The hovering finger finally trembled violently due to an unspeakable fear and did not press down.
Lin Yi withdrew his hand, as if burned by the black "sound wound," and took half a step back, his chest heaving violently.
That wasn't audio; it was a silent scream, a physical wound left by emotions on the real world!
He immediately pulled up all the surveillance footage from the old town, and the time was locked on the night before the writing appeared on the wall.
Soon, a thin figure appeared on the screen.
It was Zhou Zheng, the man who knelt for three years in front of the municipal hospital, the father who lost his only daughter in a medical accident.
In the surveillance footage, Zhou Zheng stood quietly in front of that old wall, like a mournful stone statue, for a full twelve minutes.
He didn't speak, didn't move, and even his breathing was so faint it was almost negligible.
He simply stood there, as if pouring all his sorrow, regret, and resentment into the cold bricks.
Lin Yi's heart sank.
He used his access privileges to retrieve Zhou Zheng's recent psychological assessment report and an electronic diary marked as "private".
When he opened the encrypted diary and saw the entries from that night, a chill ran from his tailbone straight to the top of his head.
“I never said she was my daughter… I was afraid they would say I was being clingy, afraid they would laugh at my pain. I only said, ‘I hurt a child.’ But the wall knew. It actually knew.”
I see!
Despite the immense grief and external pressure, Zhou Zheng never used the word "daughter" to refer to his deceased child in any public or private setting.
He used the phrase "that child".
This is a traumatic form of self-protection, a subconscious act of cutting off.
However, the memory of the old city, this vast network of plants named "Ivan," never hears the language of the surface.
It heard the name that Zhou Zheng suppressed deep in his heart, a name that even he himself dared not easily touch.
It revealed the father's overwhelming love and regret behind his twelve-minute silence.
"This is no longer listening, this is... seeing through people's hearts!" Lin Yi muttered to himself, his face turning extremely pale.
A terrible thought exploded in his mind.
He turned abruptly and rushed to the other side of the archives, where all his duty records from his years as a "Night Listener" were kept.
He frantically searched and finally found a fragment of a pottery jar that he marked as "abnormal".
This fragment comes from an ancient kiln site before the old city was renovated, and it is one of the reference objects for his spiritual resonance.
Records show that whenever he was on duty late at night, especially when he felt his mental energy fluctuating violently and needed to suppress the terrifying power originating from the "Master of Time and Space" profession, a tiny crack that was almost imperceptible to the naked eye would always appear on this hard pottery shard.
In the past, he only thought it was a coincidence caused by the overflow of spiritual energy.
But now, looking at the cracks spreading like a spider web, he was finally forced to admit for the first time a chilling fact: Ivan was not only listening to the voices of the entire city, but it was also "listening" to him every second!
It heard his mental struggle every time he suppressed his power, and it heard the terrifying corner deep in his heart that he dared not ignite, called "Master of Time and Space"!
These cracks are the marks of his silent cries, faithfully recorded by Ivan!
Just then, the coordinates of the pump station ruins flashed with an unusual halo on the monitoring map.
Lin Yi's pupils contracted, and he immediately switched the scene.
Under the midnight moonlight, Chu Yao stood quietly in the center of the ruins.
Unlike her usual semi-transparent state, tonight her outline was edged with a faint golden rim, like ears of wheat, as if she were moving from illusion to reality.
She neither looked at the monitor nor spoke.
She simply squatted down slowly and gently placed her fair palm on the cracked ground.
Buzz—
A low hum, imperceptible to the ear yet capable of sending shivers down the spine, spreads out.
Centered on her, the entire area of the pumping station ruins, and even the underground root network further away, all the growth activities of plants, came to an abrupt halt in that instant.
It was as if the pulse of the entire city had fallen into absolute stillness under her soothing touch.
Lin Yi instantly understood what she meant.
This is not an attack, but a warning.
A crystal-clear signal: when the "listeners" begin to hear what has been deliberately "hidden," the fragile balance maintaining the city's peace is about to be broken.
An unprecedented sense of urgency gripped Lin Yi.
He rushed into his lounge and took out an empty photo frame from the deepest part of his locker, a frame he had never shown to anyone or used before.
He stared intently at the blank space, his fingers turning slightly white from the pressure.
After a long silence, he picked up a pen and wrote down his deepest, most untouchable obsession on the backing paper of the photo frame:
"If I could restart that day, would I choose not to awaken my profession?"
After finishing writing, he didn't hesitate at all. He grabbed his coat, rushed out of the monitoring center, and headed straight for the ruins of dilapidated houses in the west of the city, which were classified as the most dangerous area.
Beneath a crumbling door at the ruins, he dug through the soil with his bare hands and buried the picture frame that held his greatest secret deep beneath the threshold.
He wanted to test for himself how Ivan would respond when he planted the deepest secret.
Three days later, Ivan's leyline whispers took on a clear, negative tone for the first time.
The sound was no longer a vague stream of information, but a low growl carrying a certain will, echoing in Lin Yi's mind:
"...No...don't...hide..."
Lin Yi's spirits lifted!
He immediately began to investigate the resonance nodes throughout the city based on the direction of this wave of will.
He quickly discovered three anomalies.
In three inconspicuous corners of the city, the roots of newly sprouted wheat seedlings did not spread out like normal plants, but instead presented a strange spiral closed shape, coiling in circles, resembling three thin chains.
They are "hiding" themselves, mimicking human repression and isolation.
Lin Yi did not intervene roughly.
He returned to the base and retrieved three metal fragments, each the size of a fingernail, from a sealed supply crate.
That was the only remnant that had been peeled off from his old "Time and Space Dominator" armor and remained to this day, and it was also the only trace of his "golden finger" that remained on his body.
He went to the three locations and gently placed the metal fragments next to the spiral roots.
A miracle occurred seven days later.
The surfaces of those three seemingly indestructible metal fragments showed tiny cracks identical to those on the pottery jar shards.
The root chains beside them slowly loosened, one ring at a time, and a few drops of crystal-clear liquid seeped from the tips of the roots.
Lin Yi used sophisticated instruments to collect these liquids.
The analysis results left him speechless—its chemical composition was almost identical to the tears of repentance shed by humans when they are filled with extreme remorse and have achieved liberation!
Ivan is not only imitating repression, but also learning... liberation.
Before the shock of this incident had subsided, an uninvited guest arrived late at night.
The visitor was Wang Yong, a volunteer who had participated in the early "Night Listeners" project but later withdrew due to excessive mental stress.
His face was deathly pale, and he was trembling all over, as if he had seen a ghost.
“Advisor Lin…” his voice trembled, and he stammered, “I dreamt of my mother last night. She was standing by my bed and said to me… ‘I know you burned that letter.’”
Wang Yong's lips trembled even more violently: "But...but that letter...I've never seen it! My mother didn't leave me any letters before she passed away!"
A glint flashed in Lin Yi's eyes. He didn't offer any further explanation, but simply said calmly, "Come with me."
He took Wang Yong back to the "Night Listener" shelter from back then.
It was a mezzanine space built inside an underground air-raid shelter.
Relying on his memory, Lin Yi walked to an extremely secluded corner, took out a resonant plate as thin as a cicada's wing, and gently attached it to the wall.
He tapped lightly with his fingers.
"Thump...thump...thump..."
The infrasound waves emitted by the resonant plate penetrate deep into the wall.
A few seconds later, a very faint "click" sound came from the deepest part of the wall cavity.
Immediately afterward, to Wang Yong's utter astonishment, a letter, slightly yellowed from years of use, slowly slid out from an almost invisible crack in the wall and gently landed on the ground.
Wang Yong picked up the letter with trembling hands. The signature on the letter was his mother's extremely familiar handwriting.
The letter contained only one line:
"Child, believe me, I burned it, but the ashes are still inside the wall."
In an instant, all of Wang Yong's taut nerves snapped.
He recalled that before his mother passed away, she had indeed murmured something about "a letter that I can't let you see," which he had always thought was just his mother's delirium during her illness.
It turned out that, in order to protect him, his mother burned the letter that might cause trouble, but she couldn't bear to part with that last connection, so she hid the ashes of the letter in a crevices in this wall!
Ivan overheard this secret. Through a dream, it revealed the truth to him.
"Mom—!" Wang Yong knelt down, clutching the empty letter tightly to his chest, and burst into tears. Years of pent-up doubts and longing finally overflowed at this moment.
Lin Yi silently stepped back, leaving him some space.
He knew that from tonight onward, the definition of "the night listener" would be completely rewritten.
The next morning, on his way back to the monitoring center, Lin Yi suddenly stopped in his tracks as he passed the flowerbed at the intersection.
In the center of the flower bed, a small tree that was originally unremarkable has sprouted a pair of strange structures from its roots that have emerged from the ground.
The structure resembles an ear, but it doesn't face outwards; instead, it curls inwards, like a pair of wooden ears listening to their own pulse.
A strong premonition gripped Lin Yi.
He slowly reached out his hand, his fingertips gently touching the pair of "ears".
The moment it was touched, the vibration frequency of the entire trunk of the sapling suddenly changed!
A familiar, powerful, and ancient heartbeat surged into his senses through his fingertips!
Thump! Thump! Thump!
This heartbeat...
Lin Yi's pupils shrank to the size of pinpoints, and his blood seemed to flow backwards at that moment.
This was exactly what he heard in that bizarre and fantastical spacetime rift when he first awakened the [Master of Time and Space] profession... the sound of his own heartbeat!
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