At 6:17 a.m., Grandma Chen's sturdy wooden cane thudded as she stepped onto the winding new path.
The soles of the shoes rubbed against the small pebbles, making a crisp and soft rustling sound, as if giving a silent greeting to this nascent road.
She walked slowly; years of rheumatism had made her exceptionally sensitive to every slight change in the road surface.
Something's not right about this road.
The pebbles were not laid roughly, but rather gently undulated with the terrain, creating a natural rhythm.
At several bends where turns were needed, the road surface was even lower than elsewhere, leaving footprints of varying depths.
Grandma Chen narrowed her cloudy but shrewd eyes. Having lived for seventy years, she could tell at a glance that this was definitely not the work of a construction team.
It's more like a person, someone with an extreme understanding of footsteps and gravity, walking barefoot in the quiet night, testing and walking again and again until they create the gentlest arc for their knees and ankles.
She crouched down shakily, her dry fingers touching one of the most noticeable dents.
The feel of the soil made her eyelids twitch – it carried the unique dampness of early morning, and even a hint of warmth.
She moved closer and saw, between the pebbles, several strands of white fungus, finer than a strand of hair, slowly emerging from the soil at a speed visible to the naked eye, carefully wrapping around the edges of the pebbles.
The posture didn't seem like growth; it was more like using its own body to measure and record inch by inch, "registering" this new road into the city's vast and hidden life system.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, Lin Yi's figure appeared on the verge of ruin in the old residential area of Dongcheng.
He was like an ordinary traveler, with nothing in his backpack except for an old blue shirt that had been washed until it was faded and half a bottle of mineral water.
He didn't use any power that could make the world tremble; he simply walked silently, feeling the cracks in the asphalt with his feet and breathing in the morning air, which was mixed with the scent of dust and grass.
He walked on like that, as if trying to use the most primal method to detach himself from the world he had built.
He stopped as he passed a rusty, closed grocery store.
This was his mother's favorite place when she was alive, and he could draw the layout of the shop with his eyes closed.
He pulled a neatly folded piece of paper from his pocket and skillfully slipped it through an inconspicuous gap at the bottom of the roller shutter.
The note contained only one line of text, written in neat handwriting, yet revealing an indelible weariness: "On the bottom shelf of shelf number 3, there are plum candies that your mother loves."
The shop owners moved away ten years ago, and the shop may never reopen.
But he knew that the city he had given life to would remember.
One day, when someone destined for you returns to sort through these relics filled with the marks of time, they will find this note and that jar of plum candy that may have long since turned into syrup.
This is his final act of tenderness, left to the past.
Grandma Chen straightened up, her cane clattering on the ground, and went home.
She was restless; the road and the mycelium swirled in her mind like an unsolvable mystery.
As if guided by something, she rummaged through boxes and cabinets, and pulled out a roll of yellowed drawings from the bottom of a dusty camphor wood box.
That was a map she drew herself when she was young, as a community activist, participating in urban change surveying.
She slowly unfolded the map on the old octagonal table, and familiar streets and buildings came into view.
Her gaze unconsciously fell on the blank area in the east of the city that had once been marked as "ruins awaiting planning".
The next second, her breathing suddenly stopped.
On that blank space, faint yet incredibly clear pencil marks had appeared out of nowhere.
The path traced by those marks was exactly the same as the pebble path she had walked that morning!
At the end of the path, there was a line of small characters that she had never seen before, yet which seemed strangely familiar. The characters were slender and strong, as if they were engraved into the paper: "The path that Teacher Lin has walked is not an empty one."
Teacher Lin… A sudden thought flashed through Grandma Chen’s mind, and the image of a frail, thin young man with a faint smile appeared before her eyes.
It's him!
Teacher Lin, who volunteered to teach children to draw in the community a few years ago, and then disappeared without a trace!
She stood up abruptly, staring intently at the words, her heart pounding.
This map has remained untouched for over a decade since it was put into the box, and no one has been able to access it.
The words seemed to grow out of thin air from the fibers of the paper.
As night deepened, Lin Yi sat down at a long-abandoned bus stop.
He took the half-empty bottle of water out of his backpack, sipped it slowly, and gazed into the distance.
The neon lights of the city are like giant dragons awakening, winding and undulating among the skyscrapers, their dazzling light illuminating the sky in a mesmerizing way.
He was once the architect of all this, but now he is just an observer.
Suddenly, a very subtle tremor came from beneath his feet.
He lowered his eyes and saw several strands of light, thinner than spider silk and shimmering with a faint glow, cautiously peeking out from the gaps in the drainage ditch on the concrete floor of the platform.
They were like living, conscious tentacles, trembling as they reached towards the soles of his shoes, seemingly wanting to wrap around him and make a long-awaited connection.
Lin Yi didn't move, not even a ripple in his eyes, simply letting them touch him quietly.
Those few strands of light gently caressed, paused, and trembled for a moment on the sole of his old shoe, as if confirming an ancient mark of identity.
In the end, they seemed to recognize something, yet with a hint of confusion and reluctance, they slowly, one by one, retreated back into the dark crevices, choosing not to follow any further.
He looked at the spot where the light had disappeared, a bitter smile playing on his lips, unnoticed by anyone. He murmured to himself, as if bidding farewell to the entire city: "You recognize me, but you no longer need me."
That night, a tremendous change, unknown to anyone, quietly took place throughout the city.
Countless "nameless paths" made up of light filaments, mycelium, and even the direction of wind flow are undergoing subtle self-adjustments.
The city's surveillance network captured the most astonishing scene: at 2:07 a.m.—precise to the second, exactly the time Lin Yi packed his bags and left his last residence—the main light veins that originally intersected near the Malt Ruins automatically shifted without warning. They seemed to be respectfully yielding, making way for a physical path in the center, just wide enough for one person to pass through comfortably.
Even more bizarrely, when Secret Service analysts compared the satellite image of this newly generated path with items recovered from Lin Yi's residence, they reached a conclusion that sent chills down their spines.
The overall shape of this path perfectly matches the lines unconsciously drawn with a ballpoint pen on the back of a torn calendar page in Lin Yi's backpack.
That was just an imagined route home that he had sketched on the spot last night when he was feeling upset.
The next morning, when the first group of residents who came to exercise arrived at the Malt Ruins, everyone was stunned by what they saw.
Beneath the tallest and most lush wallflower, at the starting point of the newly formed pebble path, a pair of shoes appeared out of nowhere.
It was a pair of extremely worn-out sneakers, with cracks all over the upper and the sole pattern almost worn smooth by time.
They were neatly arranged side by side, their shoelaces hanging loosely to the side, as if their owner had just taken them off and turned to walk into the morning mist ahead.
When Granny Chen arrived and saw the shoes, her eyes instantly welled up with tears.
She recognized the shoes; they were the pair that "Teacher Lin" wore most often.
She stood beside him for a long, long time, and finally, she simply bent down and gently placed a small wild chrysanthemum she had picked from the roadside next to his shoes.
That night, while everyone was asleep, the ground around the shoes began to tremble slightly.
Countless white mycelia emerged from the soil, like a gentle shroud, slowly wrapping and binding the shoe, eventually dragging it inch by inch into the depths of the earth, where it disappeared without a trace.
Where the shoes originally stood, a brand new Wallflower stubbornly broke through the soil, sprouted, and bloomed at a speed that defied the laws of nature.
Its petals are more lustrous than any of its peers, and on the translucent inner side of the petals, two dynamic points of light are clearly visible.
The points of light were not stationary; they were like a pair of tireless feet, steadily moving forward, step by step.
When Granny Chen came here again, she saw this miraculously born new flower.
As she approached, she could sense the familiar scent of Teacher Lin emanating from the flowers, along with an indescribable loneliness.
She reached out and gently stroked the soil beneath the flowers. For some reason, the soil there was unusually dry, even cracked with fine lines, standing out starkly from the surrounding damp ground.
It was as if the birth of this flower had exhausted all the life and moisture beneath its feet.
She gazed at the flower, at the tireless "feet" within its petals, and in her aged eyes, an unprecedented understanding and resolve slowly rose.
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