The underground pulse did not stop; instead, it became even clearer.
It is no longer a simple vibration, but more like a deep and long hum, silently seeping into every corner of the city, blending into the wind, wrapping around the skeleton of steel and concrete, and changing some indescribable medium in the air.
It was as if a silent chorus sweeping across the entire city was quietly beginning.
Lin Yi first noticed this unusual frequency change three days later.
On his monitoring equipment, the waveform representing the vibration of the rye seedling roots is no longer a simple spike synchronized with the outburst of human emotions, but rather a long and harmonious echo following the spike.
He extracted the frequency of the final sound and compared it with all known sound waves in the database. The result was astonishing—it was closest to the frequency of the vocal cords when a human is about to roar under extreme repression but forcibly swallows it back.
This is a sound that has been choked in the throat.
Just as he was deep in thought, an encrypted phone call came in.
The liaison officer from the special affairs department spoke urgently: "An inexplicable phenomenon has occurred at the Third Experimental Middle School in the west of the city, and we need you to intervene immediately as the 'Urban Ecological Art Project Consultant'."
When Lin Yi arrived, the scene had already been cordoned off.
A middle-aged male teacher, wrapped in a blanket, sat dazed in the police car, repeatedly muttering, "It wasn't me, it really wasn't me..."
The office was a mess, with shattered glasses scattered all over the floor.
A young police officer explained the situation to Lin Yi: "This is Mr. Wang, a senior high school teacher. This afternoon, he suddenly broke down in his emotions while preparing lessons in his office and smashed a cup. This is all normal; senior high school students face a lot of pressure. But what's not normal is..." He pointed out the window.
Outside the window was an old wall covered with ivy.
And among those dense green leaves, there stood a strange fruit, the size of a fist, that looked as if it were blown from pure glass.
It is completely transparent, and when sunlight passes through it, it refracts dazzling spots of light. But the most bizarre thing is that on the smooth inner wall, a line of fine writing is faintly visible, as if it were engraved inside the fruit.
"The day your daughter dropped out of school, you locked yourself in the garage for two hours."
Lin Yi's pupils suddenly contracted.
When Teacher Wang saw the police examining the fruit, he became agitated again and shouted through the car window, "That's a monster! It's the devil's eye!"
“His daughter dropped out of school a year ago because of depression, which was a huge blow to him, and only a very few of his colleagues knew about it,” the officer said in a low voice. “But even his wife didn’t know that he locked himself in the garage. We checked, and there was no eyewitness, and he never mentioned it to anyone. This line… it’s like it was dug straight out of his brain.”
Lin Yi ignored the surrounding discussions and cleared out his office, citing project needs.
He neither touched the glass fruit nor tried to explain the supernatural phenomenon.
He simply took out an old-fashioned, oil-free lamp from his exploration kit and gently placed it on the windowsill of the office, facing the fruit outside the wall.
The wick is specially made, requiring no fuel, and emits only a faint, almost imperceptible light.
After doing all this, he left.
The next morning, Lin Yi's phone rang again.
It was the same liaison officer, his voice filled with disbelief and shock: "You...you come quick! Under that lamp!"
Lin Yi returned to his office.
The glass fruit still hung on the vine, but under the oil-free lamp on the windowsill, a small note had appeared out of nowhere.
The edges of the paper were curled up, as if it had been dampened by dew.
A line of text was written on it in pen:
"I don't blame her, I blame myself for not being able to save her."
The handwriting was messy and forceful, almost tearing the back of the paper.
The forensic department colleagues immediately conducted a handwriting analysis, and the results came back quickly—the handwriting was completely consistent with Mr. Wang's.
But when the police showed the test results to Teacher Wang, he shook his head frantically as if he had seen a ghost, insisting that he had been at home all night, had never left, and had not written any notes.
His fear was not feigned; it was a tremor from the depths of his soul that even he could not understand.
At the same moment, on the other side of the city, torrential rain poured down.
Chu Yao stood in front of an abandoned "letter burning station".
This place used to be where residents of the old town burned letters and memorial texts; now only a stone platform blackened by rain remains.
She opened her palm, and there lay the black crystal that Ivan had given her, quietly absorbing all the light around it.
Without the slightest hesitation, she gently pressed the black crystal into the recessed area in the center of the stone platform.
"Sizzle—"
With a soft sound, the rain seemed to find an outlet, spreading countless spiderweb-like fine cracks across the surface of the stone platform, centered on the black crystal.
Each crack emitted a faint light, and within that light, fragmented cries struggled to emerge.
"Don't go!"
"I don't want to live anymore!"
"...Help me!"
These are all the unrecorded and unheard dying words from the long history of this city.
They are the last bubbles of a drowning person, the silent mouth movements of a person jumping off a building, and the fading sobs of a heartbroken person on their pillow.
Soaked to the bone by the downpour, Chu Yao whispered in an almost whispered voice, "Some voices don't need to be complete; just a crack is enough."
Almost simultaneously, deep within the city's ley lines, the ancient and chaotic whispers of the earth resonated for the first time, as if in response to Chu Yao's actions.
The inhuman voice came intermittently through Lin Yi's headphones:
"...Anyone who...can...say...half...a...sentence...is...already...living..."
Lin Yi was jolted awake, and suddenly understood.
Teacher Wang's secret, those dying words... True release is not about hysterically recounting all the pain, but about allowing yourself to shout out that first cry that tears through the silence.
Even if it's just one word or half a sentence.
A bold plan took shape in his mind. He called it—the "half-sentence ritual."
He set up a station in front of a blank wall in the city center square under the name of "ecological art project".
The rules are so simple they're almost absurd: anyone can walk up to the wall, say only the "half-sentence" they most want to say but can't bring themselves to say, and then turn and leave.
On the first day of the ceremony, very few people came; most were just there to watch the spectacle.
As evening fell, a well-dressed middle-aged woman stepped forward. Facing the empty wall, she used all her strength to hoarsely shout out three words: "I hate you!"
After saying that, she seemed to have all her strength drained away and staggered away.
That night, a strange thing happened.
On that pristine white wall, a black liquid, like ink, began to slowly seep out, gradually outlining and piecing together another line of words where the woman had stood:
"...But I hate myself even more for not stopping you."
The next day, the photo went viral online. People began to line up to attend the ceremony.
Amidst the surging crowd, Lin Yi noticed a silent young man.
He looked no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, wearing a faded school uniform. He came every day, but just stood at the far end of the crowd, from dusk till late at night, without saying a word.
He came for seven consecutive days.
On the eighth night, Lin Yi took the initiative to go over.
The boy seemed startled, his body tensing up.
"It's okay if you don't want to talk about it." Lin Yi's voice was very soft. "Sometimes, just standing here is a way of telling a story."
The boy's lips moved, but he ultimately lowered his head.
Just when Lin Yi thought he would leave in silence like he had for the previous seven days, he suddenly said in a voice barely above a whisper, "My dad beats me, but I don't want him to go to jail."
These words struck Lin Yi like a cold bullet.
He offered no words of comfort or instruction, but simply took out a smooth-edged shard of pottery from his pocket and handed it to the boy: “If you can’t say it, write it down. Write half a sentence, and let the rest shake you.”
The boy trembled as he took the pottery shard and, with his fingernail, forcefully carved a single word into the damp clay: "Dad".
Then, he shoved the pottery shard back into Lin Yi's hand, turned and ran into the night, as if a ferocious beast was chasing him.
The next day, Lin Yi arrived at the letter-burning station where Chu Yao was located.
He saw that a new mark had appeared among the spiderweb-like cracks in the stone platform.
At the end of that mark, three words appeared: "...I'm sorry".
The handwriting, childish and distorted, was exactly the same as the word "Dad" that the boy had carved on the pottery shard.
Lin Yi gently buried the ceramic shard engraved with the word "Dad" into the crack that had revealed the word "I'm sorry".
As he covered the wound with soil, an unhealed cut on his palm was scratched by the rough edge of the stone platform, and blood seeped out, mixing with the soil and rainwater.
That night, the rye seedling in the city center underwent an astonishing transformation.
The plumpest grain at its top silently cracked open.
A wisp of gray mist slowly emerged from the crack.
Through the mist, the intermittent, suppressed sobs of a middle-aged man could be heard:
"My son, I drank too much that day..."
The voice stopped abruptly there, as if an invisible hand had gripped its throat, preventing it from continuing.
But the gray fog did not dissipate.
It hovered and condensed in the air, eventually transforming into a phantom and enormous hand, which gently pressed down on the corner of the square—the corner where the silent boy had stood for seven consecutive nights.
Lin Yi stood at a distance. This time, he neither recorded data nor started the analysis program.
He simply walked forward silently and moved the oil-free lamp from Teacher Wang's office under the huge shadow of his hand.
Although the light was dim, it made the illusory shadow appear incredibly heavy and peaceful.
In his earpiece, Ivan's leyline whispers surged like an undercurrent, clearly conveying a single sentence:
“Node 93… has completed its first compensation.”
The moment the compensation was completed, Lin Yi felt the ground beneath his feet, whose steady and powerful pulse had suddenly stopped.
Immediately afterwards, a completely new and distinct frequency began to spread slowly and irreversibly from the depths of the rye seedlings' roots, along the city's entire network of geological features.
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