On the city's 19-point monitoring map, the points of light representing memory fluctuations are flashing in a strange pattern.
Most of the buildings remained dim, except for the nineteen headquarters buildings, whose lights shone brightly.
However, on this silent star map, some subtle changes are quietly spreading along undercurrents imperceptible to human senses.
Lin Yi raised his privileges to the highest level and accessed the big data on the activity trajectories of stray animals throughout the city.
In an instant, an invisible net covered the entire city map.
Countless tiny cursors represent each stray animal implanted with a chip. Their movement trajectories should be chaotic and disorderly, radiating in a jumbled pattern as they search for food and shelter.
But at this moment, the network's structure has undergone a subtle distortion.
Around the nineteen headquarters, all the wildcat cursors deliberately avoided a circular area with a radius of about fifty meters, as if there were an invisible barrier there.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, under the lamppost of the nameless bridge underpass where he had extinguished the flame of his memory, dozens of cursors representing stray dogs gathered unusually, residing there like believers.
Even more perplexing is that above the ruins of the clock tower in the city center, monitoring points representing flocks of pigeons circled densely and lingered for a long time. This area was once a concentrated burning site for birds during a major plague decades ago.
These animals are using their behavior to create a city map that humans have never been able to understand before.
Lin Yi's heart clenched.
He grabbed the rusty copper bell with a remnant of a wheat ear embedded inside and drove straight to the bridge arch.
The night wind was cold and gloomy, blowing through the empty bridge arch with a mournful echo.
He stood before that cold lampstand, and in the surrounding darkness, several pairs of eerie green eyes lit up warily.
He didn't speak, but simply shook the copper bell in his hand three times.
There was no crisp bell sound, only the barely audible rustling of the remaining wheat stalks inside the cavity.
However, this almost inaudible sound was like a silent edict.
The three pairs of eerie green eyes instantly lost their hostility, and the three skinny wild dogs raised their heads in unison. Their gazes were no longer on him, but fixed intently on the lamp stand beside him, as if it were not a piece of cold steel, but a door to some other world.
Lin Yi lowered his voice, as if speaking to an old friend: "You guys want to go home too?"
A heavy silence filled the air.
His response was a low, muffled sob.
One of the black dogs, with a faded red rope tied around its neck, hesitated before slowly stepping forward. Finally, under Lin Yi's shocked gaze, it gently placed a muddy front paw on the cold edge of the lamp base.
That gesture was filled with endless longing and anticipation.
Lin Yi did not leave that night.
He quickly brought in several high-precision infrared thermal imaging monitoring devices, which were arranged in a triangular formation to firmly lock the light fixture in place.
He wanted to see for himself how the echoes of that memory manifested in the physical world.
Time passed second by second until the clock struck 12:45 a.m.—the third quarter of the Zi hour, when Yin energy was at its peak.
On the monitor screen, an astonishing scene unfolded.
Centered on the lamp stand, countless faint, invisible energy threads appeared out of thin air in the surrounding air. They flowed slowly as if they were alive, forming a strange path.
These filaments are remarkably uniform in height, only thirty centimeters off the ground, which is exactly the eye level of a medium-sized dog.
The filamentary path meanders through underpasses, across overgrown weeds, and finally points to a long-abandoned garbage transfer station not far away.
Lin Yi's brain worked at lightning speed. He immediately hacked into the municipal archives system and retrieved all the information about the missing scavenger from twenty years ago.
The records show that the route the old man took to scavenge every day was exactly the same as the path of the light silk in front of him!
An even stranger scene appeared at the end of the light path.
At the site of the former garbage dump, a semi-transparent dog silhouette outlined by filaments of light is faintly visible.
It lay quietly, and around its neck, a faded red rope made of light was clearly visible—exactly the same one worn by the black dog under the bridge with its paws on the lamp base!
A bold hypothesis took shape in Lin Yi's mind: animal memories are not inscribed in the form of human language or images, but are solidified in the environmental magnetic field in a way that combines "behavioral inertia" and "emotional anchors".
Although they cannot speak, when a specific environmental resonance—such as that bell or that lamp stand—is activated, this long-forgotten memory can be "replayed".
To verify this hypothesis, Lin Yi immediately contacted the city's animal protection station and, through emergency authorization, borrowed a special dog.
It is one of the offspring of the stray dog adopted by the old scavenger in the archives. To facilitate tracking, the staff at the conservation station also tied a red rope around its neck as a marker.
He took the obviously agitated puppy to the old site of the garbage dump.
As soon as it set foot on this land, the dog began to circle around and growl softly, as if it felt some kind of invisible pressure.
Lin Yi didn't try to comfort it. Instead, he took out an old-fashioned windproof oil lamp from his pocket and lit it with a "snap" of a match.
The moment that warm, orange flame lit up, a miracle happened.
The frantic puppy suddenly quieted down. It raised its head, sniffed the air in confusion, and then, as if pulled by an invisible rope, it slowly spread its limbs and walked forward step by step along the light path that only Lin Yi could see on the monitor.
Its gait, the angle at which it lowered its head, and even the occasional pause to sniff, were all completely identical to the movements of the semi-transparent afterimage in the surveillance footage!
Bridges of communication must be built!
A glint flashed in Lin Yi's eyes.
He needs a stronger "emotional anchor," a beacon that can resonate with all similar memories.
He thought of Granny Chen's candy box, and of that memory of waiting.
He took out the transparent ear of wheat, found the "Daqianmen" cigarette brand that the old man often smoked in the archives, got some tobacco, and finally mixed in some ordinary dog food scraps.
He put these three things—wheat ears representing a warm gift, tobacco representing the owner's scent, and dog food representing sustenance—into a small cloth bag and made it into a unique "scent beacon."
Late on the third night, he hung the beacon on the light fixture in the bridge arch.
The results exceeded expectations.
Not only did the original three stray dogs arrive as scheduled, but more than ten unfamiliar stray dogs also emerged from the shadows of the city.
They come from different directions, but share the same goal.
They didn't fight or bark; they simply paced slowly around the light stand where the scent beacons hung, as if performing a silent and ancient ritual.
At the same time, alarms blared at the monitoring center of the 19th location.
On the city memory light map, centered on the bridge arch, the single light filament network suddenly expands explosively, instantly growing seven brand new branches!
These seven beams of light, like giant blood vessels, menacingly pierced every corner of the city, and without exception, their destinations were all places where mass animal deaths had occurred in the city's history: the long-abandoned slaughterhouse in the south of the city, the underground laboratory that was shut down twenty years ago, and the old granary where highly toxic rat poison had been used on several occasions...
Lin Yi gasped.
He finally realized that the scale and depth of animal memory far exceeded his imagination.
This is not just an individual's longing, but a collective trauma that affects a large group of people across generations!
Without the slightest hesitation, he immediately launched a bold plan codenamed "Lamp for All Living Beings".
He ordered his subordinates to set up “low-light lampposts” similar to those at the bridge arch lampposts overnight at the seven newly appeared animal memory hotspots on the map. The flames were deliberately lowered so that they emitted only a faint light, and each lamppost was hung with a scent beacon that he had made himself.
On the first day of the plan, an old cat with one blind eye came to the lamp stand at the site of the former slaughterhouse in the south of the city.
It did nothing but lie quietly in front of the lamp stand, curled up, motionless all night, as if guarding something.
The next morning, when the patrol team went to check, they discovered an unbelievable scene.
Right where the old cat had lain, a tiny wall-flower, no bigger than a little finger, sprouted from the cold steel roots of the lamp stand!
The petals have not yet opened, but within the silver veins, the flowing images of memory are crystal clear—it is an overhead view of a herd of cattle being driven by iron bars and forced step by step into a slaughterhouse, filled with despair and panic.
Late that night, Lin Yi personally inspected the ruins of the underground laboratory.
There was also a low-light stand here, and a group of stray cats sat silently around it.
Suddenly, as if receiving a unified command, all the stray cats raised their heads and looked up at the dark night sky.
Lin Yi's heart stirred, and he looked up following their gaze.
Upon looking at him, his blood seemed to freeze.
Above the thick clouds, a huge outline formed by countless points of light appeared—it was the shape of a giant dog and a giant cat snuggling together, and in their background was a huge animal shelter that was burning fiercely!
At that very moment, the ground beneath his feet trembled very slightly, and a low hum, seemingly from the depths of the earth, pierced through the soil and steel, sounding faintly.
The sound was like a dog barking, a cat meowing, or even more like a sigh from all the creatures in the city that had been suppressed for countless years.
Lin Yi subconsciously took out the ear of wheat that had become crystal clear.
He listened intently, and the lonely footsteps belonging to Granny Chen still lingered within the ears of wheat. But now, in the gaps between those footsteps, the sound of countless tiny, dense claws lightly treading the ground had been mixed in.
He slowly raised his head, looking once more at the sorrowful scene in the night sky, and murmured to himself, "So they always remembered... but no one ever understood their path."
The "Sharing Lights with All Living Beings" project ran quietly for seven days.
Seven light stands, seven beacons, like seven faint stars, continue to burn in the city's darkness.
Lin Yi checks the surveillance footage every day, watching the animals go from initially probing, to gathering, and finally settling down.
Everything seemed to be on track, and the memory light network covering the entire city had also stabilized.
However, at midnight on the seventh day, just when Lin Yi thought everything would return to a new balance, all the light spots on the city wall plant distribution map on his table, without warning, changed from silver-white, representing "stability," to a deep dark gold, representing "unknown mutation."
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