The night was as dark as ink, immersing the entire Settlement No. 88 in silence.
Only one room still emitted a faint, flickering light from an oil lamp.
The old woman awoke from another nightmare, her thin clothes soaked with cold sweat.
She subconsciously reached out her withered hand and slipped it under the pillow. Only when her fingertips touched the page of paper that she had been caressing so much that it was almost torn did she catch her breath.
That half-page of charred list fragment was the only thing she managed to salvage from the fire, and it became a nightmare that haunted her for the rest of her life.
These days, she does this every night.
During the day, she worked silently, like a dried-up statue; but at night, the list burned in her mind, each name on it a silent accusation, searing her soul.
Outside the door, Lin Yi stood silently in the shadows. He could hear the faint, suppressed rustling of paper inside the room, and he could also feel the despair that no one dared to show.
He didn't knock on the door, nor did he ask any questions.
Some wounds, if forcibly torn open, will only fester deeper.
The next day, a simple wooden box appeared at the entrance of the settlement's only public canteen.
The wooden box had no lock, and next to it stood a wooden sign with three words engraved on it: "Unnamed Mailbox".
The person who sends the letter need not sign their name; the person who receives the letter can only be Lin Yi, and they must not look through it in public.
This sudden move caused a small ripple, but more than anything, it elicited doubt and a wait-and-see attitude.
On the first day, the wooden crate was empty.
The next day, it was the same.
The discussion gradually subsided, and people realized that this was just another strange idea of Lin Yi's.
On the morning of the third day, when Lin Yi opened the wooden box, his fingertips touched a cold and fragile piece of paper.
He took it out, and his pupils suddenly contracted.
That was the half-fragment under the old woman's pillow; the paper was charred black and the edges were extremely fragile.
Beneath the shards lay a new note, its handwriting trembling and illegible, as if the writer had exhausted all his strength: "These people all starved to death later. I couldn't save them."
The last three words, like a brand etched with blood, deeply stung Lin Yi's eyes.
He didn't make the letter public; that would have been tantamount to putting the old woman on the hot seat of the fire.
He silently returned to his hut and carefully made more than a dozen copies of the half-page fragment.
Then, he found the elderly men who had participated in the distribution of food during the war and were now in their eighties.
Lin Yi distributed the rubbings to them one by one, his voice calm yet carrying immense power: "Gentlemen, you may still remember this list. I'm bringing it out today not to investigate who is right or wrong."
His gaze swept over every face—those filled with astonishment, anger, or sudden signs of aging—and he said, word by word, "I just want to tell you all that behind every decision you made back then, someone was crying silently. Now, it's our turn to see those cries."
"Absurd!" A hot-tempered old man slammed the piece of paper on the table, his face flushed red as he angrily rebuked, "Wartime rations! There are only so many people and so little food! Who didn't grit their teeth and grit their teeth to secure their quota? Are you trying to judge us?!"
"No." Lin Yi met his anger and slowly nodded. "I understand. So I don't want you to rewrite the past. I just want you to remember—in this world, there are never perfect choices, only people who bear the consequences of their choices."
Before he finished speaking, the underground whisper, which only he could hear, resurfaced, cold and precise.
"Warning: Unit 88 has entered an emotional paradox. The node... is stuck in the 'impulse to make amends'."
Lin Yi's heart skipped a beat, and he instantly understood the meaning of the hint.
Sure enough, new voices began to emerge from the crowd.
Some suggested that the settlements should be posthumously awarded medals of honor to those on the list who starved to death; others passionately proposed that a portion of the current grain reserves should be taken and "redistributed" to the descendants of the victims according to the standards of that time, as compensation.
Once the idea of "remedying" takes hold, it spreads like wildfire.
People began to discuss passionately how to correct the "mistakes" of that era, as if doing so could heal the wounds of history and bring solace to everyone.
Just then, Lin Yi walked up to the platform and took out an old leather-bound book in front of everyone.
That was the wartime rations ledger he kept close to his body.
He turned to one of the pages, which was covered with densely packed names and numbers written in charcoal.
“I’ve also missed recording three names in my ledger.” His voice wasn’t loud, but it carried clearly throughout the square, instantly silencing all the noise.
Everyone stared at him in astonishment.
“Because the three of them knelt down and begged me not to put their names on the report.” Lin Yi’s fingertips traced the blank lines, his eyes filled with a distant sorrow. “They said that there were no able-bodied men left in their families, and if they received relief food, they would only be cursed by their neighbors as parasites that dragged down the entire settlement. They would rather starve to death than be cursed behind their backs before they died.”
After saying that, he closed the ledger and, to everyone's astonishment, slowly walked to the unmarked mailbox and personally dropped the ledger, which contained his personal "evidence," into it.
“Some mistakes don’t exist to be corrected.” He turned to face the crowd. “They exist to be understood.”
The square was deathly silent.
But soon, the silence was broken by an angry roar.
A young man born after the war, whose parents had been recipients of aid, roared at Lin Yi with bloodshot eyes: "Be understood? Are we survivors supposed to carry this guilt forever? Is our survival a sin?"
Lin Yi did not answer.
He silently picked up a shovel and led everyone step by step toward the ruins of an abandoned old granary on the edge of the settlement.
Among the collapsed beams and crumbling walls, he found a spot based on his memory and began to dig silently.
The soil flew everywhere, and everyone held their breath and stared.
Soon, the shovel struck a hard object.
Lin Yi bent down and dug a huge pottery jar out of the pit.
He pried open the seal with force, and a dull smell, mixed with the stench of dust and decay, wafted out.
The jar was filled with the last batch of relief food that had not been distributed that year.
The grains had long since become moldy and rotten, turning into hard, black stones.
Lin Yi reached in, grabbed a handful of black, lifeless moldy grains, spread them out in his palm, and showed them to everyone.
“This is the ‘correct’ you want.” His voice was hoarse and heavy. “If we distribute it, it will immediately trigger looting and bloodshed among the desperate crowd, and more people will die; if we don’t distribute it, this is the result you’ve seen: the people on the list will slowly starve to death.”
He scattered the black rice in his hand on the ground, as if to mourn a war in which no one had won.
"None of us won."
That night, the settlement was unusually quiet.
The light in the old woman's house stayed on until dawn.
She stopped caressing the fragment and instead, with trembling hands, carefully copied the complete, unburnt list from her memory onto a clean sheet of paper.
Before dawn, she quietly slipped the complete list into the anonymous mailbox.
A note was also attached, the handwriting much more resolute than before: "I cannot let them die in vain."
Lin Yi took out the heavy copy.
He still hasn't made it public.
He simply found the old woman and asked her to come to the mill every afternoon.
In the mill, a group of children who knew nothing of the past gathered.
Lin Yi's request was simple: she had to tell the children the story of each person on the list.
Without making any judgments, without defining who is a hero and who is a coward, we only talk about how they were when they were alive.
"Zhang Laosan loves his wife's scallion pancakes the most, and he always eats them with his mouth full of oil."
"The little girl from the Li family is most afraid of thunder. Whenever there is thunder, she will burrow into her mother's arms and cry like a little kitten."
"When Carpenter Wang smiles, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes resemble a blooming chrysanthemum..."
The old woman's voice was initially dry and painful, but gradually, light began to appear in her cloudy eyes.
She was no longer recounting a cold list of deaths, but rather the stories of lives that were once vibrant, filled with love and hate, fear and smiles.
Chu Yao listened quietly to the sound.
She could clearly sense that an invisible transformation was taking place in this space.
She calls it "the decriminalization of memory".
This list is transforming from a "victim directory" into a "proof of life".
This oral account lasted for seven days.
On the afternoon of the seventh day, when the old woman was telling the story of a boy whose greatest wish in life was to own a kite, her voice stopped abruptly, her body went limp, and she slowly collapsed to the ground.
Lin Yi immediately stepped forward to help her up and took her back to the hut.
After settling the elderly woman in, he saw the original fragment of the list beside her pillow, completely soaked with tears, the words blurred and indistinct, as if it had finally completed its mission, turning into a pool of sorrowful water.
The next morning, Lin Yi opened the anonymous mailbox as usual.
Inside the box was a brand new letter; the paper was smooth, and the handwriting was no longer trembling.
“I no longer want to complete the list. I want them to simply be remembered, not redeemed.”
Lin Yi took out the letter, walked to the ruins of the old granary, and gently placed it under the earthenware jar filled with moldy grain.
A breeze blew, and the letter trembled slightly, as if it had just said its final goodbye.
He whispered to the void, and to the underground whisper: "Unit 88... Learned not to repair."
The world seemed to return to harmony at this moment, and the wounds of history stopped bleeding, but were calmly accepted as scars.
However, this hard-won peace did not last long.
The underground whisper that had always accompanied Lin Yi, sometimes warning and sometimes judging, fell completely silent after it finished speaking.
At first, Lin Yi didn't pay attention, but the silence lasted for a day, two days, and three days.
The background noise that used to be ever-present had completely disappeared, making the whole world seem eerily empty.
On the morning of the fourth day, as the first rays of light pierced the darkness on the horizon...
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