In just one week, this deathly silent city announced its awakening in a strange and vibrant way.
On the war-torn exterior wall of the city library, ferocious ivy grew wildly, and on each new leaf, pale gold veins were outlined—upon closer inspection, they turned out to be strings of long-forgotten library card numbers and a blood-red overdue date.
On the abandoned lawn of the municipal hospital, dandelions bloomed overnight, their fluffy seeds filling the air. When the wind blew, countless seeds scattered in the air, forming a clear Morse code, repeating endlessly, conveying a simple message: "Please live." Meanwhile, on the playground of the Third Middle School, tenacious little grasses sprouted from the cracks in the cement. When someone curiously pulled them up by the roots, they were horrified to discover that their roots were tightly wrapped with a faded red scarf that should have been buried in the old days of thirty years ago.
Lin Yi stood in front of the light screen in the central control room, his fingertips tracing over the real-time high-definition photos transmitted back by drones.
The data stream refreshed like a waterfall, and all the clues pointed to one conclusion: he succeeded, and he failed.
Seed Liquid-01, the liquid that carries the old woman's lifelong memories, has been completely integrated with the "city memory network" buried deep underground through the city's underground water system.
It no longer needed him to water it at specific locations, but instead began an autonomous, disordered "sowing" process, yet imbued with a certain mysterious logic.
This city is telling its own story through the language of plants.
It was on this day that Chu Yao appeared for the last time at the ruins of that dilapidated house.
Her figure was thinner than ever before, as if a gust of wind could blow her away.
In her hands she held an invisible lamp, her movements gentle and solemn, as if she were holding the most precious treasure in the world.
She walked to the section of the broken wall where the old woman used to hang her oil lamp and gently placed the invisible "lamp" on it.
There seemed to be a faint warmth in the air.
“Some light doesn’t need to have a form,” she said softly, as if speaking to Lin Yi, but also as if speaking to herself.
The moment her words fell, her figure transformed into countless tiny specks of light. Instead of dissipating, she silently merged into the earth beneath her feet, into the breeze that swept across the ruins, and into the pulse of the city's ubiquitous collective memory, just as water flows into the sea.
Lin Yi understood that she had made her own choice—no longer acting as an independent "messenger," but instead completely integrating her own consciousness into the river of urban memory, becoming the flowing memory itself.
He didn't try to stop him, but silently walked forward and carefully buried the rusty, broken lampshade of the oil lamp he had always treasured into the soil in front of the house.
Then, he found a relatively flat stone slab in the ruins, stood it in front of the mound, and used his military knife to carve a line of words: "There were people here, who did not want the house to collapse and the lights to go out."
The city's transformation continues.
Lin Yi accessed the city's dynamic surveillance footage, and an even more peculiar phenomenon came into his view.
As midnight falls, more and more surviving citizens emerge from their hiding places like sleepwalkers, unconsciously yet purposefully heading towards the newly emerging memory-planting points.
They don't touch or destroy; they simply sit quietly for a while under the vine-covered walls of the library, by the dandelion fields of the hospital, or beside the cracks in the school playground. Then they leave quietly before dawn, unaware of what happened when they wake up the next day. They only feel that a long-standing sense of oppression and emptiness deep within their hearts has been quietly filled in a corner.
Even more astonishing changes have occurred among those who were once "night listeners".
Some of them began receiving "replies" in their dreams.
It was no longer just snippets of words from the dead, nor did it contain the memories they had heard.
That voice was a voice from the deepest part of their own hearts, a voice they themselves had never heard before.
Some people dream of their childhood selves, questioning why they gave up painting; others dream of arguing fiercely with someone who looks exactly like them, eventually reconciling, waking up in tears, their long-standing inner conflict suddenly resolved.
"I see." Lin Yi muttered to himself as he looked at the analysis report.
Seed Liquid-01 not only fosters the release and commemoration of lost memories, but also acts as a catalyst, unlocking the closed hearts of survivors and forcing them to begin a belated yet crucial self-dialogue at the moment when they resonate with the collective memory of the city.
“…Silence…is…no longer…empty…” Ivan’s whispered words came through the sensors. The heaviness and stagnation of the past disappeared, and it became lighter than ever before, like a stream flowing gently among pebbles.
This gave Lin Yixin an idea.
He restarted the long-dormant "Silent Sanctuary" archives declassification project, but this time, in a completely different way.
He performed high-precision scanning on all the countless unmailed letters he collected during the apocalypse, but the data was not entered into any supercomputer.
He found an old-fashioned mechanical typewriter and placed it in the center of the pumping station.
A wheat seedling, grown using Seed Solution-01, has its thick roots wrapped around the pipes connecting the typewriter keys like nerve cords.
By capturing the ley line vibrations transmitted by Ivan, the root system will drive the buttons to re-type out the contents of those letters, word by word.
Every night, the typewriter would automatically print out a page of a letter.
Without a signature or recipient, the thin sheet of paper would slide out of the paper dispenser after it was typed and lie quietly at the entrance of the pumping station, left to be blown by the night wind.
Lin Yi believes that the emotions and memories contained in these words will, through this method, re-enter the pulse of the city.
On the seventh night, a strange change occurred.
At midnight, the old typewriter suddenly went berserk, striking the keys rapidly. The rhythmic "click, click, click" sound was replaced by a rapid, violent "tap-tap-tap-tap"!
Lin Yi suddenly jumped up from his cot and rushed to the monitor screen.
He saw that the typewriter was not printing out the contents of any of the letters he had typed in.
A completely new line of text, never before seen, appeared at the top of the paper:
We are not coming back; we are growing into a new wall.
Lin Yi's pupils contracted sharply. He immediately checked all the systems, but the alarm system was completely silent, with no signs of external intrusion.
He rushed down into the ground and arrived at the pumping station, where the paper with the startling handwriting lay quietly on the ground.
Instead of picking it up, he slowly squatted down and placed his palm on the metal base of the typewriter.
At that moment, he felt a subtle yet firm pulse emanating from inside the machine, from the roots of the wheat seedlings that entwined it, and from the deeper underground.
The feeling was like a huge heart clumsily and painstakingly learning how to beat.
It was as if the entire city was trying, for the first time, to breathe in its own way through this ancient machine.
"Stop all manual intervention," Lin Yi commanded into the communicator, his voice trembling slightly. "Maintain basic monitoring, highest privileges, and observe silently."
The next morning, as the first rays of sunlight pierced the horizon, Lin Yi stood in front of the pumping station, and the sight before him made him hold his breath.
That wheat seedling, which was originally just an exceptionally thick one, grew to nearly three meters tall overnight, becoming a small, graceful tree with a canopy.
Most incredibly, its roots are exposed on the ground.
Those tangled roots no longer resembled plants, but rather presented a precise, miniature architectural structure—he could clearly discern the outline of the dilapidated building, the entrance to the air-raid shelter in Unit 91, and even the shadow of the water pump station itself.
They are no longer phantoms of memories, but real entities “built” from living plant roots!
Lin Yi suddenly had a sudden realization.
He realized that true reconstruction is never about repairing things that are already broken.
Instead, it allows those experiences, pains, and hopes that were "on the verge of collapse" to become nourishment, growing from the ruins into a completely new structure capable of supporting the future.
He took out the last empty photo frame from his pocket; it was his last thought.
He didn't include any photos; he simply placed it gently in the shadow of that strange little tree.
The midday sun shines through the branches and leaves of the new trees, casting dappled light and shadow in the center of the picture frame.
A miracle happened.
Within that patch of light and shadow, countless overlapping and intertwined figures slowly emerged—the old woman lighting the lamp, the warrior writing a letter in the "Silent Sanctuary," Chu Yao, and even himself, as well as many more faces whose names he couldn't recall but were incredibly familiar with.
They were all smiling, and their eyes were all looking in the same direction—ahead.
Ivan's whisper, rising slowly from the deepest part of the earth, was no longer a stream, but more like the first rumble of spring thunder, clearly resounding in Lin Yi's mind:
"Unit Ninety-One... will sprout within the first new wall."
Lin Yi raised his head and looked at the outline of the old city in the distance.
Overnight, everything changed.
Those points that were once merely coordinates for memories have now likely evolved into something he could never have imagined.
The light of dawn pierced the last vestiges of night, gilding the newly born, wondrous land beneath his feet with a golden hue.
He had to go and witness with his own eyes what kind of new dawn was breaking on this land.
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