The air in the No. 3 approval meeting room at the city hall was as cold as if it had been quenched with ice.
On the committee panel, an elderly man with gray hair adjusted his glasses, his voice carrying an undeniable caution: "Mr. Lin Yi, your 'Lighting Up the Charter' concept is very moving, but it has a fatal flaw. Memory is sacred, but also fragile. If someone fabricates a touching story to gain sympathy, or simply as a prank, how will the lamp holders react? Are we recording history, or creating a bunch of glamorous lies, polluting the memories that truly belong to this city?"
This questioning was like a pebble thrown into a still lake, instantly creating ripples.
All eyes were on Lin Yi, some scrutinizing, some suspicious, and some expectant of a good show.
Lin Yi remained completely calm; he simply waved towards the door.
A volunteer who had been arranged in advance walked in, looking a little nervous.
“Now, I will give a live demonstration.” Lin Yi’s voice was clear and steady, as if it had a calming power. “This gentleman will light a lamp for a ‘grandmother’ he has never met and tell a story that we just made up outside the door.”
He placed a brand new oil lamp on the lamp stand in front of the volunteer.
The volunteer took a deep breath and, following the prepared script, began to tell the story in a voice full of "emotion": "My grandmother... she loved to sit by the window and tell me stories on rainy days. She said that every drop of rain was someone in heaven thinking of us..."
He spoke with such passion and emotion that he almost believed it himself.
However, the oil lamp on the lamp stand underwent a strange change.
The flame, which was a warm, bright yellow at the moment of ignition, quickly faded into an ominous gray-black as he continued his false narration, as if it had been stained with ink.
The flames no longer leaped upwards, but instead curled inwards in agony, struggling.
A few strands of light struggled to escape from the flames, twisted like diseased branches, and after a few moments of struggle in mid-air, they snapped silently with a "crack," turning into nothingness and dust.
The entire conference room was deathly silent; the only sound was the gasping of the crowd.
Lin Yi walked to the dark gray oil lamp, his gaze sweeping across the room before finally settling on the face of the committee member who had asked the question. He spoke each word with conviction: "Light only recognizes a truly beating heart. It can discern the temperature of tears and understand the weight of silence, but it cannot be illuminated by lies."
He paused, a hint of awe in his voice.
You can fool people, but you can't fool the light.
The charter was passed unanimously.
That afternoon, under the silver vein-covered exterior wall of the nursing home, Grandma Chen, supported by a volunteer, gently placed the rusty tin candy box into the "silent lamp stand" specially set up for her.
The moment the box touched the lamp stand, the cold metal seemed to come alive, and the blurry peony pattern on the lid even lit up slightly.
The volunteer held the recording device to her lips, and her chapped lips moved for a long time before she finally made a hoarse, bellows-like sound.
After several attempts, a fragmented but clear speech was finally recorded.
“I…I am Chen Xiaosui. In 1943, I was…entered into a detention center. That year…that year, the wheat that had sprouted, we…shared it.”
The volunteer pressed the play button.
The moment that aged voice resonated through the lamp stand's resonant mechanism, a miracle occurred.
"boom--"
On the outer wall of the nursing home, the long-dormant silver veins seemed to be injected with a million volts of electricity, instantly bursting out with a dazzling silver light!
No longer were the scattered points of light or the intermittent paths, but an unprecedented, complete, and solid massive path of light, like a silver dragon awakening from the earth, roaring and soaring into the sky, tearing through the twilight, and shooting precisely towards the distant outskirts of the city—the ruins of that long-abandoned wheat field.
For a fleeting moment, the entire city was illuminated by this pillar of light that pierced through the sky.
The following morning, a gardener discovered a wild plant he had never seen before in the ruins of the wheat field site.
It stubbornly emerges from the parched earth, its petals layered upon layered, their color yellowish like an old photograph.
And on that very center petal, two naturally formed Chinese characters, their clarity breathtaking—
Small spikelet.
The "Light-up Assistant" program was subsequently rolled out across the city.
Lin Yi personally formed the first "Memory Patrol Team," which consisted mostly of enthusiastic young people. They were responsible for going deep into every corner of the city, especially those forgotten, marginalized communities, to find those "silent people" who could not light their own way.
During the training course, Lin Yi only set three principles: do not ask about details, do not judge the truth or falsehood, and do not interrupt the narration.
A young team member raised his hand and asked, his eyes filled with confusion: "Teacher Lin, what should we do if... if the narrator breaks down emotionally and cries so hard that he can't say a word?"
Lin Yi looked at him, his gaze gentle yet firm: "Then stay silent with him. Remember, the weight of what you hear is the weight of what you see."
Late that night, the young team member encountered the first test of his professional career at a gathering place for homeless people under a bridge.
A middle-aged man huddled in a corner, clutching a worn-out canvas backpack tightly to his chest, as if it were his entire world.
The man didn't say a word from beginning to end, only staring blankly at the cold ground in front of him.
The team members remembered Lin Yi's words.
He didn't approach the man to speak, but silently placed an oil lamp beside him, then sat down quietly and kept him company in silence.
One hour, two hours, three hours... The cold wind swirled in the bridge arch, and apart from the occasional suppressed sobs of the man, there was no other sound.
Just as the team members were about to freeze to death, a sudden change occurred.
Without warning, points of light appeared on the ground in front of the man.
The dots of light formed a series of footprints, starting from the man's feet, winding their way through the bridge arch, and pointing towards the old factory dormitory area in the distance, which had long been razed to the ground.
The light trail was not bright, yet it stubbornly flickered, as if silently recounting a long, irreversible journey.
The team members stood up abruptly, staring in shock at what they saw.
He understood that silence was not emptiness, but a cry filled with sorrow.
With all 37 silent lighting stations in the city now in operation, the generation of memory light flow has increased exponentially.
Lin Yi anticipated the risk of system overload and activated the "optical flow guidance" mechanism he designed.
He selected seven long-abandoned ancient wells in the seven directions of the city (east, west, south, north, and center) and transformed them into "memory cache pools".
These resonance wells can temporarily absorb and store excess light filaments, like a floodgate for emotions, waiting for new emotions to follow in reality before being released.
On the first day the mechanism was in operation, the resonance well in the East District malfunctioned.
In the dead of night, the ancient well emitted a low hum without warning, like a sleeping giant muttering in its sleep.
The personnel stationed there were astonished to discover that lines of nursery rhyme lyrics, composed of light and never before recorded by any equipment, were appearing on the mottled inner wall of the ancient well.
"Moonlight shines on the barn, the wheat turns golden, and it's time to put on new clothes..."
Lin Yi rushed over overnight and compared the lyrics of the song with the database.
The result shocked him—the tune of this nursery rhyme was exactly the same as the melody that Grandma Chen had unconsciously hummed in her sleep not long ago!
Light is no longer merely a passive record.
It begins to actively integrate and complete, using one person's memories to fill the gaps in another person's memories.
The light trails are replenishing the memories missing in reality.
A few days later, late one night, Lin Yi was on his routine patrol when he suddenly stopped when he reached the West District Detention Center.
An unusual, overly bright light shone from the window of Xiaohe's room.
He rushed into the monitoring room and pulled up the footage from inside the room.
Xiao He was already fast asleep, but the oil lamp by her bedside burned all night long, its flame as steady as a sculpture.
Countless fine threads of light emerged from the flames, but instead of dissipating or forming paths as usual, they swirled, intertwined, and coiled on the ceiling, as if a skilled painter were creating a work of art with light.
The image was sketched out stroke by stroke, and finally, a complete and clear silhouette was pieced together.
A woman stands with her back to the observer in front of a patch of withered vines.
Then, she slowly...slowly turned around.
When that face was fully revealed in the light and shadow, Lin Yi's breathing suddenly stopped.
It's her!
He was one of the members of Unit 95 who extinguished the oil lamp with his own hands back in Forbidden Zone Zero, beside that eerie withered vine!
Almost at the same moment, on the other side of the city, in a nursing home ward, Granny Chen suddenly sat up abruptly, her eyes wide open, staring straight at the ceiling, and clearly said in a dreamlike tone:
"...So it was her...she was the one who passed the lamp...to the child..."
Lin Yi wrote a line in his work log with slightly trembling hands: "The memory cells have begun to autonomously transfer the spark between each other."
The final anomaly occurred without warning at midnight.
At all thirty-seven designated "silent lamp stations" throughout the city, regardless of their age or intensity, all the oil lamps simultaneously spun their flames without any wind within the same second.
They rotate at high speed and eventually condense into tiny, extremely bright specks of light, each the size of a grain of rice.
Immediately afterwards, these points of light seemed to receive a silent command, detached from the lamp wicks, and like a massive firefly migration, flew up from all directions of the city, converging into thirty-seven streams of light, rushing toward the same destination—the Malt Ruins on the outskirts of the city.
When Lin Yi drove to the scene, he was completely shocked by what he saw.
Thousands upon thousands of points of light, like living stardust, hovered above the ruins, slowly converging at the top of the newly sprouted "small spike" wall-writing plant.
They did not collide with each other, but rather, in a mysterious order, they together constructed a huge phantom.
The silhouette of the shadowy figure was that of a mother holding an oil lamp.
But it is not the remnant of any single memory, but a completely new and complete image shaped by all the spontaneous streams of memories that have been lit up throughout the city.
The moment the phantom took shape, the ground beneath Lin Yi's feet trembled slightly, as faint as a sigh, or like a heart that had been beating for too long finally finishing its final beat.
Then, all was silent.
Lin Yi looked up, gazing at the phantom of his mother, composed of thousands of points of light, suspended in the night sky.
Her face was blurred, but the light from the oil lamp in her hand was gentler and brighter than any star in the sky.
He spoke softly, as if addressing the phantom, yet also as if speaking to himself:
“Now, you are not just following my path... you are following your own.”
After he finished speaking, he remained silent and stood still.
The soft light cast by the mother's illusory image stretched his shadow long, reflecting an indescribable tranquility on his usually calm face.
He made no further move, gave no instructions, and simply looked up, as if waiting for an inevitability that had been foreseen but unknown to anyone.
The whole world seemed to hold its breath at this moment, waiting for the next move of that colossal statue of light and shadow, or the next revelation.
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