Before the ripples of the well water had completely subsided, the crystallized wheat flower that rose from the abyss cracked open with tiny fissures the instant it touched the sunlight, and then silently sank back into the darkness, like a dream unwilling to be seen through.
The next morning, the air was still slightly cool with moisture.
A bronze mirror appeared on the stone bench beside the well pavilion without warning.
It wasn't smashed to pieces, but rather shattered in an almost ritualistic manner, with all the fragments spreading outwards in a radial pattern. Only the center, the place that best reflects people's hearts, was empty.
Lin Yi crouched down, his fingertips not touching her, but his gaze was as precise as a scalpel.
He could see clearly that the edges of each fragment had tiny, inward-curving scratches.
This was not the result of an external impact; it was broken apart inch by inch by someone's bare hands with resolute force.
Chu Yao's voice sounded behind him, as light as a breeze, yet every word struck his heart: "Some people heard the freedom hidden in the words 'not fix it,' but they were also afraid that they would really become a broken mirror from then on, never to see their whole image again."
Fear and desire clashed silently on this fragmented ground.
Lin Yi stood up but did not order the collection of the fragments.
He indifferently ordered the guards around him, "Bring clay."
The guards quickly brought over moist clay.
Lin Yi did not attempt to piece them back together. Instead, he instructed the guards to seal the fragments into a newly fired small pottery jar, keeping them exactly as they were originally broken.
The mouth of the jar was sealed with clay and it was eventually placed in the most inconspicuous corner of the well pavilion.
“It doesn’t want to be whole,” Lin Yi’s voice was calm and composed, yet it carried an undeniable authority. “Then let it remember forever how it shattered.”
This action was like an invisible decree, instantly turning the well pavilion into a forbidden area.
For several days in a row, the villagers preferred to take a long detour rather than approach the ancient well, as if what was sealed in the jar was not a broken mirror, but a contagious curse.
There was only one exception.
He was a thin boy who would come to the well pavilion every morning and sit quietly in front of the pottery jar for an hour, without saying a word, moving or looking, as if he were keeping vigil for someone.
He always wore loose, old clothes, but when the wind blew up his sleeves, you could vaguely see old bandages wrapped around his wrists.
Lin Yi did not disturb him, but simply ordered someone to retrieve the old files.
Page after page of yellowed paper pieced together a tragedy that had been buried in the dust of time.
The boy's father was a wartime dispatcher in charge of supplies to three villages. One wrong judgment, a mere deviation of a number, led to a ten-day food shortage in the three downstream villages.
In the post-war reckoning, he did not live to see trial. One morning, he committed suicide by disembowelment in front of a bronze mirror in his own home.
At the end of the file was a hastily written note: In his grief and anger, his son smashed everything in the house that could reflect a human figure, vowing "never to reflect a human figure again in this life."
Lin Yi understood.
The boy mistakenly believed that the broken mirror sealed by the well was him publicly judging his father's "crimes" in a cruel way.
In his eyes, that jar was a public instrument of torture.
Lin Yi still did not explain.
He simply stepped forward as the boy sat quietly once more and extended an invitation: "The abandoned observatory on the west side of town needs its ground repaired. I need someone to piece together a star chart using broken pottery shards." Looking into the boy's wary and hostile eyes, he slowly said, "Some ground is unstable; only by paving it with broken pieces can one walk on it with peace of mind."
The boy did not answer, but the next day, he appeared on the observatory.
It was a tedious and painful job.
Countless shards of pottery, with edges as sharp as knives.
The boy kept his head down and silently embedded the fragments into the grooves left in the ground.
His fingers were soon covered in cuts, new wounds overlapping old scars, but he seemed not to feel the pain, just mechanically and stubbornly piecing them together.
Lin Yi would occasionally come to visit, never offering guidance or urging anyone. He would simply stand quietly on the high place, watching that lonely figure, observing how broken things were being rebuilt from broken pieces.
The seventh day, at dusk.
The boy finally pieced together half of the star trail map.
He froze completely when the last piece of pottery was inserted.
Those winding lines, those few specially marked nodes... this is exactly the last ration route leading to death in his father's notebook!
He thought he had become numb, but when this route was presented to him in such a concrete way, the emotions that had been building up for years burst forth instantly.
His hands began to tremble uncontrollably, and his voice became hoarse and almost incoherent: "He's not a bad person... he just... he just miscalculated..."
The wind on the empty observatory shattered this explanation.
Lin Yi, who had appeared behind him unnoticed, nodded, his voice calm yet firm: "Only when a mistake is painful enough can it be called a choice. Otherwise, it's just an insignificant error." He crouched down to be at eye level with the boy, his gaze falling on the unfinished star chart. "Now, are you willing to let this chart remain incomplete forever?"
This is a more difficult choice than repair.
Completeness means acknowledging that the father's path ultimately led to that tragic end; incompleteness, on the other hand, is like a cowardly escape.
The boy remained silent for a long time, so long that the last ray of light on the horizon was about to sink below the horizon.
He suddenly stood up, picked up a blank ceramic shard without any patterns from the pile of rubble, and instead of filling in the broken star trail, he heavily embedded it into the end of the broken trail.
He picked up a sharp stone and, with all his might, carved four characters on the blank pottery shard.
There is no solution here.
The instant those four words were etched into Lin Yi's mind, Ivan's whisper, originating from the depths of the earth, resounded intermittently like cracked rock once more: "The eighty-ninth... node... is... in the 'unfinished diagram'..."
Lin Yi suddenly understood.
People's fear of "not being able to fix it" and their fear of "incompleteness" ultimately stem from their fear of being defined as "losers" by the world.
The crack on the crystallized wheat flower, the broken bronze mirror, the boy's father's suicide, and the boy's own vow—all these were fierce resistances against the definition of "failure."
The real solution may not be repair, but acceptance.
He immediately summoned all the survivors who had participated in major decisions during or after the war.
Among them were generals with outstanding achievements, as well as officials with tainted reputations.
Lin Yi did not conduct a trial or hold anyone accountable; instead, he gave each person an uncarved stone slab.
“You don’t need to write down your merits and demerits,” his voice echoed in the empty observatory, carrying a strange, comforting power. “Just carve a mark on it. A mark that represents the step in your life that you can’t turn back from, and that you least want to turn back from.”
The crowd exchanged bewildered glances, their expressions a mixture of surprise, disbelief, resistance, and relief.
Lin Yi picked up his own stone slab and, with his fingernail, cleanly and decisively scratched a slanted crack.
He didn't explain what the crack represented; he simply placed it silently at the highest point of the observatory, directly facing the star chart that was "unsolvable."
That diagonal crack resembled a scar, or perhaps a bolt of lightning.
That night, the boy dragged his tired body home, only to smell a burnt odor.
In the backyard, the firelight flickered, and his mother was weeping as she threw all of his father's belongings into the fire, one by one.
She wanted to burn the past, to burn away the memories that had caused her a lifetime of pain.
In the firelight, a perfectly intact bronze mirror was being licked by the flames.
That was the last mirror my father faced when he committed suicide, and it was also the only thing my mother couldn't bear to smash.
"No!" the boy roared, disobeying his mother for the first time.
Like a wounded beast, he rushed into the fire, ignoring the burning pain, and snatched the scorching bronze mirror.
His palms were scalded and bloody, but he clung tightly to the mirror, neither crying nor shouting.
He did not take the mirror back to the observatory, where it already had its own "incompleteness".
He staggered to a corner of the backyard, dug a hole, and buried the mirror, which had survived death and fire, deep inside.
Then, he planted a wheat seedling he had brought from the field on the newly covered soil.
The next morning, just as dawn was breaking.
Lin Yi arrived at the boy's backyard with a team of construction workers, claiming he wanted to reinforce the foundation of the area.
The excavator's cold, hard claws had just made their way into the ground when they "unexpectedly" stopped.
People gathered around, and there they saw that the bronze mirror was half-exposed under the dug-out soil. Sometime during the night, the wheat seedling planted last night had its delicate roots stubbornly burrowed into the soil and intertwined tightly with the mirror, like a pair of symbiotic lovers.
The roots spread across the mirror surface, like new blood vessels growing on a healed wound.
Lin Yi immediately ordered a halt to work.
Looking at the mirror entwined with life, he addressed all the villagers who had gathered around, declaring in a tone of announcement: "This place shall be named 'The Unhealed Garden'."
He had a stone tablet erected nearby, with only one sentence inscribed on it: "The wound here need not be fully healed, but it can grow."
Two weeks later, the star chart on the observatory was finally completed in the hands of the boy.
But he didn't make it perfect.
He deliberately left seven breaks in the entire painting.
He patched each tear with a special material: a rusty iron nail, a piece of rubble dug out of a trench, an old strip of cloth soaked in blood and dried by the wind...
Lin Yi walked up to the observatory and slowly ran his fingers over one of the broken sections.
He recognized the texture and color of the old strip of cloth; it was a piece of scrap torn from the first batch of relief packages sent to villages that had run out of food.
That night, the ancient well, which had been silent for a long time, began to ripple again.
This time, what floated up was not wheat blossoms, but a complete, crystallized wheat leaf.
Under the moonlight, the veins on the leaf were clearly visible, exactly the same as the incomplete star chart on the observatory, even the seven breaks were exactly the same.
Chu Yao stood by the well, looking at the incomplete star map floating on the water, and let out a long sigh.
"Unit 89... Finally, someone dares to let this world continue to turn, even with a flaw."
The night was deep, but the torches on the observatory were still burning.
In the town, some people who had been unable to sleep all night came out of their homes.
They did not go to the well, nor to the observatory.
They simply stood in their own yard, looking at the cracks in the walls, touching the dents on the corners of the table, and gazing at the old objects abandoned in the corners because of their imperfections.
In the darkness, their eyes subtly underwent a change.
An unprecedented idea, like a seed buried deep in the soil, began to stir in the silence.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com