His fingertips hovered over the cold control panel, his pupils reflecting the frantically pulsating stream of data.
This is no longer a simple information anomaly, but a blatant provocation against established physical laws.
Lin Yi took a deep breath, suppressing the wild beating of his heart, and almost instinctively pulled up the data from the ground vein microseismic sensors buried under the 37 "nameless path" lampstands throughout the city on the night the "River of Light Emerged".
On the screen, thirty-seven data streams flowed like trickling brooks into a vast ocean of data.
He set parameters, centering on the malt ruins, and precise the timeline to the exact moment the light point took off.
The next second, the entire data model was drastically restructured.
The unidirectional energy wave radiating outward from the site, as expected, did not appear.
Instead, a bizarre yet magnificent scene unfolded – the earth's veins were undulating in reverse loops!
Like a boulder thrown into still water, it doesn't create ripples that spread outwards, but rather waves that surge from afar towards the center, seven in total, crystal clear, as if the earth is taking a deep and orderly breath.
This is not the conduction of energy, this is... a summoning.
Lin Yi's back was instantly soaked with cold sweat.
He suddenly remembered something, and with trembling hands, retrieved the highest-precision 3D projection of the well core fragment from the encrypted storage.
The image freezes on the last moment when the mother carves words with her fingernails.
He zoomed in on the projection, focusing on the last stroke of the four characters "Don't forget me," that tiny, almost negligible finishing curve.
He compared the data model of this arc with the trajectory of the seven reverse ripples that eventually converged into the malt ruins tonight.
Buzz—
A soft buzzing sound, with an overlap of 99.9%.
A perfect match.
At that moment, Lin Yi felt as if all his strength had been drained, and he slumped into his seat, his mind blank.
Years of scientific understanding collapsed in an instant, replaced by an even more unbelievable yet perfectly reasonable truth.
He stared at the trace on the screen that matched his mother's handwriting, his throat dry, and he murmured in a dreamlike voice, a sound only he could hear:
"It's not that we're memorizing the road... it's that the road is looking back at us."
The next morning, before dawn.
Lin Yi's eyes were bloodshot, yet he carried an unusual excitement as he arrived at the "Relics Return Path" pilot project in the West District, holding a portable infrared recorder.
This is one of the first "unnamed paths" to be opened to the public. Last night, the area was crowded with people, and the relics left behind have already been cleared away by the patrol team.
However, in an inconspicuous corner, a worn-out black cloth umbrella lay quietly, its ribs rusted.
Strangely, this umbrella did not trigger a light path like other relics; in the system records, it was a "silent relic."
Lin Yi didn't touch it immediately. Instead, he squatted down and activated the recorder's high-sensitivity mode.
Under the infrared lens, he saw a strange sight: the morning dew condensed on the inside of the umbrella handle was not randomly distributed, but arranged into a string of barely visible light spots, like a silent code, firmly pointing to the abandoned river ferry crossing three kilometers away.
He immediately accessed the city's meteorological database and cross-referenced historical tidal records.
A startling discovery made his heart clench—the tide data at this time last night was almost identical to the tide data from ninety years ago, when refugees in the city crossed the river under cover of darkness to escape the war.
Lin Yi slowly reached out his hand, his fingertips gently touching the cold ribs of the umbrella.
The moment they made contact, a sudden burst of noise erupted from inside the transparent wheat stalk he carried with him—the device that could capture echoes of memories.
It wasn't some vague electromagnetic noise, but a crystal-clear sound from the past.
Splash... splash...
That was the sound of a wooden oar cutting through the water, heavy and rapid.
Then came the pattering of raindrops hitting the umbrella, and... the faint, deliberately suppressed cry of a baby.
The sound was so realistic that Lin Yi could even "hear" the mother holding her child's rapid heartbeat and her panting as she struggled to hold up the umbrella in the wind and rain.
The owner of this umbrella once used it to shelter the newborn in his arms for an entire night during that desperate torrential rain in the middle of the river.
Memories don't necessarily need to shine.
Some memories are too heavy, so they choose to remain silent, pointing the way home in a more secretive way.
To verify whether the autonomous mapping ability of these "silent relics" is widespread, Lin Yi made a bold decision.
He selected seven remote, unmarked paths with lampposts and had specially made "covers" installed overnight.
This cover, made of lead composite material, completely blocks all artificial light sources and optical observation, but retains the base's ability to sense earth vein fluctuations.
He wanted to see if these memories would resurface without any "observers".
Late on the third night, the results came.
Of the seven concealed lampstands, three of the internal relics spontaneously generated faint filaments of light in complete darkness.
In the surveillance footage, a broken wooden cane slowly traced a zigzag pattern on the ground.
Lin Yi pulled up the wartime map, and the trajectory was exactly the survival route that a wounded soldier had taken to avoid a minefield.
Elsewhere, a brass button without any markings attracted iron filings from the ground with its weak magnetism, which then arranged into a small star-shaped pattern of light in the darkness.
This star map perfectly matches the star navigation method passed down through generations of the city's "Night Listeners" family, used to orient themselves on moonless nights.
Standing in front of the massive surveillance wall, looking at these objects that were "telling" their own stories in the darkness, Lin Yi finally understood everything.
Memory never depends on the storyteller.
It is a fundamental existence comparable to gravity, and when the frequency of the environment resonates with it, it will reproduce the past through "existence itself".
This discovery inspired him to come up with an even more outrageous plan—the "silent pilot program."
He set up ten "empty platforms" in a desolate, abandoned garden in the north of the city.
There were no lights, no runes, and they didn't even accept any of the citizens' belongings.
These stone platforms are empty; the only "relic" is a leaf that falls randomly and is picked up daily by the patrol team from the garden.
He wanted to test whether memories could still be born from the purest natural objects after removing the element of "human-imbued meaning".
Time passed day by day, but the empty platform remained completely silent.
Just as the project team began to doubt whether the experiment was too far-fetched, a miracle occurred on the morning of the seventh day.
On the empty platform number one, the sycamore leaf that had been placed there the day before, with its dry edges, surprisingly revealed a wisp of light even finer than a spider's web.
The filament of light trembled and stretched out, winding its way to a former site five hundred meters away that had long since been razed to the ground.
According to city records, it used to be a school for blind children.
Lin Yi rushed to the scene immediately. He put on a high-powered microscope, squatted down, and almost pressed himself against the ground to observe the fallen leaf.
After magnifying it hundreds of times, he saw details that made his scalp tingle—the naturally formed veins and cracks on the leaves, their direction, branching, and turning, were exactly the same as the direction of the drainage ditch in front of the dormitory building of the school for the blind back then.
He suddenly remembered a school history record: that summer, after a torrential rain, the drainage ditch was filled with clean rainwater. The blind children could not see it, so they used their bare feet to step on the cold edge of the ditch, one after another, to fetch water and play in the ditch.
This fallen leaf happened to land at a corner of the drainage ditch from back then.
It remembered the path the children walked.
The news of the "fallen leaves growing on the path" spread like wildfire.
An elderly woman named Granny Chen, carrying a basket of dried wild chrysanthemums, found Lin Yi.
“Mr. Lin,” the old woman’s eyes were cloudy, but her voice was clear, “These flowers were picked from the hill behind our shelter. Back then, life was hard, and we couldn’t afford coffins for children who died of illness, so we used these flowers to cover their faces as a way of sending them off.”
She scattered the basket of dried wild chrysanthemums on the stone platform at the starting point of the "nameless path" in front of the nursing home where she lived.
That night, everyone witnessed the most tender and heartbreaking scene in history.
The light paths did not converge into one as usual, but instead sprouted silently from the pile of golden petals, and then gently divided into nine slender streams.
Each path of light was so light and so gentle, as if afraid of disturbing something.
They flowed slowly, eventually stopping in the open space in front of the nursing home. At the end of each of the nine light paths, a blurry shadow, only the height of a child, appeared.
The light and shadow stood silently, as if looking back at this world that was both familiar and strange.
A moment later, they all transformed into countless points of light, slowly rising into the air and disappearing into the night.
Meanwhile, the nursing home's nighttime health monitoring system recorded an astonishing scene: at the same instant the nine lights appeared, nine elderly people who had long been asleep and had all lived in that shelter all turned over in unison and uttered indistinct murmurs.
The lip-reading system captured the sleep-talking of one of the elderly women:
"Little sister, it's your turn to go home."
Lin Yi returned to the Malt Ruins once again. He needed a definitive answer.
The wall covered with newly sprouted plants continues to grow silently.
But this time, the images flowing through the silver veins of the plants are no longer limited to the scenes of the past.
It begins to reflect the "present moment".
Lin Yi could clearly see that in the image on the wall, a boy in a school uniform was squatting in front of an "empty platform" in a deserted garden in the north of the city, silently placing a pen with a broken nib on it.
As the pen began to extend its faint path of light, the leaves representing the wall-symbol plant in the image subtly turned toward the boy.
That posture didn't seem like recording; it was more like... watching.
Lin Yi's heart began to pound.
He slowly took out the transparent wheat stalk that he always carried with him, squatted down, and gently touched its tip to the ground of the malt ruins.
Familiar footsteps from the past sounded once again.
But just a second after the footsteps began, they suddenly stopped.
All was silent.
Just when Lin Yi thought it was all over, a very light, very close response, as if it were right next to his ear, was transmitted to his mind through the wheat.
That was not a sound, but an incredibly clear thought.
"I am here."
Lin Yi trembled violently and stood up abruptly.
It's not an echo, it's a response. It's not a memory, it's consciousness.
He suddenly understood.
This massive system, covering the entire city, has evolved from a passive memory repository into a living "being" with nascent consciousness.
It is learning, observing, and responding.
Forcible control will only stifle its growth and may even trigger unpredictable resistance.
We must let go.
He took a deep breath, connected to the central control center, and issued an order with unprecedented firmness that could overturn the entire project: "Supreme Directive. Effective immediately, all 'nameless path' lighthouses throughout the city will no longer be subject to scheduled patrols and will be replaced by a citizen self-governance model. Let everything return to its original state."
Upon receiving the command, Lin Yi felt an unprecedented sense of relief, but also a subtle unease.
He looked up at the city night sky lit up by countless points of light, as if he were gazing into the eyes of a massive soul that had just awakened.
He had just relinquished the reins, placing all his trust in the silent soul of this city.
However, the dreams of a newly awakened soul will not remain peaceful forever.
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