The moment he finished speaking, Lin Yi's aura seemed to solidify into an invisible blade, cleaving through the heavy night before him.
Without the slightest hesitation, he turned around and drove to the faintest and most desolate corner of the city—the East City Nursing Home.
According to data from the "Dark Light Survey" system, this place is like a forgotten depression, where countless decaying points of light reside, yet none of them can ignite.
His first target was the deepest point in the data depression, an elderly woman named Granny Chen.
The file states that Granny Chen is 90 years old, lives alone, and has been in the hospital for over ten years, but has never participated in any group activities.
She was like an isolated island, sitting by the window of her room every afternoon without fail, her gaze blankly fixed on the distance where there used to be an endless wheat field, now fragmented by the outlines of high-rise buildings.
When Lin Yi first met her, she was holding a rusty tin candy box, her fingers repeatedly rubbing the rough lid with such force that it seemed she wanted to imprint her fingerprints into the texture of the metal.
"Grandma, would you like to talk about the past?" Lin Yi spoke softly, afraid of disturbing the old woman who was immersed in her own world.
Grandma Chen's eyes flickered, but she didn't focus on him. She simply tightened her arms around the candy box and shook her head.
Her refusal was silent, yet more resolute than any words.
Lin Yi did not insist.
He knew that some memories were locked, and the key had long been thrown into the abyss of time by its owner. Using brute force would only cause the door to crack, and the things inside would be destroyed.
He silently took out a small, exquisite copper oil lamp from the box he carried with him, which looked as if it had stepped out of an old era, and gently placed it on Granny Chen's windowsill.
From that day on, he would light the oil lamp remotely at midnight every day. The flame of the wick was small, but warm and steady, until it was extinguished remotely at dawn the next day.
The light was faint, yet it precisely gilded the window with a layer of gold.
One day, two days, three days... for a full seven days, the nursing home caregivers all felt that this young man was a bit strange, but seeing that he had no ill intentions towards the elderly, they let him be.
On the morning of the eighth day, as the first rays of sunlight pierced the morning mist, a strange change occurred.
The tin candy box, which had been silent all along, suddenly made a very faint "click" sound.
The sound was as clear as thunder in the silent room.
The lid popped open slightly on its own without anyone touching it, leaving a barely perceptible gap.
A faint yet incredibly pure aroma of maltose wafted out from the cracks, instantly filling the entire room.
Lin Yi received an alert from the light trace sensor at almost the same time.
He immediately retrieved the nursing home's nighttime surveillance footage from the past seven days.
In the video, an astonishing scene unfolds—every midnight, at the very moment the oil lamp is lit, several tiny specks of light silently appear under Granny Chen's bed.
Those specks of light seemed to have a life of their own; they carefully, at a speed imperceptible to the naked eye, crawled along the corner of the wall all the way to the windowsill.
They dared not approach the flame, but instead devoutly circled the base of the oil lamp three times, and then, like melting snowflakes, quietly disappeared into the air.
Lin Yi immediately input the fluctuation frequencies of these light filaments into the analysis system.
The moment the device popped out, his heart skipped a beat!
Frequency matching degree of 99.8% - the core fluctuation during the heyday of malt flower core!
The catastrophe that swept through the entire city ninety years ago!
He suddenly stood up and began typing rapidly on the keyboard, bringing up deeper city archives.
Among the dusty pile of electronic archives, he found a scanned copy of the admission registration book of the orphanage in the west of the city from ninety years ago.
The first name on the list, written in a childish yet clear and strong handwriting—Chen Xiaosui!
The wheat field that Granny Chen gazed at every day was marked as "the backyard of the West City Orphanage" on an old map from ninety years ago!
The mystery has been solved.
Grandma Chen is Chen Xiaosui.
That candy box contained the wheat fields and sunshine of her entire childhood.
But the memory remains dormant, the light threads too faint to coalesce into a complete picture.
Forcibly waking the elderly will only cause irreversible damage to their mental health.
Lin Yi needs a gentler and more ingenious "proxy carrier".
He contacted the municipal agricultural science station and applied for a specially cultivated wild wall-writing plant.
The silvery veins of this plant have a natural affinity for memory light trails.
When he brought the flowerpot to the nursing home and transplanted the plant into the soil on the balcony of Grandma Chen's room, a miracle happened.
The moment the plant's roots touch the soil, its silvery-white veins suddenly light up, as if they have been infused with a soul.
Then, to the astonishment of Lin Yi and the caregiver, its tip twisted and grew on its own, eventually shaping into a budding malt flower!
Lin Yi took a deep breath, carefully picked up Granny Chen's candy box, and gently placed it under the flower bud.
He bent down and whispered to the sleeping old man, "You don't need to say anything, I remember for you."
That night, midnight arrived again.
The malt bud formed from the plant in the wall emitted a soft glow without the need for an oil lamp.
The light projected onto the opposite wall, no longer as scattered points of light, but as a flowing scroll of light and shadow—a group of ragged children, hand in hand, running freely in that golden wheat field, their laughter seemingly piercing through ninety years, echoing in the room.
In her sleep, two streams of cloudy tears slid down Granny Chen's cheeks, and her parched lips moved slightly as she uttered her first murmur in decades: "...Abao...don't run too far..."
Lin Yi's deduction was confirmed: some memories that are sealed away by the subject due to deep trauma cannot be retrieved through active recall, but can be indirectly revealed through "proxy carrying".
He immediately launched a pilot program for "lighting up on behalf of others" in the nursing home.
He set up a special "silent light stand" in the corridor, allowing volunteers, caregivers, and even other elderly people to light a symbolic electronic light in the name of another person.
On the first day of the plan, a young caregiver who usually takes care of Granny Chen walked to the lamp stand and lit a lamp for Granny Chen.
Facing the lamp, she softly recounted a fragmented story she had overheard Granny Chen murmuring in her dream—a story about "candy in the wheat field."
The moment the words fell, the faint filaments of light that had been surrounding the oil lamp outside the window suddenly increased dramatically!
As if summoned by some force, they converged frantically, condensing in mid-air into a translucent path of light that stretched straight from the windowsill to the back wall of the nursing home, eventually disappearing into a patch of mottled brickwork.
The next day, a rather unusual thing happened at the nursing home.
Grandma Chen, who never left her room, actually stepped out of her room by herself for the first time.
Under everyone's gaze, she staggered to the back wall, stretched out her withered hand, and trembled as she touched the crack in the brickwork where the path of light had disappeared.
Right where her fingertips touched—a tiny, almost invisible wall-flower was quietly blooming from the crack in the bricks.
The huge success of the pilot program led Lin Yi to turn his attention to another heavily dormant area of Light Trail—the West District Asylum.
There was a mute girl named Xiaohe who would use charcoal to draw the same blurry silhouette on paper over and over again every night.
It was the back view of a woman, carrying an old-fashioned lantern in her hand.
Based on the outline in the painting, Lin Yi had someone make a replica of the same lantern, but it was empty, without any lamp oil.
He placed the lamp in the corner of Xiaohe's room.
The first night, nothing happened. The second night, still silent.
On the third night, just after midnight, the empty kerosene lamp suddenly lit up without any flame!
In the dim light, countless rays of light surged wildly from the lamp holder. They didn't project an image, but rather, like a swarm of nimble insects, spread along the walls to the ceiling, spelling out two crooked, distorted characters on the dark ceiling—
Mother.
The word "light" lasted only three seconds before disintegrating into countless points of light and disappearing without a trace.
At the same time, Lin Yi's monitoring system issued an alarm.
Data shows that the moment those two words lit up, in a demolition site far to the north of the city, a withered vine buried deep under the rubble had its silver veins flicker almost imperceptibly.
Lin Yi's pupils suddenly contracted.
He pulled up the city's historical map, and the ruins were marked as—Ninety years ago, the residential area for the families of the Night Listeners!
The clues have come together!
Late at night, Lin Yi returned alone to the source of the myriad traces of light—the abandoned malt ruins.
The silver veins of the buried wall-language plant mother plant are flowing several times faster than before.
The fragments of memory projected into the air are no longer just children from the orphanage; a large number of unfamiliar faces begin to appear—young women holding babies, their eyes filled with longing, and nameless wounded soldiers leaning on crutches, covered in blood. Their eyes are filled with the same confusion and waiting.
Lin Yi took out the transparent wheat ear that served as the core sensor.
At this moment, the light flow inside the wheat ears is no longer a babbling brook, but has turned into a surging river, with countless tiny light points colliding and rushing within it, as if thousands of troops are shouting and running within it.
Just then, from the depths of the earth beneath his feet came an extremely faint yet incredibly heavy resonance.
Like a giant heart, after sleeping for ninety years, it faintly resonated for the first time.
Lin Yi understood instantly.
Those who "dare not light the lamp," those forgotten souls, their paths are being illuminated and opened up little by little by others, by those kind-hearted strangers who act as "lighters."
He gazed at the surging sea of light within the translucent wheat ears and murmured to himself, "So the guides are never just one person... but every single one of them who is willing to light a lamp for others."
However, this spark was far too weak in the face of the bottomless darkness and silence beneath their feet.
Individual, scattered acts of kindness are like pebbles thrown into the ocean; they may create ripples, but they cannot change the direction of the tide.
That heartbeat-like echo was both a harbinger of awakening and a warning of crisis.
Something deep underground is being disturbed by these lights.
It is vast, ancient, and full of unknown power.
It's simply not enough for him to manage on his own, or for the few pilot programs in nursing homes and shelters.
This is no longer a gentle awakening of individual memories, but a rescue race against time.
We must establish a larger, more efficient, and more credible system to gather these faint sparks into a raging fire that can illuminate the entire abyss.
He raised his head and looked at the brightly lit administrative district in the city center, his gaze sharper than ever before.
It's time.
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