As dawn broke, a misty fog enveloped the ruins of the old city.
Lin Yi's figure moved among them, his military boots making a crisp, lonely sound as they stepped on the gravel.
This is the seventh planting site, a dilapidated building that was cut in half during the war, with its steel bars pointing towards the sky like ribs.
Right at the base of the exposed foundation of the dilapidated building, a cluster of never-before-seen plants sprouted from the soil.
Its stems are extremely thin, with a sickly grayish-green color. Every short distance, the stem nodes swell unnaturally, resembling a string of tiny Adam's apples.
When the wind blows, dust rises from the ruins, and the slender stems sway gently in response.
A soft, rustling sound, more subtle than the chirping of insects and more elusive than a whisper, entered Lin Yi's ears.
He stopped abruptly, his gaze locking onto the source of the sound like that of a hawk.
He slowly squatted down, held his breath, and carefully pressed his ear against the cold, rough ground.
The earth became the best stethoscope, and the intermittent sounds became clear and distinct through the solid soil.
"...I didn't cry that day...I was afraid that if I made too much noise...it would wake her up..."
That sound!
Lin Yi's heart clenched.
That hoarse, suppressed, and extremely tired male voice was the recording left by Li Weiguo, the last missing firefighter in the "Siege of the Red Flame" seven years ago, through a walkie-talkie before his death.
However, the sentence Lin Yi heard had never appeared in any publicly available files.
Those were deliberately erased; they were the hero's most tender and painful last words.
He slowly stood up and stared at the strange plant.
It is not "making a sound" because its structure is insufficient to vibrate the air.
A word flashed through Lin Yi's mind in an instant.
He didn't rush to take samples, but quickly jotted down in his hardcover notebook: "Ruins of a dilapidated building. Suspected to be a resonant cavity for residual bioelectric signals from underground, rather than a vocal organ."
As night falls, the pulse of the city sinks into darkness.
Lin Yi's communicator suddenly rang; it was a panicked report from the city archives' night shift clerk.
Eerie whispers emanated from a long-abandoned ventilation shaft behind the building.
However, when he retrieved the surveillance footage above the well, there was nothing else in the picture except for the ivy climbing all over the well wall and swaying in the wind.
When Lin Yi arrived at the scene, a cold wind was blowing back from the bottom of the well, making the ivy leaves rustle.
The whispers were muffled and indistinct, mixed with the sound of the wind and the rustling of the leaves.
Instead of rushing down the well, he took out a thin piece of glass from his toolbox—it was originally the glass of an empty picture frame, which he had polished until the edges were smooth.
He gently pressed the glass shard onto the cold metal opening of the ventilation shaft, much like a doctor pressing a stethoscope against a patient's chest.
A miracle happened.
The glass plate and the wellhead form a perfect resonant plane, filtering and amplifying the regular vibration frequencies generated by the airflow in the vines.
The indistinct whisper instantly became clear, a crisp yet stubborn girl's voice: "Borrowing card number 307, you still owe me a thank you."
Lin Yi immediately contacted the central database.
The records were quickly retrieved: the owner of library card number 307 was named Chu Yao, who dropped out of school ten years ago due to unbearable school bullying and has been missing ever since.
The last book she borrowed was "Stars and Dust," which she has yet to return.
Lin Yi walked into the quiet, deserted library and found the dusty poetry collection among the vast sea of books.
He put it back in its original empty spot on the bookshelf and left a note next to it with only five words: "Returned, you're welcome."
At midnight, the moonlight was like water.
A phantom, almost blending into the moonlight, slowly appeared outside the library.
Chu Yao's figure overlapped and intertwined with the swaying vine shadows on the wall, as if she herself were part of this shadow.
She stretched out her almost transparent hand and gently stroked an ivy leaf.
The instant her fingertips touched it, the vines on the entire wall began to tremble violently and wildly, as if struck by an electric current.
This time, they no longer uttered single sentences, but rather a series of hurried, chaotic, and overlapping names—"Zhang Wei," "Liu Fang," "Wang Jianjun," "Li Xuemei"... Each one is a surname from the list of missing persons after the war, whose families have yet to claim them.
Chu Yao withdrew her hand and whispered to Lin Yi, who was standing in the shadows, her voice devoid of joy or sorrow: "They are not calling to be remembered; they are practicing how to be heard."
Lin Yi remained silent for a long time, as if those countless names were still echoing in his ears.
He turned and issued a perplexing order via the internal channel: "Notify the Municipal Engineering Department to have 'Someone once remained silent here' engraved on the back of every seat in all public reading areas and bus shelters throughout the city. No explanation needed, execute immediately."
At the same time, Ivan's ley line monitoring system sounded an alarm again.
The whisper from the depths of the earth's crust, for the first time freed from the chaotic noise, presented a rhythmic quality almost like the pulsation of life, as if an ancient heartbeat and a cold pendulum were intertwined.
After hours of data analysis, Ivan finally translated the rhythm into fragmented words: "...the wall...is...learning...to...speak..."
Lin Yi immediately compared the report with the acoustic anomaly location map of the old city area.
An astonishing conjecture formed in his mind.
He led a small team into the abandoned underground pipe network in the old town.
At specific corners and confluences, he discovered that the intricate network of pipes, under certain air humidity conditions, would form huge, natural Helmholtz resonators.
These resonating cavities can amplify the faintest vibrations from underground—those sounds "remembered" by the earth—to a level that is recognizable to humans.
Instead of ordering any modifications or blockages to the pipeline network, he made a more ingenious decision: to adjust the timing and water volume of the municipal automatic sprinkler system so that the soil moisture content around the pipeline network was always maintained at a delicate critical value.
In this way, the "wall language" will not disturb citizens during the day, but will only appear quietly like a ghost in the dead of night when all is quiet.
On the third night, an elderly teacher with gray hair walked tremblingly into the temporary command post of the water pumping station.
He was one of the rotating members of the "Night Listeners" project, responsible for recording unusual sounds emitted by the city at night.
“I…I heard my father’s voice last night…” Tears welled up in the old man’s eyes. “It was in the old wall of my house…he only said one sentence…I’m sorry.”
Lin Yi didn't say anything to comfort him. He simply picked up a charcoal pencil and a rubbing of old wallpaper with mottled patterns that he had just taken from the old teacher's wall and handed it to him.
The old man understood what Lin Yi meant.
He leaned over the desk, his trembling hand gripping the pen, and began to write.
He wrote all night long, pouring out all the grievances, longings, and eventual reconciliation that had been building up over half a lifetime onto his pen.
At dawn, he handed the reply, which could never be sent, to Lin Yi.
Lin Yi carefully folded it into a small paper boat and placed it in the drainage ditch in the corner of the wall.
The first stream of urban wastewater in the early morning carried the paper boat towards that bottomless underground network made up of pipes, water flow, and memories.
The next morning, Lin Yi came to the small tree that had mutated from a wheat seedling once again.
He was surprised to find that the newly formed microstructures at the base of the tree roots were no longer the outlines of the remains of buildings or bridges.
Instead, there are intertwined rings of sound wave patterns, like solidified sound waves.
The intricate yet orderly patterns resemble a three-dimensional dialogue that has been paused.
He instinctively reached out and gently touched the rough tree trunk with his fingertips.
In that instant, an extremely slight vibration came from deep within the tree trunk, traveling along his fingertips to the nerve endings.
The vibration was very weak and did not produce any sound, but it had a strange rhythm, like a babbling infant clumsily practicing how to move its vocal cords.
Almost simultaneously, Ivan's whisper came again from the depths of the earth, this time with a steady and clear voice, without any pauses:
"Node 91... Begin learning grammar."
Lin Yi's fingers froze in mid-air.
He suddenly realized that all his previous actions—returning the books, inscribing the text, and sending a reply—were not merely one-way appeasement and commemoration.
They are input, feeding, and interaction with this vast and silent "memory life form".
Now, this behemoth that is learning grammar seems to be no longer satisfied with simply replaying the past.
It began... to try to respond.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com