Yi's breath hitched, and his heart felt as if it were being squeezed by an invisible hand.
He quickly accessed the city's archives, raised the access level to the highest level, and retrieved early wartime satellite images of that area.
The image was blurry and full of static, but after several rounds of data enhancement and comparison, a long-forgotten mark appeared on the screen—a wartime letter-burning station.
Duty: To destroy any sensitive letters that could undermine morale or leak intelligence.
In an instant, Lin Yi understood.
This frame, which he named "Memory Body," not only responds to the strong emotions of the outside world, but also explores himself and reconstructs the past that he deliberately forgot with his iron will.
That light went out...
Deep in my mind, a long-forgotten scene was forcibly torn open.
It was on a war-torn border, where a dying child lay weakly in a makeshift shelter.
A nightlight was lit beside him, the only memento left by his mother. But Lin Yi, as the most efficient "cleaner" at the time, was tasked with clearing the battlefield, leaving no survivors and no emotional ties.
He blew out the lamp with his own hands, amidst the child's despairing gaze.
Because light will attract enemies and cause unnecessary trouble.
Extinguishing it is the "optimal solution".
Lin Yi turned off the screen, picked up his coat, and walked straight towards the ruins of the long-abandoned letter-burning station.
Today, this place is a desolate wasteland overgrown with weeds, with only a few broken foundations bearing witness to its past.
Without the slightest hesitation, he began digging in the central area based on the location indicated by the satellite image.
The cold entrenching tool cut through the soil with a dull thud.
Three meters underground, the shovel tip touched a hard object.
He cleared away the topsoil, revealing a section of charred and twisted wooden beam.
Inside the wooden beam were dozens of pieces of paper that had not been completely burned, like sparks hidden in charcoal.
He carefully removed the scrap of paper. The writing on it was incomplete, and the ink marks were blurred by the high temperature. But the familiar pen strokes were like a red-hot steel needle, piercing Lin Yi's eyes.
It's my mother's handwriting.
He immediately activated the miniature scanner on his wrist to compare the fragments with a handwriting database.
The results popped up instantly, showing a 99.9% match rate.
These are all letters his mother wrote to him during the war.
The warm words of advice and trivial daily life in the letter were actually judged by the system as "dangerous information that may shake the will of the soldiers" and directly intercepted and sent to this letter-burning station to be burned to ashes.
He was never told that the reply he had been waiting for all these years had long since turned into a handful of ashes that could not be pieced together.
The scar on his palm, shaped like a wheat seedling, seemed to sense his intense pain and suddenly split open.
This time, the oozing blood was no longer simply scarlet, but carried a rich aroma, like freshly harvested wheat under the sun.
A drop of wheat-scented blood fell onto the grayish-black scraps of paper.
A miracle happened.
At the edge of that desolate expanse of ashes, a faint, golden-red light appeared, like a flickering candle in the wind, or like embers reigniting.
At that very moment, the morning mist above the burning station began to condense eerily, and water droplets arranged in the air to form a line of suspended text in Chu Yao's handwriting: "Some fires don't burn letters, they burn hope."
Lin Yi instantly understood.
The destruction of his mother's letter and the burning of his hopes were the root cause of his later decision to blow out the night watchman's lamp and reject all emotional connections.
He was afraid to possess it, because light always brings destruction.
He would rather walk alone in the darkness than see any more hope turn to ashes before his eyes.
"So that's how it is..." he murmured to himself, his voice hoarse.
He took out a small brass oil lamp from his tactical bag. This was his backup light source for every stealth mission, but he almost never used it.
He carefully and gently covered the cold wick with the faintly glowing ashes, piece by piece.
He didn't light the fire, but stared at the pile of ashes and whispered, "This time, I'll burn it all."
The moment he finished speaking, the ashes on the wick seemed to understand his command, and began to curl and shrink on their own, changing from grayish-black to pitch black. Finally, without a flame, they completely carbonized and condensed into a black crystal the size of a fingernail.
The surface of the crystal is as smooth as a mirror, but inside it seems as if there are galaxies flowing.
With a soft "click," the black crystal automatically embedded itself into the lamp housing, resembling a black eye.
Almost simultaneously, Ivan's whispers from the depths of the earth took on a perceptible temperature for the first time, no longer a cold statement, but warm like the first surge of subterranean fire.
"...where...it...was...burnt...out...then...roots...grow..."
Lin Yi held the oil lamp inlaid with black crystal, and a crazy and audacious idea took shape in his mind.
He always believed that the way to heal trauma was through repression, forgetting, and sealing it away.
But Ivan and the lamp told him that complete liberation was not about forgetting destruction, but about letting destruction itself become nourishment for new life.
He arrived at a crossroads in the city center and dug up the soil again directly beneath the flowerbeds of the busy roundabout.
He buried the black crystal oil lamp deep into the ground, then took out twelve specially made pottery shards engraved with the character "listen" and arranged them in a perfect ring around the lamp.
This is not for sealing, but for marking.
Mark it with the words "Here, someone once extinguished a lamp by their own hand".
Three days later, strange scenes began to unfold at the crossroads.
When the automatic fountain in the flower bed sprays water at night, the water droplets occasionally contain some tiny black crystals.
These crystals melted upon landing, turning into a wisp of mist that exuded a contradictory and peculiar aroma, a mixture of burnt paper and fresh wheat.
A dejected middle-aged man passed by. Not long ago, he had personally burned all the diaries left by his deceased wife, trying to say goodbye to the past.
A drop of water mixed with black crystals landed on the back of his hand and melted instantly.
That night, he had a dream.
In his dream, he heard his wife gently say to him, "You burned the words, but I remember them."
The next day, the man rushed home like a madman, pulled out his only remaining diary from under his bed, and drove to the site of the old letter-burning station.
He lit the diary, and flames rose.
At the very moment when the flames were at their strongest, a clear set of his wife's footprints from her youth appeared on the charred ground.
The footprints walked step by step toward the fire, lingered in front of the flames for a moment, then slowly retreated and finally disappeared.
From the shadows in the distance, Lin Yi witnessed it all.
He did not stop him, but after the man left, he silently walked to the circle of pottery shards he had set up and expanded each shard by one foot.
The seventh night, at exactly midnight.
Where the black crystal oil lamp was buried, a seedling sprouted from the soil.
Its stem is as black as charcoal, as if formed from ash, but strangely, its leaves radiate a flowing golden light with distinct veins.
This wheat seedling exhibits a surprising counterintuitive characteristic: it dislikes sunlight and instead grows fastest during the darkest hour of midnight.
Lin Yi slowly approached, extending his scarred hand to gently touch the dark stem of the wheat seedling.
A tearing, burning pain shot through his palm and instantly flooded his brain.
Countless figures he had once abandoned to save flashed before his eyes—the child whose night watchman's lamp he had blown out, the comrades he had considered "necessary sacrifices" during the mission… But this time, there was no resentment on their faces; instead, they all said to him in unison:
“You didn’t abandon us, you remember us.”
In an instant, the burning pain disappeared, replaced by a warm current.
At the top of the black wheat stalk, a thin crack quietly appeared, releasing a wisp of gray mist.
The mist condensed in the air, slowly transforming into the shape of the night watchman's lamp that he had once blown out.
In the lamplight, the wick that had long been extinguished suddenly burst into flame with a "poof".
Ivan's whisper, like a surge of subterranean fire, resounded clearly deep within Lin Yi's consciousness: "Node Ninety-Three... has learned to light lamps with ashes."
Lin Yi gazed at the jet-black wheat seedling that was growing vigorously in the darkness, flames dancing on its golden leaves.
He withdrew his hand, placing his palm on the cold ground, wanting to feel the power of this new life.
However, the moment his palm touched the soil, his brow furrowed slightly.
He sensed an extremely faint yet continuous echo coming from deep underground.
It wasn't a sound, but rather a steady and powerful pulse, as if some enormous living thing was slowly adjusting its breathing beneath the concrete jungle of the city, along with the growth of this wheat seedling.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com