For seven whole days, Lin Yi did not set foot in that secluded pumping station again.
His figure disappeared into the physical corners of the city, but he became an omnipresent ghost, lingering in the massive data stream of the municipal environmental monitoring system.
He was like a demanding gardener, no longer watering and fertilizing himself, but judging the growth rhythm of the wheat seedlings buried deep in the ground and the small tree at the crossroads by observing every fluctuation in temperature and humidity on the screen.
This miracle, nurtured by memory and longing, has a growth pulse that far exceeds the scope of botany.
The first vision appeared late on the third day.
Lin Yi noticed that whenever citizens lingered in front of the flowerbeds at the intersection for more than ten minutes, whether they were heartbroken young people, office workers returning home late from overtime, or simply elderly people who were tired from walking, the traffic lights above their heads would always undergo a subtle, almost imperceptible adjustment.
The duration of the red light will be extended precisely by 0.3 seconds, no more and no less.
0.3 seconds, so short that it is imperceptible to the naked eye, so short that it can be masked by any excuse of system redundancy or network latency.
But for Lin Yi, this number was as precise and stable as a cosmological constant.
He retrieved hundreds of hours of surveillance footage from the intersection, analyzed it frame by frame, and finally confirmed that it was not a system malfunction.
That 0.3 seconds was just enough for a withered leaf to fall from the branch, swirling gently across the deserted zebra crossing.
It is the underground root system, that vast neural network formed by countless stories, that "adjusts the time" for its listeners.
It's as if it's saying: Don't rush, your silence is complete and won't be interrupted by the blaring horn or the hasty green light.
I'll give you one more moment to let your emotions flow away completely.
Lin Yi's fingertips traced across the cold screen, a chilling realization coursing through his body.
This thing has already begun to affect the physical rules of the real world.
At 3 a.m. on the fifth day, in the southeast corner of the city, a long-forgotten abandoned telephone booth suddenly emitted a sharp ringing sound.
The municipal hotline center's back-end alarm was triggered instantly, but the staff on duty searched through all the records and could not find any dialing information.
It was like a call from the void, abruptly piercing the silence of the city.
When Lin Yi arrived by car, the phone had already stopped ringing.
He didn't force the door open; he simply observed quietly.
In the dim moonlight, he saw that the metal base of the phone booth was already tightly wrapped by countless fine wheat seedling roots.
Some of the toughest roots, even like living wood fibers, burrowed into the cracks of the aging glass door, wrapped around the telephone handset's connecting wires, and eventually converged on the back of the handset, forming a thin, intricately structured natural diaphragm.
He did not disturb the "work of art," but simply sat quietly outside the pavilion, like a sculpture, blending into the darkness before dawn.
Time ticked by, until the sky began to lighten and the first rays of dawn pierced the thin mist. Finally, a faint sound came from the hanging receiver.
It was a very faint monosyllable, accompanied by static: "Hello?"
His voice was dry, as if his vocal cords had not vibrated for a long time, yet it also carried a strange, inhuman ethereal quality.
Lin Yi's pupils suddenly contracted.
He immediately realized that this was not a recording.
The recording is fixed, but the sound is a unique response generated by the root-like vibrating membrane, based on the "context" of his presence in this place.
It is trying to communicate.
Lin Yi neither picked up the receiver nor hung up.
He took out a ceramic shard that he had prepared beforehand from his pocket, on which the character "listen" was clumsily carved with a carving knife.
He carefully slipped the ceramic shard into the widest gap at the bottom of the glass door.
After doing all this, he turned and left without looking back.
The next day, when he returned, the pottery shards in the crack of the door had disappeared.
On the surface of the tangled roots at the base of the phone booth, soil and plant fibers miraculously formed a row of new indentations, with the words clearly legible: "Thank you, wait for me."
At the same time, Chu Yao's consciousness, the "Ninety-first Node" that carried all of the old woman's memories, also underwent a new transformation.
Standing by the lake where the twin monuments reflected in the water, Lin Yi could no longer feel that familiar fluctuation of consciousness, filled with sorrow and exploration.
But in the thick morning fog, he noticed a strange regularity in the frequency of the ripples in the center of the lake.
The rhythm of the ripples spreading was perfectly synchronized with the frequency of leaves falling from the small tree at the pumping station thousands of miles away.
A thought flashed through Lin Yi's mind, and he took out the empty porridge bowl that the old woman had left behind, which he always carried with him.
He gently placed the bowl on the lakeside where the twin monuments were reflected, letting the lake water slowly seep in and moisten the bottom of the bowl.
The water was calm, and a minute later, two lines of trembling characters formed by water ripples slowly emerged above the water at the bottom of the bowl.
"You're not asking me anymore."
Next is the second line.
"So I started asking myself questions."
Lin Yi understood.
This memory has evolved from "passive recall" to "active tracing".
No longer needing external questions to activate those long-forgotten memories, it began to analyze itself, to seek out the deepest inner monologues that even the old woman herself had never uttered to anyone.
It was at this moment that Ivan's deep, earthy whispers, after a long pause, finally continued.
The intermittent sound of the rock strata rubbing together pieced together a complete sentence in Lin Yi's mind: "...hearing...him...him...listening..."
The real leap is not about being "heard," but about "realizing that you are listening!"
Lin Yi suddenly understood.
He immediately returned to the archives of the "Silent Sanctuary" and retrieved all the thousands of unmailed letters.
But instead of organizing the contents of the letters, he re-archived them according to the life trajectory of each writer—birth, education, work, migration.
He simply affixed a new label in red pen to the outside of each thick file folder, with the same sentence written on it: "This letter may not be for you."
The city's breathing became increasingly strange and real.
A young nurse whispered almost inaudibly in front of a crack in the exterior wall of the hospital's inpatient building: "I wash the bodies of countless patients every day, but no one ever knows that I... am a germaphobe. I'm afraid of getting dirty."
Three days later, a strange plant emerged from that crack.
Its stem is completely transparent, like crystal, with a tube of pale golden, serum-like liquid flowing inside.
When the nurse instinctively walked over there again, a soft vine emerged from the crack, like a lover's finger, and gently wrapped around her wrist.
A drop of clear liquid seeped from the tip of the vine and landed in her palm.
In an instant, a burning sensation came, as if it would burn through her skin, but the liquid evaporated immediately, leaving no marks, only taking away a trace of weariness and filth from the depths of her soul that she herself had not even noticed.
Lin Yi quietly observed everything through binoculars from the shadows across the street.
He made no records or analyses; he simply drew a red circle around the area on his electronic map, labeled it a "non-intervention observation zone," and set the highest level of access to prohibit any municipal environmental monitoring equipment from accessing the area.
The seventh night has arrived.
In the center of the flowerbed at the crossroads, the small tree that served as the origin of everything suddenly underwent a dramatic change.
All its branches and leaves stopped swaying, and the canopy tilted 15 degrees to the southeast—the direction of the abandoned telephone booth—without any external force.
Even more bizarrely, the bulging, ear-like tumor-like structures at its base completely closed at the same moment.
The entire plant seemed to enter a deep, absolute stillness in an instant.
Lin Yi quickly stepped forward, squatted down, and gently touched the rough tree trunk with his palm.
The usual flow of energy has disappeared, replaced by a heavy and regular vibration.
It wasn't language, it wasn't whispers, it was a heartbeat.
Thump...thump...thump...
The rhythm was slow yet powerful, as if it came from the depths of the earth.
Incredibly, when Lin Yi fully concentrated, he could feel the vibration gradually synchronizing with his own pulse.
One slow, one fast, one strong, one weak, eventually merge into one.
He became another heart of this tree.
Lin Yi slowly stepped back, his chest heaving, his eyes gleaming with an unprecedented light.
He went back to his car and retrieved the last item—an empty photo frame.
He walked to the edge of the tree's shadow, turned the picture frame upside down, and placed it face down on the ground.
The moment the glass of the picture frame touched the soil, a strange sight occurred.
The soil beneath the glass, instead of being compacted, began to slowly and irrationally bulge.
It was as if a new bud was sprouting from the depths, but it chose a direction completely opposite to that of all other plants, stubbornly and firmly growing towards the deeper underground.
At that very moment, Ivan's silent whispers of the ley lines echoed in his mind for the last time, as if announcing the end of an era:
“Node 92… has learned to shut up.”
Lin Yi stood up and patted the dust off his hands.
In his eyes, the city had completely transformed into a vast, living, and self-aware web of life.
He knew that the era of listening was over, and a completely new and unknown phase was about to begin.
He must become faster and understand everything sooner than it.
He returned to his temporary base, a room filled with servers.
In order to find more clues about the city's "listening" history, he accessed a city voiceprint database that had been sealed for many years.
It contains records of all the background noise from the past ten years before the old city was redeveloped—the sound of wind, traffic, and crowds—which were considered worthless "sound waste."
He wrote a simple algorithm to quickly screen for abnormal waveforms in the data.
On the screen, tens of thousands of spectrograms flashed by rapidly, like a gray waterfall.
Suddenly, his gaze was fixed on one of the frames.
In a seemingly ordinary street sound recording from an afternoon fifteen years ago, a trace that should never have existed suddenly appeared.
That wasn't a sound, but an "empty" space.
On the complete spectrogram, it's as if an invisible scalpel has brutally removed a piece.
That area was devoid of data, utterly silent, forming a grotesque black scar.
Lin Yi's blood seemed to freeze instantly. He stared intently at the black "sound wound," his finger hovering over the play button, hesitant to press it.
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