Those aged hands were etched with the lines of time, and the knuckles were slightly deformed from years of using a cane.
These hands had sewed clothes for him, cooked soup for him, and when he was young, they had stood firmly in front of an out-of-control bicycle, protecting a path to safety for him.
At this moment, Lin Yi was sitting not far away. The air was filled with the bitter scent of fallen leaves from the old locust tree. He could feel something invisible slipping away from Granny Chen, like the last grain of sand in an hourglass.
Finally, Granny Chen's voice rang out, as soft as a sigh, yet it clearly reached Lin Yi's ears.
“Last night…I dreamed of him again.” She didn’t look up, her gaze still fixed on the old pocket watch that had stopped ticking. “Ninety years, a full ninety years, and he’s still trapped in that bus that never reaches its stop.”
Lin Yi's heart sank.
He lowered his head, his gaze falling on Granny Chen's feet.
The light filaments there were thinner than usual, and they trembled slightly with anxiety, yet were powerless to project any image.
Finally, the brightest strands of light seemed to have exhausted their strength, and slowly and gently wrapped around her smooth wooden cane, like an invisible hand silently supporting the frail old woman.
The next morning, while it was still barely light, Lin Yi deliberately took a long detour to reach the mottled wooden door of Granny Chen's house.
He took out a packet of perilla plum candy wrapped in kraft paper from his pocket and gently placed it on the stone steps in front of the door.
Beside him, a small note was weighed down by a pebble, with Lin Yi's neat handwriting on it: "Same as always, no pickled vegetables."
He knew Granny Chen's rules; she never accepted things from people without a reason.
But this time it's different; it's about "returning a favor."
He remembered that after she stood guard for him that time, she did the same thing, handing him a bowl of cucumber salad sprinkled with perilla and plum powder, saying, "Cure your heat, don't be shy, we're neighbors."
Having done all this, Lin Yi did not linger and turned to disappear into the morning mist.
From the window of his attic, one could see a corner of Grandma Chen's doorway.
He didn't turn on the light; he just waited quietly.
As night fell, just when Lin Yi thought the bag of candy would remain untouched outside the door, something unexpected happened!
A sliver of light, thinner than a hair, trembled as it peeked out from the gap beneath the door.
Like a timid yet curious tentacle, it hesitated in the air for a moment before finally locking onto the bag of candy.
The light gently wrapped around a corner of the parchment, making no sound, yet with an undeniable force, slowly, little by little, dragged the packet of candy into the crack of the door and disappeared into the darkness.
The next day, when Lin Yi went for his morning exercise again, the candy bag in front of the door was indeed gone.
Instead, there was an upside-down white enamel mug, and underneath it, a small bunch of dried wallflower petals were neatly arranged.
Those were the only flowers in Granny Chen's yard, and legend has it that they could hear the memories left behind in the walls.
This is how she accepts favors and reciprocates.
Lin Yi breathed a sigh of relief, but the unease in his heart did not dissipate.
Sure enough, on the morning of the third day, the bench beside the pebble path was empty.
Grandma Chen did not appear.
An ominous premonition gripped Lin Yi's heart.
He immediately changed direction, quickened his pace, and quietly arrived outside the courtyard wall of Granny Chen's house.
The gate to the courtyard was ajar, and he peered through the crack.
Grandma Chen sat alone on a small stool in the center of the courtyard, her back view desolate.
She didn't look at the sky, nor did she tend to the flowers and plants. Instead, she used the tip of her cane, which had been supported by the light, to draw the same pattern over and over again on the damp mud—an upside-down bowl.
She kept murmuring the same sentence, her voice broken and hollow: "I guarded the road... I guarded the road for them my whole life... But who remembers me? Who still remembers me..."
The moment she finished speaking, the ground beneath her feet suddenly began to surge violently!
Countless fine white mycelia sprouted wildly from the soil. They were no longer faint filaments of light, but transformed into surging streams of light that burst forth from the ground!
The streams of light intertwined and converged in the air, instantly creating a dazzling, three-dimensional image.
It was an old alleyway ravaged by war. The young Granny Chen, with her hair in braids, walked side by side with a young man in a coarse military uniform.
The man was her husband, who died in another forgotten battle.
They looked a little nervous, but their eyes were incredibly determined. Each of them held an empty bowl and was about to collect their relief rations.
The image lasted only three seconds before vanishing like a dream.
The surging mycelium receded into the ground like a tide, leaving only a whisper that seemed to come from the depths of the earth, echoing in the silent courtyard: "You've always been here."
Grandma Chen in the courtyard was stunned. For the first time, her cloudy eyes regained focus.
Lin Yi, standing outside the wall, took in everything.
He did not choose to appear at this moment.
He silently stepped back, returned to his home, and went straight up to the attic.
He carefully removed a broken brick from an inconspicuous flowerpot.
That was the only relic left from his mother's former residence, and it also carried a faint trace of the "origin" of the place.
That night, Lin Yi came to Granny Chen's courtyard gate again.
He gently placed the broken piece of wall brick on the stone steps at the entrance to her courtyard, with a note next to it, the words on which were written with even more force than before: "The source is not just one."
In the attic's surveillance footage, he saw a thick mycelium, brighter than ever before, solemnly curling up the wall brick and slowly dragging it into the yard.
Instead of bringing the wall bricks into the house, it carefully placed them under the rattan chair where Grandma Chen often sat, as if burying a new "lampstand," a new coordinate of memory.
On the morning of the fourth day, that familiar figure finally reappeared beside the pebbly path.
Grandma Chen is back.
The cane in her hand was wrapped with a brand-new blue cloth strip, and her eyes were no longer empty, but clear and calm like never before.
She walked to a clump of wallflowers, but instead of sitting down, she slowly squatted down and gently stroked the most beautiful flower with her hands, which were no longer trembling.
“You remember me,” she said softly, as if speaking to the flowers, or perhaps to the earth beneath her feet, “and I remember you too.”
As soon as she finished speaking, a drop of crystal-clear dew slowly seeped from the heart of the flower she had been touching.
Dewdrops rolled down, landing precisely on her palm.
Grandma Chen looked down and saw that the reflection in that tiny drop of dew was none other than Lin Yi's back as he bent down to put down the bag of candy in the morning mist two days ago.
She was taken aback at first, then a knowing smile spread across her wrinkled face.
“So the ‘waterers’,” she murmured to herself, “were also being watered.”
At the same time, in the attic, Lin Yi was organizing the bookshelves.
Suddenly, the heavy ancient book with silver-patterned grass leaves tucked inside opened with a "whoosh" without any wind.
The book stopped on a brand new blank page. Pale gold ink, as if alive, slowly seeped from the paper fibers, forming a line of text:
"The bus she dreamed of has finally arrived at its destination."
Lin Yi closed the book, and a huge weight was lifted from his heart.
He walked to the window and looked into the distance.
At the end of the pebbled path, Granny Chen was leaning on her cane, slowly walking forward step by step.
Behind her, the threads of light that had once illuminated her path followed her like a shadow, but this time, they were no longer there to support or guide her.
They simply followed, tightly intertwining into a flowing carpet of light, as if using the power of the entire world to declare to her: We recognize every step you take.
Lin Yi withdrew his gaze and turned to look at his small attic.
For some reason, he felt that the air seemed different than usual.
The ancient book lay quietly on the table, and the surrounding silence seemed to breathe and warm itself.
This little haven that he thought belonged only to himself seemed to have been quietly marked by that invisible, enormous web of memories because of his repeated "watering" of others.
An unprecedented feeling enveloped him.
He was no longer just a bystander, an outsider who knew the rules.
He felt that he, along with the attic, had become part of this living history.
And this is just the beginning.
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