A piercing system alarm shattered the tranquility of Lin Yi's command room.
On the screen, a line of blood-red data pulsed violently like an electrocardiogram, pointing to a forgotten corner—the south of the city, the "silent pilot" area.
The alarm message was bizarre: a maple leaf, without any physical contact, had autonomously activated a light path, which had been running stably for over seven days without any sign of diminishing light.
Lin Yi's pupils suddenly contracted.
The Silent Pilot Project was a product of his early experiments, designed to test the natural settling cycle of memory dust without any external intervention.
That place should have been a graveyard of data, deathly silent.
He personally went to the scene.
The maple leaf lay quietly in the center of the stone base codenamed "Empty Platform," like a carefully displayed work of art.
Its veins are clear, its edges are curled, and its color is the richest crimson of late autumn.
Lin Yi inspected the base and confirmed that the leaves had not fallen naturally.
Its position was so precise, right in the core sensing area, without the slightest error.
He immediately ordered the retrieval of 360-degree ultra-high-definition images around the "empty station".
The scene flashed back, and the truth made him gasp for breath.
Seven days ago, a sparrow carried this maple leaf in its beak, placed it precisely in the center of the empty platform, and then flapped its wings and flew away.
And this is just the beginning.
Over the past seven days, seven different bird species, from thrushes in the morning to blackbirds in the afternoon and hoopoes at dusk, have taken turns bringing a different fallen leaf each day, as if performing some kind of sacred ritual.
Each fallen leaf corresponds precisely to a long-forgotten, never-before-officially-registered memory path.
Lin Yi's fingertips traced the cold stone platform, and a yellowed ancient book surged into his mind.
Those were scattered records left over from the war, which mentioned an almost absurd legend—"the bird path for delivering messages."
It is said that in desperate situations where communication is completely cut off, some specially trained carrier pigeons can sense strong human emotions and obsessions and "carry" them to a designated location.
This idea has always been regarded as a romantic fantasy during wartime, a kind of poetry born of despair.
But now, everything before our eyes seems to be writing the harshest footnote to this legend.
If birds can be messengers of memory, then how many other lives on this land are participating in this unprecedented "ecological shared memory"?
To verify this crazy conjecture, Lin Yi secretly set up ten "dumb spots" at the site of the old river channel in the East District, which had long been filled in.
That was the last major obstacle for refugees crossing the river at night during the final stages of the war.
The so-called "dumb spots" are ten completely isolated underground caves, with all the air and light removed, containing only a handful of sterile soil mixed with trace amounts of memory dust.
This is the most extreme environment; any sign of life would be considered a miracle.
Seven days later, when the infrared monitoring device's probe went deep into the cave, the scene displayed on the screen made all the staff present gasp in shock.
Within the pitch-black cave, countless faint, intermittent wisps of light appeared out of thin air, like the breaths of someone on their deathbed.
As the underground humidity subtly changes at night, they flicker on and off, and the rhythm of their flashing perfectly matches the breathing frequency of refugees who held their breath and lay in ambush on the riverbank, as recorded in the database.
Lin Yi personally ordered the ground to be broken.
When the first cavern was opened, a scent mixed with earth and past sorrows rushed out.
The source of the light filaments was a milky-white mycelium he had never seen before, which was tightly wrapped around a piece of rotten wood soaked in soil.
That rotten wood might have been a fragment of a boat plank used to cross the river.
The samples were rushed to the laboratory.
The analysis results were even more astonishing than the light filaments found in the cave.
The cell structure of this unknown hyphae is extremely unique. Its long DNA chains are filled with a large number of regular, non-biological repetitive sequences, and their arrangement is highly similar to the encoding logic of human brain memory storage.
More importantly, subsequent culture experiments proved that this fungus can only survive within the weak radiation range of the "nameless path" and exhibits strong phototactic adsorption of organic traces such as sweat, tears, and bloodstains left on human remains.
Lin Yi stood in front of the sterile petri dish, holding in his hand the rusty bell-shaped wheat stalk he had found in Granny Chen's belongings box.
He slowly and gently touched the end of the broken stem to the mycelium in the petri dish that was faintly breathing.
In an instant, the entire patch of mycelium seemed to be infused with a soul, and its light surged!
They were no longer unconscious flickering, but rapidly intertwined and outlined, projecting a heartbreakingly clear three-dimensional image into the air above the petri dish: in the pouring rain, a frail woman knelt in the mud, using her back to tightly protect the crying baby in her arms; behind her, towering flames and a burning, collapsing village.
This was the dream scene that Granny Chen repeatedly mentioned but could not quite recall on her deathbed.
Lin Yi's hand trembled slightly.
He finally understood.
Some life forms, without his knowledge, have quietly evolved into "living carriers" of memories.
They no longer need the guidance of the night dwellers, nor the energy of the silent lights; they can autonomously and completely reconstruct those forgotten paths through the most subtle, emotionally charged traces in the environment.
He immediately launched the "bacterial introduction plan".
He secretly buried nine specially made pottery shards at nine of the city's most critical historical junctures—including the destroyed clock tower, the abandoned field hospital, and the entrance to the last air-raid shelter.
The pottery shards are made from clay mixed with memory dust and fired, with faint symbols of the Night Listener engraved on the surface using an almost invisible fluorescent material.
Late on the third night, a miracle occurred.
The monitoring system showed that all nine ceramic shards developed a brilliant mycelial network on their surfaces as expected.
These light networks emerged from the ground, automatically connecting along the underground energy flow, and eventually converged into a complete route map of the Golden Age retreat that traversed the old city.
However, what happened next was even more unexpected.
At the end of one of the light networks, which was the final gathering point for the refugees, an infrared camera captured a group of wild cats.
They seemed to be attracted by the net of light, forming a circle and taking turns gently patting the ground with their front paws.
The rhythm of the clapping was steady and melodious. After sound wave analysis and comparison, it was confirmed to be the folk song passed down orally among wartime survivors—"Homecoming Tune".
The news reached the nursing home.
Upon hearing that the mycelium could produce light and develop images, Granny Chen tremblingly took out a jar of aged rice wine that had been sealed for decades from under the bed.
Her cloudy eyes shone: "Back then, the wounded on the front lines had no water to drink, so the medics would soak cloths in alcohol and let them lick them to keep them alive."
She insisted on sprinkling the wine at the starting point of the "nameless path" in the nursing home.
Lin Yi did not stop him.
As the amber-colored liquid seeped into the soil, everyone held their breath.
That night, an astonishing scene unfolded.
As if sensing the presence of an old friend, the mycelium sprouted wildly from the wine stain. Instead of spreading along the ground, it climbed up the wall and quickly entwined itself around a wild plant in the corner called "Wall Whisperer".
The light of the mycelium and the faint light of the wallflower intertwined and merged, and the two streams of light from different life forms intertwined and rose, eventually projecting dozens of blurry but warm figures in mid-air.
They couldn't see faces, but they could see hands carefully passing pieces of damp cloth forward.
At that moment, in the central monitoring room of the nursing home, seven elderly people who had participated in wartime care and were now in their twilight years, almost simultaneously raised their arms in their respective rooms, making a gesture of reaching out to receive something.
Their faces held a dreamlike serenity.
Lin Yi inspected the Maiyadi Ruins again.
The scene here was beyond his comprehension.
At the base of the newly sprouted wallflower, the silvery-white mycelium has completely merged with the underground vein light threads.
When the energy of the earth veins flows like the tides, the light of the mycelium also pulsates, as if the entire earth is taking a deep and regular breath.
He took out the crystal-clear, transparent ear of wheat and slowly touched it to the ground.
The moment they made contact, the faint footsteps in the wheat ears suddenly became extremely light and distant. In their place came the delicate crackling sound of the mycelium spreading underground, like millions of neurons transmitting information at the same time.
Moments later, a scene that defied scientific explanation appeared.
At the same moment, all the illusory points of light gathered atop the Wall-Walking Flower ruins in the entire wheat field ruins turned towards Lin Yi's direction.
They stared at him silently for a full three seconds.
Immediately, all the light, as if touched by an invisible hand, went out.
It was a silent declaration, clear and resolute, as if telling him, "You don't need to come anymore."
He slowly gathered the wheat ears, feeling not disappointment, but an unprecedented sense of relief.
He looked up at the silent night sky and whispered his final instructions: "Remove all the remaining silent streetlights in the city, leaving only the 'Nameless Path' signpost. The rest are up to nature and people to decide."
The old order is crumbling, and the new rules have just begun to write the first undecipherable character in the sky above this awakening city.
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