The earth's tremors became increasingly clear; it was no longer an illusion.
It was a dull, rhythmic pulsation, like a giant beast imprisoned deep within the earth's crust, slowly adjusting its breathing.
Lin Yi's expression was more solemn than ever before. He ignored Chu Yao and immediately rushed back to the temporary laboratory, dragging out the portable sonar detector.
The cold metal probe was pressed against the wet, slippery cement floor of the pumping station, and the waveform on the screen was instantly filled with a series of strange signals.
A low-frequency vibration travels through the probe, through the cable, and finally converges on the analyzer into a curve that is so stable it's almost unsettling.
Lin Yi stared intently at the number, his pupils suddenly contracting.
He was all too familiar with that frequency!
It almost perfectly matches the alpha brainwaves emitted by humans during deep meditation or when they are about to fall asleep!
A crazy and audacious idea exploded in his mind.
He turned sharply and looked at the wheat field swaying in the thin mist.
The root systems of those wheat seedlings were no longer ordinary plant structures.
Previous exploration data showed that they resembled a boundless neural network, precisely connecting seven underground areas marked as "memory nodes of the old city".
“It’s not the wheat seedlings absorbing memories,” Lin Yi murmured, his voice hoarse with shock. “They are… neural synapses! The entire city’s underground is relying on these wheat seedlings to form an unimaginably vast… dormant consciousness!”
Just then, the air around him distorted, and Chu Yao's figure reappeared.
But this time, her outline was extremely unstable, like a poorly projected image with a bad signal, the edges constantly flickering and peeling, emitting subtle electrical noise.
Her face was pale, and her eyes held an unprecedented warning.
“Stop, Lin Yi.” Her voice was broken, as if it came from a distant time and space. “Awaken it, like opening all the buried, unsent letters. The recipient is no longer here, but the obsession with sending the letter will devour everything. Some people would rather never know the truth.”
Lin Yi turned around abruptly, looking directly into her flickering eyes, and asked in return, "But what if those letters wanted to speak for themselves? What if those obsessions were just waiting for a listener?"
Chu Yao fell silent.
Her ethereal body seemed to solidify for a moment at this rhetorical question.
After a long while, she gave up trying to persuade him, and simply raised her almost transparent hand, pointing to the ground beneath Lin Yi's feet.
"Listen," she said, uttering only one word.
Without the slightest hesitation, Lin Yi immediately tossed the sonar aside, bent down, and pressed his ear tightly against the cold, damp cement ground.
At first, there was only the dull, heart-beat-like throbbing from underground.
But when he cleared his mind of all distractions and immersed himself in it, another, more subtle and complex sound penetrated the thick soil and rock layers and entered his eardrums.
That is not any known language.
That's a mixed sound.
It is the sound of hundreds, or even thousands, of people breathing at the same time, rapid and suppressed; it is the sound of countless throats swallowing saliva, tense and dry; it is the sound of teeth uncontrollably clattering against each other, and bones trembling slightly with fear.
These sounds intertwined, merging into a wordless symphony of the apocalypse, filled with boundless despair and deathly terror.
Lin Yi's body trembled violently, and he sprang up from the ground, his face deathly pale.
He finally understood what Chu Yao meant by "the truth".
That's not historical record, but the most primal, purest... pain.
He rushed back to the lab, his eyes bloodshot, and began frantically searching for materials.
He wanted to create a resonant chamber to extract this symphony of despair from the earth, amplify it, and then record it!
He used every available piece of equipment, and even disassembled half of the exploration robot.
A few hours later, a strangely shaped box covered with coils and metal film appeared in his hands.
He placed the resonance chamber in the center of the water pump station, connected it to the recording equipment, and then slowly turned it on.
"Buzz buzz buzz..."
The resonating chamber began to vibrate, its frequency perfectly synchronized with the pulsation beneath the earth.
Initially, all that was recorded was a chaotic low-frequency noise.
But gradually, the sounds of breathing, swallowing, and trembling were peeled away, amplified, and made clearer, bit by bit.
They were no longer vague background noises, but transformed into a sound wave filled with substantial wails, bursting forth from the loudspeaker!
The moment the audio started playing, something unexpected happened!
In the laboratory, the file folders that he had collected from various parts of the old city ruins and kept perfectly sealed suddenly tore open on their own without any warning!
"Snap! Snap! Snap!" Dozens of brown paper bags burst open at the same time, as if violently torn apart by an invisible hand.
Countless yellowed papers fluttered wildly in the confined space like butterflies in a blizzard.
An even stranger sight unfolded.
On those blank or illegible papers, lines and paragraphs of deep black writing appeared out of thin air the instant they were enveloped by that underground audio!
"...Mom, I'm so cold..."
"...Water...Does anyone have any water...I'll trade my last compressed biscuit for it..."
"...Outside the door...the thing outside is still banging on the door...Don't open the door! Whatever you do, don't open the door!"
"...I'm sorry, Xiaoya, I couldn't show you the sun on the ground..."
"...The entire 17th Squad...mission failed...we...can't go back..."
Each piece of paper is a last will and testament.
Each sentence is a soul's final murmur in the darkness of the refuge.
At the same time, Ivan's whispers of the ley lines, which had been swirling in Lin Yi's mind, became more chaotic and fragmented than ever before under the impact of this sound wave.
"...The...unspeakable...name...has...awakened..."
For the first time, the voice broke into a pause, as if struggling to utter a final warning amidst immense interference.
Lin Yi felt a chill run through him as a deeper deduction took shape in his mind.
He always thought that the so-called "well of memory" was just a passive container, a database for storing historical information.
But now it seems he was wrong, terribly wrong!
This is not a container, it is a seal!
The people who built this massive underground shelter encountered some unbearable and unspeakable horror.
They could not destroy it; they could only bury it, along with those desperate memories, deep underground.
They built the most solid tomb for this secret with thick walls, with everyone's silence, and with a long period of time.
Those wheat seedlings are the guardians of this grave, and also the weakest link in this seal.
He had to enter the interior of that "consciousness," but he couldn't be completely swallowed up by that massive torrent of despair.
He needs a barrier, a barrier that allows him to access the stream of memories while protecting his mind from being torn apart.
He thought of the fragments of pottery jars dug out of the ruins, which still retained the purest "human" aura of the old era.
He thought of the wheat seedlings again; the golden resin they secreted was the medium connecting reality and memory.
Lin Yi began designing his "two-phase isolation chamber".
He ground the fragments of the pottery jar into powder, mixed it with wheat seedling resin, and molded it under a strong electric field into a semi-transparent shell that could barely accommodate one person.
Theoretically, this isolation chamber can filter out negative emotions in the memory stream that exceed the mental threshold, allowing only the most essential information to enter.
He took a deep breath and personally entered the isolation chamber.
The world fell silent the moment the hatch closed.
But just three seconds later, it felt as if a bomb had exploded in his mind.
Hundreds, even thousands of voices flooded his consciousness like a burst dam, no longer the blurry breathing and trembling, but transformed into crystal clear, soul-piercing questions.
"I could have saved you!"
Why didn't you come sooner!
"Look at me! Why are you watching me die!"
"Save me...I could have...saved you..."
Every sound represents a lost life, and every word contains regret and despair enough to crush even the strongest will.
Lin Yi's consciousness was almost torn to shreds on the spot under the bombardment of these voices.
He clenched his teeth, his whole body spasming, veins bulging.
He knew he had to find something before he went completely insane.
He forcefully gathered the last vestige of clarity, searching for the most core and stable structure in the boundless torrent of consciousness.
Finally, just before he was about to be swallowed by darkness, he "saw" it.
In the center of that black ocean of pain and regret, something floats silently—a lamp.
An old, unlit oil lamp.
Its shape is exactly the same as the lamp that hangs under the eaves of his residence!
"ah--!"
Lin Yi let out a painful roar, pushed open the hatch, and scrambled out.
He only lasted seven minutes inside, but it felt like he had been tormented in hell for seven centuries.
He was panting heavily, his body drenched in cold sweat, but his eyes shone with an eerie light.
He brought back crucial information.
He stood up unsteadily and walked back to the center of the pumping station.
The original wheat seedling has now grown to be more than a person tall.
At its top, a tightly closed bud had appeared at some unknown time.
On the surface of the spikelet, naturally formed golden lines intertwine and converge, their shape remarkably resembling a coiled lamp wick!
This is the real core! That lamp is the key to unlocking everything!
Lin Yi reached out his hand, his fingers trembling, and gently touched the strange bud.
For a moment, the ear of grain trembled slightly.
Immediately afterwards, an extremely faint yet crystal clear voice came from inside the ear of grain and simultaneously rang in his mind.
"drop."
That sound was like the first drop of lamp oil falling into a dried-up lamp.
The space behind him distorted once more, and Chu Yao manifested her form for the last time.
Her figure was more solid than ever before, her face filled with struggle and reluctance.
She instinctively reached out, seemingly trying to stop Lin Yi's next move, but her hand, raised in mid-air, eventually fell limply to the ground.
The deep, earth-derived whispers receded like the tide, sinking into an unfathomable abyss.
Before disappearing completely, Ivan's voice left behind a final revelation:
"Unit 90... will be activated with the first call."
Lin Yi slowly withdrew his hand, his gaze sweeping over the dual-phase isolation chamber beside him, which he had personally made and which was now cracked from the impact of the memories.
Its fragments were scattered all over the ground, each piece still carrying the terrifying echo of that soul-tearing pain.
He looked at the fragments, then looked up at the wheat seedling in the center of the pumping station, quietly waiting to be "ignited." There was no fear or hesitation in his eyes, only a resolute determination to burn his bridges.
He knew what he had to do.
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