That mysterious "∞" symbol, like a drop of ink thrown into a calm lake, quickly spread ripples in the No. 84 resource mill.
Panic, curiosity, and speculation—various emotions intertwined among the crowd.
All eyes turned to Lin Yi; in this temporary student gathering place, he was the de facto leader.
"Teacher Lin, did you make this? Does it have any special meaning?" a bold boy asked loudly.
Lin Yi shifted his gaze from that deeply ingrained symbol, slowly shook his head, and said calmly, "It wasn't me."
His denial did not quell the unrest; instead, it stirred up even greater waves.
If it's not Lin Yi, then who could it be?
Is it a mark left by an external enemy, or has an unknown variable emerged internally?
An invisible pressure began to permeate the mill.
In response to this unease, the students spontaneously began a clumsy attempt to "rectify" their names.
They began meticulously recording every "good thing" that happened at the mill, using charcoal pencils and scraps of wood.
"Zhang Yuan from Group Three repaired the windmill blades in the northwest corner, increasing efficiency by five percent."
"Li Qian from Group Five taught ten people how to weave ropes with tough grass, solving the problem of binding supplies."
Even a small thing like "Wang Hao from Group Two built a shelter for a stray old cat during a rainstorm" was solemnly written on the bulletin board.
The mill was filled with a positive atmosphere of "making achievements and establishing a career," and people seemed to want to fill the psychological void brought about by that mysterious symbol with these visible achievements.
Lin Yi watched all of this silently.
He saw people comparing their contributions and whose names appeared more frequently in front of the bulletin board, with the occasional arguing drowning out the creaking of the windmills turning.
He knew this was wrong.
At dawn, thick fog shrouded the distant mountains and also soaked the stone walls of the mill.
Chu Yao stood beside him, her clear, cold voice seemingly able to pierce through the mist: "They are still using the yardstick of 'merit' to measure the value of 'existence.' The panic brought about by that symbol is essentially the fear of having one's own existence erased."
Lin Yi nodded, knowing that Chu Yao had seen through the core issue.
What these people fear is not the unknown, but that their efforts and existence will be easily wiped away like dust in a corner, leaving no trace.
Their way of resisting is to use a more utilitarian measure, objectifying themselves into lines of cold, hard achievements.
He turned and walked into a corner where clutter was piled up, and pulled out a stack of discarded record sheets.
These papers were no longer usable for formal records due to dampness and insect damage.
Lin Yi took a pair of scissors and carefully cut them into square pieces the size of matchboxes.
He stood at the entrance of the mill, holding the stack of rough scraps of paper.
Everyone who comes in or leaves, regardless of their status or age, will receive a card from him.
“Write down the thing you remember most vividly today, no matter how small.” Lin Yi’s instructions were simple yet perplexing. “Then, drop it into the feeding hole in the center of the millstone.”
People looked at each other in bewilderment.
Someone hesitated before taking the piece of paper, thought for a long time, and then wrote down, "I fixed the leaky sieve today."
Another person wrote, "I ground three more bags of wheat than yesterday."
They habitually handed the slips of paper to Lin Yi, hoping he would review them, comment on them, or even take notes.
But Lin Yi simply waved his hand, indicating that they should throw it in themselves.
He neither looks, nor asks, nor comments.
And so, one by one, the slips of paper bearing words of pride or ordinariness were thrown into that deep millstone hole and disappeared into the darkness.
As evening fell and the last batch of wheat was fed into the millstone, Lin Yi did something that left everyone speechless.
He poured all the scraps of paper he had collected during the day, along with the newly harvested wheat grains, into the millstone with a clatter.
"Teacher Lin! There are words inside!" someone exclaimed.
"You can't eat paper!"
Lin Yi ignored him and calmly activated the windmill linkage device.
The heavy stone mill turned slowly, making a grinding sound that made your teeth ache.
Grains of wheat, scraps of paper, ink stains—everything was mixed and crushed under that immense pressure, eventually turning into fine white powder mixed with wisps of ash.
That evening, the steamed buns from the cafeteria had a peculiar, faint gray pattern, like the washes in a traditional Chinese ink painting.
The atmosphere became strange.
Someone picked up a steamed bun, held it up to the light, and examined it closely, frowning as if studying some kind of pollutant.
Some people found it novel and laughed as they broke it open to see the texture inside.
But no one argued loudly as usual about who ground the flour today or whose contribution was the greatest.
Because this flour belongs to "everyone".
This went on for a week.
Gray-patterned steamed buns became the new norm at the mill, and people gradually got used to this food bearing the mark of the unknown.
The arguments completely ceased, replaced by a shared, secret-like silence.
Until dinner on the seventh day.
A boy of about ten years old was wolfing down a steamed bun when he suddenly spat out a small piece of paper soaked in saliva.
He wanted to flick it away in disgust, but he inadvertently caught a glimpse of the half-line of text that hadn't been completely worn away.
The ink was faint, and the handwriting was childish. It read: "...That song reminded me of my grandmother..."
The boy was stunned.
Holding up the tiny scrap of paper, as if he had discovered some earth-shattering secret, his lips trembled, and he suddenly shouted with all his might, "My grandma! My grandma hummed that song too! The one she hummed when the wind blew through the window at dusk!"
The entire cafeteria fell silent instantly.
Everyone froze. Time seemed to have been paused.
The silence was broken the next second.
A girl suddenly looked down and pulled out a piece of paper stained with soup from the bottom of her bowl. It read, "...the taste of mom."
Her eyes instantly welled up with tears.
"Here! In the crack of the pot lid!" a cook called out, carefully prying out a piece of writing that was almost rotten from the steam from the edge of the huge pot lid. "It says, 'I really want to be caught in the rain again'..."
"A piece of my shoe is stuck to the sole! 'The sun feels so warm on my back!'"
The unrest spread like wildfire, and people began frantically searching around them.
From the mouth, the bottom of the bowl, the cracks in the table, the stove, and even from the dust in the freshly swept floor, I searched for those fragments of memories that had been worn down and reborn.
“What’s being ground up isn’t memory,” Lin Yi’s voice rang out at that moment, clearly reaching everyone’s ears.
He stood up, his gaze sweeping over the excited, bewildered, and moved faces. "It's about letting it grow into the food, becoming a part of our bodies. The merits may be forgotten, but the memories will not."
Just as the emotional torrent within the mill reached its peak, from deep underground, Ivan's intermittent whispers, mixed with electrical static, drifted faintly through Lin Yi's bone conduction headphones:
"Node 84... High-frequency emotional resonance confirmed... Begin... Breathing..."
That night, without any organization, a peculiar "sound transmission ring" spontaneously formed in the mill.
People sat around the stove, which had been extinguished, by the dim light of an oil lamp.
A person speaks, recounting their most profound memory.
After he finished speaking, the people around him had to retell his story before telling their own.
The third person must retell the stories of the first two people, plus their own.
And so, the chain of memories grew longer and longer, like a long river of oral narration, flowing quietly in the darkness.
Each person becomes a bearer and transmitter of others' memories, and individual experiences are incorporated into collective history.
“…I remember, when the ‘Scavengers’ first came to our area, the city wasn’t completely locked down yet,” a middle-aged man with a hoarse voice said slowly. He had once been a resident of the outer area. “Back then, the night watchmen, in order not to alert anyone and to let their replacements know it was safe, would always draw a special mark on a fixed corner of the wall…”
At this point, Lin Yi's heart suddenly stirred.
He suddenly stood up, interrupting the flow of the story.
Amidst the astonished gazes of the crowd, he strode quickly toward the oldest and most weathered wall of the mill.
The plaster on the walls there had peeled off layer by layer due to years of dampness and wear.
Lin Yi reached out and carefully scraped away the outermost layer of white paint and the putty powder underneath with his fingernails.
The paint peeled off in a rustling sound, revealing a deeper, darker wall underneath.
As he cleaned it little by little, a symbol that had been almost unintentionally smoothed out by the years and by later generations suddenly appeared before everyone's eyes.
It was a horizontal "8", an infinity symbol—very similar to the mysterious "∞" on the mill gate, only more archaic and more blurred.
Lin Yi's breath hitched slightly, but he didn't make a sound.
He straightened up without making a sound, dusted off his hands, as if he were just casually verifying the story.
The next day, he gathered several students who had studied history and archival science in the old world, gave them the rubbing of the image in the corner, and gave them only one task: to identify the origin of the symbol.
All day long, the mill’s archives room was filled with the rustling sound of turning pages.
Those incomplete old archives, city logs, and personal diaries salvaged from the ruins were carefully examined page by page.
Finally, they found the answer in the pages of a yellowed and brittle battlefield medic's diary.
On a hand-drawn map, there are several markings that are exactly the same as the rubbings.
A note in the diary reads: "Shift handover confirmation symbol. The person who takes my place will see it and know that I was here and everything is alright. We don't leave our names, only our marks, so that those who come after us will know—someone took your place during this long night."
Lin Yi solemnly posted a photocopy of that page of the diary on the mill's bulletin board, right next to the wooden boards that recorded "achievements".
He didn't write any explanation, but only a line below the photocopy: "They didn't seek fame, they only wanted future generations to know—that someone had kept watch for you."
At that moment, Chu Yao closed her eyes, and she once again sensed that strange change in brainwaves.
It's no longer the chaotic, horizontal comparison and anxiety of before, but a kind of "vertical resonance".
People's thoughts began to travel through time, forward to trace those nameless guardians; backward to consider what kind of mark they would leave for future generations.
Three days later, a smooth stone slab, brought by an unknown person, appeared next to the mill's notice board.
A line of large characters was carved in charcoal on the stone slab: "No one is on duty today, but the gate is open."
This statement is like a declaration, a bold test.
In a time of scarcity and crisis, an unattended granary is nothing short of a deadly temptation.
In the evening, Lin Yi finished his business and passed by the mill.
He saw a tall, thin boy squatting next to the "∞" symbol, secretly writing something on the back of the stone slab with a small piece of charcoal pencil in the afterglow of the setting sun.
The boy wrote hastily, his handwriting messy and tiny: "I'll come at dawn tomorrow, don't let the millstone get cold."
Lin Yi stopped and watched him finish writing in the shadows. Then, like a guilty child, he quickly flipped the stone slab back to the side that read "No one is on duty today" before hurriedly leaving.
Lin Yi did not go forward to disturb them. As he left the mill area, he reached out and gently closed the heavy wooden door without locking it.
It's late at night.
As Lin Yi stood on the distant ridge, gazing at the mill one last time, he saw the door being pushed open a crack from the inside out.
A faint glimmer of light from an oil lamp shone through the crack in the door, like a stubborn star.
The next morning, when the first rays of sunlight shone on the mill gate, the stone slab had already been quietly turned over.
The small print on the back is missing.
Instead, below the line on the front that read "No one is on duty today, but the door is open," several new lines of text, each with a different handwriting, have appeared:
“We’ll take turns.”
Anonymous.
"Don't let it get cold."
Lin Yi stood on the mountain ridge, the cold morning wind ruffling the hem of his clothes.
He gazed at the wisps of smoke rising above the mill and the lamps that still burned stubbornly in the morning light, a faint smile appearing on his lips that went unnoticed.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com