That greedy gaze, like an invisible poisonous needle, pierced the city's night.
But at this moment, Lin Yi had no time to pay attention to the spying on the distant spire.
His entire attention was completely captivated by the strange transformation of the malt flower core before him.
Nine beams of light shot into the sky, like sacred pillars supporting the heavens, illuminating the entire city as if it were daytime.
However, within the network of light bands projected from the flower core, a mutation is taking place.
Besides the thirty-seven brilliant light paths leading to historical sites, which are already well-known to the "Night Listeners," countless faint light threads, as thin as hair, are quietly sprouting from the main trunk of the light belt.
Like a giant, sprawling spider web, they ignore the grand blueprint of urban planning, bypassing the commemorated monuments to heroes and ancient temples, stubbornly and silently extending into forgotten corners—slums on the city's edge, abandoned heavy industrial factories, damp and smelly underground pipe networks, and nameless areas marked only as gray blocks on the map.
These filaments were so faint that they seemed as if a gust of wind could break them.
They have no name, no direction, and no end; they simply exist humbly.
"...They...have no names..." Ivan's ethereal voice whispered in Lin Yi's mind, carrying a trace of ancient compassion, "...and no inscriptions...but they walked slowly...and persevered..."
Lin Yi's heart sank.
He immediately pulled up the city's nighttime surveillance footage and focused the image on the areas where the light rays extended.
In the high-speed playback of the footage, he finally caught the anomaly.
When the night is still and quiet, faint points of light appear out of nowhere in these places, like fireflies on a summer night.
They form no path, nor do they go to any ruins; they simply stubbornly and repeatedly circle a fixed point, round and round, like lost children searching for their way home, or like loyal guards protecting something unseen, day after day, year after year.
What are they waiting for?
Driven by intuition, Lin Yi donned his night clothes and slipped into a collapsed alleyway in the old city.
This is one of the areas with the highest density of light spots in the surveillance footage.
The air was thick with dust and the smell of decay, and the broken walls cast menacing shadows in the moonlight.
Right in the corner of a collapsed wall, he discovered a cluster of wild wall-talking plants.
Unlike its robust counterparts found at the site, this plant had unusually thin stems and dull, lifeless silver veins on its leaves, showing almost no trace of its "words".
Lin Yi slowly raised the "Night Listener" oil lamp in his hand.
An incredible scene unfolded when the warm yellow lamp flame approached the plant.
Without warning, the steady flame split into a faint, almost invisible red thread, which, as if it had a life of its own, actively wrapped around the fragile stem.
Buzz—
A soft resonance.
At the foot of the plant, the dust trembled slightly, and the outline of a small half-child's shoe, made of light particles, flashed by, crystal clear, but disappeared completely into the air in less than a second, as if it had never existed.
Lin Yi's pupils suddenly contracted.
He immediately returned to headquarters and went through the dusty old archives of the city.
After searching for several hours, he finally found information about this alleyway in the corner of a yellowed wartime map—this place had once been a wartime orphanage, which was razed to the ground in a devastating air raid, and all the children perished.
This place has never been included in any official list of "Night Listeners".
An astonishing deduction took shape in his mind: these specks of light, these nameless wall messages, belong to ordinary people who have been completely submerged by the torrent of history and completely forgotten by time!
They were not heroes, not kings, and didn't even leave behind a complete name, but their persistence and their "waiting" also left their mark on this city!
If these forgotten memories could also become power... how vast that power would be!
To verify this absurd hypothesis, Lin Yi launched an unprecedented plan—"Operation Name Search".
He did not use any official power, but simply posted hundreds of anonymous recruitment notices in his personal capacity throughout the city.
There are no fancy words above, only the simplest question: "Do you have someone you really want to remember, but who hasn't been remembered?"
Three days.
In just three days, the mailbox below the call for submissions was flooded with letters.
Hundreds of handwritten letters, each carrying a heavy memory.
An elderly mother with white hair wrote in trembling handwriting on a letter that she could no longer remember the nickname of her son who died in the war, but only that he had two dimples when he smiled.
An old soldier with a broken leg wanted to draw the face of his comrade who took a bullet for him, but he only left a blurry ink stain on the paper.
Another retired nurse sent me a wedding ring she found in an old hospital locker, whose owner was unknown, saying she kept dreaming of a man looking for it.
Lin Yi took all these letters, soaked with tears and longing, to the ground beneath the malt flower kernels.
He set them on fire.
Flames rose, and the letter turned to ashes.
A gust of wind blew by, swirling up the black ash and miraculously merging it into the "spider web" composed of countless fine, faint threads of light.
In an instant, the entire dim network of light trembled violently, as if a giant beast that had been sleeping for thousands of years had its nerve endings awakened for the first time!
efficient!
Lin Yi suppressed his inner elation and immediately moved on to the next step of the plan.
He selected seven areas with the highest concentration of unnamed lights and arranged for volunteers to keep watch with lights at night.
These volunteers are not limited by their background or memory capacity; the only requirement is that they sincerely and from the bottom of their hearts tell the story of someone "who doesn't want to be forgotten."
On the third night, at the entrance to the abandoned underground pipeline of the municipal hospital, an elderly cleaner, facing an ordinary kerosene lamp, rambled on about a stray cat she had adopted.
During the wartime bombing, the cat was hit by falling rocks while trying to lure her out from under a collapsed precast concrete slab, and never woke up again.
"...It's called Coal Ball because it's entirely black except for its white claws, which look like it's been stepped on in snow..."
The old man's voice was hoarse and choked with emotion.
The moment she finished speaking, a series of cat footprints made of tiny points of light appeared out of thin air on the ground in front of her, stretching all the way into the depths of darkness.
A faint, almost imperceptible meow seemed to still echo in the air.
Ivan's voice rang out again, with unprecedented certainty: "...Thought knows no distinction between noble and lowly...Light has its own path..."
Lin Yi officially named these seven locations "Silent Light Stations" and set up simple light stands and registration books there, allowing citizens to voluntarily come, light a lamp, and write down a forgotten name.
On the first day, only a dozen or so people participated.
On the seventh day, the line to register stretched from the alley entrance to the street corner.
It was late at night again when an elderly blind man, leaning on a cane, groped his way to a quiet streetlights. He carried an old harmonica with him.
He told the volunteers on night watch, “I can’t see and I can’t write. My wife loves to hear me play this, even though I always play it off-key.”
He sat in front of the lamp stand and began to play that nursery rhyme that was no longer in tune.
The mournful sound of the piano echoed in the night, indescribably unpleasant to hear, yet indescribably poignant.
Suddenly, the oil lamp in front of him, whose name was on it, stretched its flame, transforming into a gentle ribbon of light that outlined a semi-transparent female figure beside him.
The figure did nothing but quietly and gently leaned against the old man's shoulder.
The old man trembled, stopped playing, and tears silently streamed down his face.
At that very moment, the city's monitoring center sounded a piercing alarm.
On the screen, the light trails of the 37 oldest and most central historical sites in the city flashed seven times simultaneously!
It was a response, a confirmation, a silent coronation from the very core of the city's oldest memories!
Lin Yi stood in the central control room, looking at the unprecedented spectacle on the screen, and took a deep breath.
In the dead of night, when all the noise had subsided, Ivan's voice, like a gentle breeze, brushed through the depths of his soul.
"...The hundred races will awaken...The first lamp awaits...The next journey...Entering the heart of the well..."
Lin Yi's gaze pierced through the huge floor-to-ceiling windows, looking towards the Well of Memories in the city center, which was shrouded in light.
At the end of the bridge of light, in the very center of the lake, the legendary "First Lamp," burning with a ghostly blue flame that is said to never go out, waits quietly.
He knew that everything he had done before was just paving the way for this moment.
He has yet to touch the true core—there lies the moment the first wall language was born, and also the true source of the supreme power of the "Master of Time and Space".
He gripped the translucent ear of wheat in his pocket, a crystal clear object that seemed to be formed from condensed light—his token as a "Night Listener."
This time, he was no longer just a listener.
He whispered to himself, as if making a promise to the countless sleeping souls of the city:
"This time, I want to etch all your names into time."
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com