Lin Yi woke up.
The news spread like wildfire throughout the college.
But he did not pick up the broom again and return to the golden wheat field as everyone expected.
On the contrary, the first thing he did after recovering from his illness was to close his bedroom door.
One day, two days, three days.
The wooden door was tightly shut, and there was no sound, as if the person inside had once again fallen into some kind of deep slumber.
This unusual silence carried more weight than any loud pronouncement, weighing heavily on the hearts of all the students.
After the initial commotion and discussion subsided, a peculiar sight appeared at the edge of the wheat field.
The first student, a usually quiet boy, silently picked up an unused broom at dusk on the third day and walked to the section of road that Lin Yi had once swept, clumsily starting to sweep.
He didn't say anything, he just repeated that simple action.
His actions were like a pebble thrown into a lake, instantly creating ripples.
Soon, a second and a third student joined in.
They spontaneously began taking turns guarding and cleaning the path leading to the wheat field.
At first, everything seemed chaotic and disorganized.
Some people get up early but only rush through the most conspicuous and easily "seen" sections of the road; others work hard in front of others, but once no one is paying attention, they hide in the shade to slack off.
Students delivering meals from the cafeteria also began to linger a little longer in front of Lin Yi's door, calling out loudly, "Lin Yi, your meal is at the door!" as if waiting for a response, a confirmation.
Chu Yao stood by the window high up, taking in all of this.
She keenly sensed that a subtle "service competition" was quietly brewing among the people.
They still yearn to be named, to be thanked, and to receive even a casual nickname like "food delivery hero" from that mysterious "observer."
Goodwill is being quietly eroded by utilitarianism, and a new class, under the guise of "serving Lin Yi," is being formed invisibly.
She couldn't let this trend continue to veer off course.
With a slight movement of his fingertips, his mental energy, like the most exquisite carving knife, curled up a wheat leaf in the courtyard.
The wheat leaf swirled and floated lightly over the windowsill, landing precisely on the tightly closed window frame of Lin Yi's room.
Under the moonlight, the naturally formed veins on the leaves miraculously formed a clear question mark.
This was her inquiry, and also her reminder.
On the morning of the fourth day, just as dawn was breaking, the wooden door that had been tightly closed for three days was finally pushed open with a creak.
All eyes that had been observing from the shadows instantly focused.
Lin Yi came out.
His face was still somewhat pale, but his eyes were clearer than ever before.
He wasn't holding a broom in his hand, but rather tightly gripping half of a worn-out, faded bowl.
He didn't go to the wheat field, nor did he go to the cafeteria to collect his "love meal." Instead, amidst countless astonished gazes, he walked straight to the long-abandoned old mill on the back hill of the college.
It used to be a wartime granary, but now only ruins remain, piled with rotten debris and thick dust.
Lin Yi kicked open the rickety wooden door and dragged out a rusty, almost fused-in-the-mud hand-cranked stone mill through the fog of cobwebs and dust.
He placed the stone mill in the open space in front of the mill and took out a small bag of wheat grains from his pocket—the ones he had secretly saved while he was ill.
Then, under the puzzled gazes of everyone, he bent down and began to silently push the heavy millstone round and round.
"Creak...creak..."
The harsh, grating friction sound shattered the morning's tranquility.
Grayish-white dust flew up as the millstone turned, filling the air around him and making his figure appear both blurry and resolute.
He didn't say a word, his eyes fixed intently on the gaps in the millstone, watching the coarse wheat bran and flour being ground out little by little.
His movements were slow, even somewhat laborious, but each cycle carried an undeniable sense of rhythm.
For the entire morning, he repeated this monotonous action.
Only after all the wheat grains had been ground did he straighten up and carefully pack the coarse, unsifted flour into a worn-out cloth bag.
Then, he found a piece of charcoal and wrote a line on the bag: First bag of unclaimed flour.
After doing all this, he carried the bag of flour to the bustling entrance of the canteen, gently placed it on the top step, turned and left without speaking to anyone.
The bag of flour lay there quietly, like a silent declaration, questioning everyone who passed by.
Late that night, when the area around the mill returned to silence, a thin boy, the first student to voluntarily sweep the floor, quietly used a wheelbarrow to push his family's small, equally dilapidated stone mill to the mill's entrance.
He didn't disturb anyone, but simply left a note next to the millstone, on which was written in crooked handwriting: "I also want to grind some flour that nobody wants."
The next day, there were more things at the entrance of the mill.
Two older students brought over a broken sieve and a wooden shovel with a broken handle.
Lin Yi still did not appear, did not accept these things, and did not offer any praise or thanks.
He only returned to the mill at dusk and nailed a plank to the mottled wall.
On the wooden board were three lines of text written in charcoal:
Anyone is welcome.
Anonymous.
Don't let it get cold.
The moment the planks were nailed in, Ivan's long-silent underground whisper, like a bell tolling across time, quietly surfaced in the depths of Lin Yi's mind: "The eighty-fourth node... the echo of 'Nameless Labor'."
A week later, the abandoned mill had been completely transformed.
It became a peculiar, spontaneously formed nighttime gathering place within the college.
During the day, the students still attend classes and train, but as night falls, people always come here in twos and threes.
Some people silently pushed the millstone to grind the collected wheat into flour; others found tools and quietly repaired the broken sieves and tools; there was even an old woman with white hair, whose family member was unknown, who would light a small fire in the corner every night to cook a pot of steaming ginger soup for those who returned home late at night, exhausted.
There are no organizations, no leaders, no points, and no honor roll here.
No one recorded who did what and who didn't do anything.
People come and go, and the only communication might be a tacit nod or a bowl of hot soup handed to them.
Lin Yi only comes once a night.
He never presided over anything, nor was he ever absent.
He would add a piece of dry firewood to the fire, change the water in the pot of ginger soup, and straighten a stool that had been sat on crookedly.
He was like a most dutiful night watchman, silently maintaining the operation of this space, and then quietly leaving.
One night, a fierce wind blew and a torrential downpour began.
The mill’s dilapidated roof began to leak, and cold rain dripped onto the freshly ground flour sacks.
"Quick! Quickly, seize and protect the grain!" someone shouted.
Instantly, everyone in the mill sprang into action.
They frantically moved sacks of flour, using their bodies and rags to cover the leaks. Without any command or orders, they formed an astonishing tacit understanding amidst the chaos, their movements as synchronized as if they were one person.
In her mental world, Chu Yao clearly sensed this unprecedented collective brainwave—a kind of "uncommanded collaboration."
There is no leader, yet everyone is of one mind.
Lin Yi, however, did not participate in the massive effort to salvage the grain.
He squatted in the most inconspicuous corner, silently catching the rainwater dripping from another crack in the roof with that half-broken bowl.
One drop, two drops, three drops... He was focused, as if performing some kind of sacred ritual, carefully pouring the collected rainwater into an inconspicuous earthenware jar next to him.
At that moment, three muffled tremors suddenly came from the earth, evenly spaced, like the heartbeat of a giant.
Ivan's warning!
Lin Yi's pupils suddenly contracted; he sensed something was wrong.
The tremor did not originate from the surface, but from deep beneath the mill.
The next day, instead of grinding wheat, he brought several bold students to survey the foundation of the mill.
He did not use his extraordinary senses to investigate, as that would have made him the sole "prophet" once again.
He found a dusty earthenware urn in a corner, turned it upside down on the ground in the center of the mill, and then had the students take turns bending down and pressing their ears tightly against the cold walls of the urn to listen to the sounds coming from underground.
"I can't hear anything..."
"Only a buzzing echo..."
The students tried one by one, and all shook their heads in disappointment.
When it was the turn of a timid girl with freckles, she trembled as soon as she put the ear to her ear, and her face turned deathly pale.
She suddenly raised her head and said in a trembling voice, "I...I heard...it sounds like someone is humming?"
singing?
Lin Yi gestured for her not to move, then closed his eyes and focused all his attention on the faint sound waves.
It was an extremely old, simple, and slightly melancholic tune, disorganized and intermittent, as if someone unconsciously hummed it when they were extremely tired and lonely.
It is not a song known to anyone, yet it is deeply etched in the memory of this land.
In Lin Yi's mind, fragmented historical images flashed by in an instant—amidst the flames of war, a thin, nameless female worker, in the same darkness, in this mill, was desperately pushing the millstone while shedding tears, humming her own little tune to resist fear and hunger.
This song has long been forgotten in any historical records.
That night, a piece of music, written in charcoal, appeared on the wall of the mill.
It was that little tune from underground.
Below the sheet music, Lin Yi added only one note: "The flour she ground fed seventeen wounded soldiers."
The next morning, when the first rays of sunlight shone into the mill, the wall had already changed.
The sheet music is surrounded by countless messages written in various handwritings by later generations.
“My grandfather said that he used to keep watch here when he was a child and heard similar sounds.”
"My mom seemed to hum this tune when she was putting me to sleep..."
"Salute to the unsung heroes!"
At the very bottom of all the comments, someone wrote a soul-searching question in a childlike yet remarkably forceful handwriting:
"Who can we feed with the flour we grind today?"
Lin Yi stood in front of the wall, gazing at that sentence for a long time.
He slowly reached out and blew out the oil lamp that had been burning all night beside him.
Outside the window, the first rays of morning light pierced through the dust and shone precisely on the huge stone mill in the center.
At some point, someone used extremely fine techniques to carve a tiny, almost eternal symbol, "∞," onto the rough stone surface of the millstone.
Lin Yi's gaze fell on the symbol, his pupils contracted slightly, and he muttered to himself, his voice so soft that only he could hear it: "So the eighty-fourth unit... wasn't asking about 'dedication,' but about 'continuation.'"
That mysterious symbol shimmered faintly in the morning light, like a puzzle from a deeper time and space, quietly waiting to be solved.
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