...a rich and complex tapestry of life.
At that moment, my first thought was: This wall-talking plant is showing me a dog's perspective... Does this mean that this phenomenon is happening everywhere?
I immediately retrieved all the data from the thirty-seven "silent light stations" in the city.
There is indeed a pattern to follow.
Every time the lights flash automatically, there will be heavy rain or fog.
Each such activation is related to the evacuation ninety years ago.
It suddenly dawned on me: they weren't just replaying memories; they were completing that journey.
I must see it with my own eyes.
I went to the abandoned railway bridge.
I know that place used to be a refugee camp, and I feel... that's right.
I stood in the pouring rain, waiting.
Then they came, a pack of dogs, silhouetted against the storm.
Watching them move, I felt my heart tremble.
They kept tapping the cement ground with their claws, the rhythm of which was the same as "Hometown Song".
Then, a path of light shone, and a golden line extended out, shimmering in the rain.
When I responded with a rusty bell, the light path lengthened, confirming my theory that animal memory can actively repair broken paths.
That's amazing!
Next step: Conduct controlled experiments.
I installed “earth sound sensor panels” at seven historical breakpoints, places marked by loss and suffering. Each sensor panel flashes the symbol of “Night Listener”.
It was those dogs again, carving out paths and completing loops in places where human memory had faded.
A beautiful and vibrant wallflower bloomed directly from where a dog had urinated.
The implications of this are shocking.
I revised my assumption: walking itself is a form of energy input.
Then, conduct social experiments.
Nine empty lampposts; the city pleads: "Light them up." The initial attempt failed.
The sense of emptiness was very strong.
Then... he came.
A scavenger, his face etched with the marks of time.
“I have no name,” he said, “but I’ve carried people along this road for thirty-seven years.” The lights came on, connecting to a hospital in the distance.
Abstract things are connected with concrete things.
Back at the nursing home, Mrs. Chen seemed to be in a dream as she fiddled with the wheat grains.
She is creating patterns.
The pattern resembles the path a dog has walked, and the root system of a plant.
The path is etched into their very bones.
I need to know more.
I looked at the data on "twin lights," a record of urban public lighting: "low lights" (animal paths) were more active and vibrant than "high lights" in human memory.
That night, I returned to the Malt Ruins.
As night falls, even the soil itself is moving.
A new path appeared, a thin, winding trail like an earthworm.
It connects to the resonant well.
I touched the ground with the transparent wheat stalk and heard some new sounds—the rustling sound of something moving underground.
"So even the life underground... is remembering us."
This sudden realization was like a lightning bolt tearing through the fog in Lin Yi's mind.
He almost instinctively rushed back to the console, his fingers moving so fast on the virtual keyboard that they left afterimages.
The nighttime geomantic data from all 37 silent stations across the city flooded into the central processor like a burst dam.
The data model jumped and reorganized wildly on the screen, eventually solidifying into a picture that sent chills down his spine.
The light filaments, those memory veins that should have lit up in response to human narratives, have long since become restless.
In the dead of night, when no one is around to interfere, especially on nights of torrential rain or thick fog, they seem to extend and explore silently, as if they were creatures with their own consciousness.
The fine lines formed by the convergence of light points, avoiding the obstruction of modern buildings on the city map, stubbornly extend forward along the tracks of some long-lost streets and alleys.
That posture didn't seem like it was playing a fixed video, but rather like it was carefully "avoiding obstacles and moving forward".
Lin Yi quickly retrieved the city's weather records from the past century, and an astonishing coincidence came to light.
The severe weather that caused the most intense filament activity almost perfectly coincided with the apocalyptic evacuation period ninety years ago.
Back then, countless people fled in panic amidst the turmoil, and many perished along the way.
He stared at the interplay of light and weather data on the screen, his throat dry. Finally, he uttered a very low murmur, as if afraid of disturbing something slumbering: "They are not reproducing memories...they are retracing the path they didn't finish back then."
The next day, the predicted downpour arrived as expected, with large raindrops pounding against the window, making a dull drumbeat.
Lin Yi put on a waterproof jacket, took a high-precision infrared recorder, and drove straight to the abandoned railway bridge in the south of the city.
This place was once the largest temporary refugee camp during the war. Ninety years later, it is overgrown with weeds and no longer has any light stands for the silent light stations.
He crouched behind a broken wall at the bridgehead, rainwater dripping down his hat brim, icy cold.
Time ticked by, and as the midnight bells faintly rang out on the other side of the city, a sudden change occurred!
Without warning, two parallel paths of light appeared on the ground beneath my feet, amidst the mud and gravel.
A high rail, about knee-high, casts a faint, intermittent light, as if it might go out at any moment.
The other low-orbit track, close to the ground, was exceptionally clear and continuous, with flowing light and incredible stability.
Lin Yi held his breath and zoomed in—that clear low-trajectory light path was actually formed by a group of stray dogs walking in the rain!
There were about seven or eight dogs in the pack. They didn't bark or make a fuss, and silently walked along the unseen path.
Upon reaching the gap where the bridge broke, all the stray dogs seemed to receive a silent command and stopped in their tracks.
The lead black dog raised its front paw and slammed it heavily on the ground three times.
The rhythm, steady and powerful, was exactly the same as the prelude to "Homecoming Tune" that Lin Yi had heard in countless fragments of his memory!
Lin Yi's heart began to pound.
He took out a rusty object from his pocket—a dried, rusty stalk of a wheat ear found at the malt site.
He mimicked the rhythm from his memory, tapping the stone in front of him three times with the stalks of a wheat ear as a response.
The moment the knocking sound ended, the previously clear low-orbit light path that had broken the bridge suddenly shone brightly!
The light filament seemed to be infused with new energy, suddenly extending forward, crossing the broken chasm, and pointing straight to the other side of the bridge—where the old site of the shelter was now just a leveled open space.
It's done!
Lin Yi clenched his fists tightly.
His hypothesis was confirmed: these animal memories do not only mechanically remember the way, but they can also actively repair broken light paths under specific environmental stimuli!
To verify this groundbreaking discovery, Lin Yi selected seven historical breakpoints formed during the city's transformation over the next two days: old riverbeds that had been filled in, ancient alleyways that had been replaced by high-rise buildings, and old market sites that had been covered by cement squares.
He secretly installed ground-sounding sensor panels in these places without any light source, and used special tools to carve faint, almost imperceptible symbols of the Night Listener on the rough surface of the panels.
Late on the third night, the report arrived.
The system's backend was frantically popping up alarms, as seven sensor panels simultaneously captured multiple sets of data on claw-like attacks, sniffing, and regular detours.
Then, a shocking scene unfolded in the infrared surveillance footage.
On either side of the fractures severed by modern cities, delicate filaments of light emerge from the ground, as if guided by an invisible hand, precisely connecting together to form complete memory loops.
The most astonishing scene occurred at the third break point, which was an old alleyway that had been demolished.
On the edge of a sensor panel that a stray cat had repeatedly marked, a tiny wall-flower, about the size of a palm, quietly grew out of the soil!
Its roots are embedded in the deepest part of the cat's urine, naturally formed by the most primitive life markers.
Looking at the data on the screen, Lin Yi formed a bolder conclusion in his mind: the Well of Memory has evolved, transforming the act of "walking" itself into a way of inputting energy.
As long as there is life carrying that obsession from the bloodline, stepping onto that ancient road, even without lamps or storytellers, the light of memory can be ignited out of thin air!
He decided to launch a radical pilot program, codenamed "The Lamp Without a Master".
At the ends of nine paths lit spontaneously by animals, he set up the simplest empty lamp stands, without any complicated interactive interface or explanation of the process, only a line of text on the base: "If you walk this path, light one."
On the first day, nobody paid any attention.
The next day was still deserted.
Passersby cast curious or puzzled glances, but no one touched it.
On the third day at dusk, a ragged old scavenger pushed his creaking cart and stopped in front of one of the lampposts.
He stared at the words for a long time with his cloudy eyes, then stretched out his calloused and dirty hand and silently pressed the light switch.
The light fixture did not light up; it only emitted a soft confirmation sound.
A staff member responsible for recording approached him and asked for his name and story. The old man shook his head and said in a hoarse voice, "I don't have a name. They all call me Old Guai. I've been carrying the people I've taken in on this road for thirty-seven years."
Before the staff could ask any more questions, the old man had already pushed his cart and walked away unsteadily.
However, that very night, the light source of the lamp that the old man had lit experienced an explosive surge!
The beam of light was no longer thin, but transformed into a torrent that instantly broke through the original path restrictions and connected all the way to the entrance of the old emergency room of the municipal hospital several kilometers away!
It was as if every life the old man had carried on his back over the past thirty-seven years, their weight, their breaths, were awakened at this moment and flowed into the long river of memory.
Deeply shocked, Lin Yi returned to the nursing home.
As soon as he entered, he saw Granny Chen sitting on the floor in the corner, taking out the ears of wheat one by one from the candy box, intently arranging them into a complex circular pattern on the floor, while humming an off-key nursery rhyme.
Lin Yi approached and crouched down to examine it closely.
Upon seeing this, his blood seemed to freeze.
The arrangement of those wheat grains, seemingly chaotic, was completely consistent with the bifurcation angles, extension arcs, and converging nodes he had seen in the data model, as well as the trajectory of the dogs walking around the lamp stand!
“Grandma…” he called softly.
Grandma Chen raised her head, a mysterious, childlike smile appearing on her aged face: "Do you know? Back then, dogs didn't eat malt. They only needed to smell the scent to know where to go... The path was imprinted in their bones."
The road is etched into my bones.
These words struck Lin Yi like a heavy hammer blow.
He suddenly stood up and quickly retrieved the backend data of all the "twin light stands" (i.e., light stands that simultaneously possess the high-orbit light path described by humans and the low-orbit light path trampled by animals).
The result made him gasp – in the past week, the activation frequency and light intensity of the low-orbit optical path had surpassed those of the high-orbit optical path, and the vast majority of activations occurred in the dead of night when human activity was almost nonexistent.
That night, Lin Yi once again came to the Malt Ruins alone.
This is the very beginning, and the core of all the mysteries.
He stood before the mutated wall-talking plant, the night wind carrying the scent of earth and decaying plants.
Suddenly, he caught a glimpse of something unusual out of the corner of his eye.
At the base of that newly sprouted wall plant, the moist soil seemed to come alive, gently shifting on its own.
It was as if something was moving inch by inch underground.
Lin Yi stared intently at the ground, forgetting even to breathe.
A moment later, a string of extremely tiny points of light seeped out from the ground, leaving a discontinuous footprint on the surface.
The footprints were neither human-shaped nor any known animal form; they were small and dense, winding and twisting, like the tracks left by an earthworm.
However, this trajectory, with an unbelievable precision, perfectly connected the seven long-abandoned resonance wells within the site.
Lin Yi slowly took out the completely transparent ear of wheat and gently touched it to the ground.
The moment they made contact, the clear footsteps inside the wheat ears were suddenly mixed with a completely new, teeth-grinding sound—the rustling sound of countless tiny particles rubbing, squeezing, and passing through.
Immediately afterwards, an extremely slight yet incredibly muffled tremor came from the depths of the earth beneath his feet, as if the ancient roots of the entire city were stretching their limbs in the darkness.
Lin Yi's pupils contracted sharply. He slowly straightened up, looked around at the sleeping city beneath his feet, and finally, his gaze fell back on the unprecedented underground streak of light that was extending towards the city center.
He murmured in a voice only he could hear:
"So... even the life underground is remembering us."
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