Inside the main hall of the Hua family stronghold, Mo Hua’s gaze sharpened as he looked at the myriad “bone-carving” secret techniques from different mountain realms, tribes, and eras of the Barbarian Wilderness laid out before him.

He meticulously reviewed each bone-carving technique, comparing them one by one, but found nothing particularly unusual.

After the heavy rain, the mountain mist lingered. Simulin outside Jin’yu City was as quiet as if in slumber, only the bronze bell beneath the ancient tree trembled softly with the first light of dawn, as if responding to someone’s unuttered whisper from afar.

The young boy knelt before the Guanyi Platform, clutching a soaked notebook. Rainwater dripped from his hair onto the stone slab, echoing his rapid breaths. His lips still moved slightly, repeating, “I remember… I remember…” His voice grew fainter but never ceased. The surface of Ji Lake had long returned to calmness, but the ethereal silhouette of the “Yisheng Tree” had not entirely faded. It remained like a brand etched into the heavens and earth; though invisible to the naked eye, the soul could perceive its presence.

Suddenly, footsteps approached from a distance, crushing fallen leaves and withered branches. It was a young woman in a grey-blue cloth robe, with a plain jade bell hanging from her waist. She was Mo Zhiwei, the newly appointed Xunyi Envoy of the Xinyi Division, tasked with investigating anomalous memory fluctuations in the border regions of Jiuzhou. Last night, she had been staying at an inn thirty li away but was awakened by an inexplicable palpitation, as if the memories of millions of people were simultaneously calling out, or like a single, solitary cry piercing through time and space.

She stood at the edge of the Guanyi Platform, gazing at the boy’s back, and asked softly, “What is your name?”

The boy trembled all over and slowly turned his head. His eyes were clear amidst the haziness, as if he had just awakened from a long dream. “I… I have no name,” he said. “They call me ‘Yazai,’ because I haven’t spoken since I was five.”

Mo Zhiwei squatted down, her gaze falling on the notebook in his arms. The cover was swollen and deformed, but a few lines of pencil writing were still vaguely visible: “Mama’s Words,” “The Day Papa Broke the Bowl,” “I Shouldn’t Have Hidden Her Medicine Bottle”…

“Did you write these?” she asked.

The boy nodded. “I was always afraid to finish the last chapter. She said, ‘Don’t blame Papa,’ but I still hated him. I hated him for hitting her, for drinking, for watching her die without saving her… But… but she said not to blame him… So I locked myself in the attic for three years, without saying a word. Until last night, I dreamed she stood at the door, smiling at me and saying: ‘Speak it out, child.’”

Mo Zhiwei remained silent for a long time, then gently stroked the cover of the notebook. “Do you know? The heaviest memories in this world are often not grand, earth-shattering events, but the trivial words hidden under pillows, in wardrobe corners, or in the cracks of stove hearths. They silently gnaw at people’s hearts, until one day, someone finally dares to bring them out and let them bask in the moonlight.”

The boy looked up, tears welling in his eyes. “Now I’ve spoken… but will I… go mad? Like those who have seen the Jingqiang?”

“No,” Mo Zhiwei shook her head. “Because you are not forced to see, but choose to speak. True collapse comes from suddenly confronting something after avoiding it for too long; what you are doing now is rebuilding.”

She took out her jade bell and gently shook it. The clear sound, like a spring, flowed into the lake. The water surface rippled slightly, and circles of waves spread out, gradually synchronizing with the boy’s heartbeat. This was the “Gongming Yinyi Shu,” a secret technique passed down by the Xinyi Division, which used music to stabilize the mind and help people clarify memory boundaries.

A moment later, the boy took a deep breath and slowly placed the notebook under the bronze bell. He closed his eyes and whispered, “I remember what my mother said before she died. She said, ‘Don’t blame Papa, he’s just too tired.’ I also remember the last time she combed my hair, using a wooden comb with broken teeth. I remember there was blood on the handkerchief she used to cover her mouth when she coughed, but she smiled and said it was chili oil. I remember… I remember everything.”

As his words fell, the bronze bell rang again.

This time, it was not a single chime, but three consecutive rings, clear, melodious, and long-lasting, piercing through the sky.

In the depths of Ji Lake, a faint light rose again, but it no longer resembled the towering giant tree of yesterday. Instead, it transformed into countless firefly-like points of light, floating up from the bottom of the lake, spiraling upwards, finally condensing into a blurry, gentle, human-like silhouette of a woman wearing an old-fashioned apron. She remained in the air for a few breaths, smiled faintly at the boy, and then dissipated in the morning breeze.

The boy was stunned, tears streaming down his face.

“Was that… Mama?” he murmured.

“That was the form your memory gave her,” Mo Zhiwei said softly. “It’s also the most authentic her in your heart.”

She stood up and looked towards the center of the lake. “Everyone has a Ji Lake in their heart, but most people’s lake surfaces are frozen year-round, reflecting nothing of the past. Only when a person is truly willing to face themselves, to say ‘I remember’ without embellishment, will that ice crack, allowing light to shine through.”

The boy remained silent for a long time, only tightly clutching the damp notebook, as if it were his umbilical cord to rebirth.

Meanwhile, a thousand li away on a solitary island in the East Sea, strong winds and waves suddenly arose.

Before the “Weiwo Jingqiang,” a man had stood for seven days and seven nights. Draped in a black robe, his face hidden in the shadow of his hood, he gripped a small bronze mirror. The mirror surface reflected no image, only a swirling grey mist. He was one of the seventh group of observers to land on the island, and the only one who refused a guide. Xinyi Division officials on duty on the island had repeatedly urged him to leave, but he had refused with silence.

This morning, as he once again closed his eyes and silently recited “I remember,” the scene in the mirror suddenly changed.

It was no longer twisted slaughter or absurd dreams, but a street scene in a small town: bluestone paths, lanterns hanging from eaves, children chasing paper kites, an old woman sitting in front of a door shelling beans, looking up and waving to him: “Ayan, come home for dinner.”

The image was heartbreakingly real.

The man suddenly opened his eyes, breathing rapidly. With trembling hands, he caressed the edge of the bronze mirror, where a line of extremely fine characters was etched: “Year Renwu Spring Homecoming Record.”

“This isn’t my memory…” he murmured. “But why is it so familiar? Why… am I crying?”

At this very moment, the entire underground palace shook violently. Cracks appeared on the surface of the Jingqiang, and faint golden light seeped from the black fissures, like blood flowing from a wound. Immediately after, memory fragments of all those who had collapsed there began to flow in reverse—pictures shattered by fear, truths buried by guilt, identities distorted by desire—all converged into the mirror’s core, forming a slowly rotating vortex.

In the center of the vortex, two characters appeared:

The man’s pupils constricted.

“Guiyuan… Yinzhen?” he exclaimed in a low voice. “Impossible! That formation collapsed ten years ago! Lu Chen destroyed it with his own hands!”

But he quickly realized something was wrong. The characters “Guiyuan” before him were not the official seal script recorded back then, but rather clerical script with a clear folk artisan charm, the strokes warm and powerful, as if penetrating stone, more like some original version.

He suddenly remembered Lu Chen once mentioning in a public lecture: “We thought the Guiyuan Yinzhen was built by the imperial court, but that’s not true. It originated from an nameless craftsman who only wanted to help his amnesiac mother recall snippets of her childhood. Later, it was appropriated by the powerful and transformed into a tool for controlling memories.”

Could it be… the Jingqiang on this island was the true “Guiyuan” prototype?

Just as he was pondering, footsteps sounded behind him. A girl in a plain white dress walked slowly, her bare feet treading on the cold rock without any sense of chill. She was the speechless girl who had brought back the crystal ten years ago, now the highest-ranking “Jingting Zhe” of the Xinyi Division, specializing in analyzing collective subconscious fluctuations.

She stopped and faced the man, speaking for the first time in ten years. Her voice was like spring water striking stone, clear and firm:

“Who are you looking for?”

The man froze.

“You think you are searching for the truth, but in fact, you have been avoiding someone. You are unwilling to admit she is your mother, because you believe her weakness caused your family’s death; you are unwilling to remember her voice, because you are afraid that once you recall it, you will forgive her. But you are wrong. True memory is not for judging the past, but for those who live, to no longer be alone.”

The man’s knees buckled, and he fell to the ground.

“I… I don’t want to forgive… but I miss her…”

The girl walked closer and placed her palm on his forehead. “Then let her come back. Not as a sinner, nor as a victim, but as… someone who loves you.”

In an instant, the bronze mirror shattered.

Thousands of fragments floated in the air, each reflecting a different scene: his mother coaxing him to sleep, mending his torn clothes, walking ten li in a snowy night to buy him medicine, holding his hand on her deathbed and saying, “You must live well”…

The man roared to the heavens, tears streaming down his face.

And in the ice cave in the far north, the old woman’s picture book suddenly turned a page by itself.

The page, which had been open to “Planting Peach Trees,” quietly slid to the next illustration: two little girls running side by side, peach blossoms fluttering behind them, and a distant cottage with smoke curling from its chimney. The inscription in the corner had changed:

“Little sister, this time it’s my turn to find you.”

The old woman was stunned, her withered fingers tracing the image, murmuring, “You said… you would marry when the flowers bloomed… but you didn’t live to see it… But I guarded that tree, year after year… Now, it has bloomed.”

As her words fell, the wind and snow outside the window abruptly stopped.

An aurora descended from the sky, piercing the firmament. Wherever its light reached, nearly a hundred Ji Lakes across Jiuzhou simultaneously rippled. In a deserted courier station on the northwestern frontier, a charred wooden tablet inexplicably spontaneously combusted, its ashes forming the character “Tao”; in a southern fishing village, the memory bell inside an iron box vibrated on its own, emitting a hoarse song: “Children could not return… May future generations know of this battle…”; in the Xintang of Huanhu Academy, the bamboo slips of the “Zhenshi Jiuzhang” all vibrated, one of them even revealing a chapter title never before recorded:

Chapter Nine: Memory is Not Still Water, But a Spark

Lu Chen was organizing the revised draft of the “Lu Clan’s Three Questions” when he noticed the anomaly and immediately rushed to the courtyard. He looked up at the aurora, his heart shaking violently.

“This is not a natural phenomenon… This is memory resonance! The Ji Lakes of the entire Jiuzhou… are synchronously awakening!”

He immediately issued orders to all branches of the Xinyi Division to activate the “Jiuzhou Common Memory Contingency Plan.” At the same time, he opened his personal copy of the incomplete bamboo slips, his gaze falling on the text that had kept him sleepless for nights:

“If the ‘Ji Lake’ turns against its master, the ‘Duanyi Fire’ shall burn all the waters of Jiuzhou…”

He suddenly sneered: “So you were wrong. The Ji Lake was never a container, it was a seed. What you call ‘backlash’ is merely it finally sprouting.”

At this moment, before the broken stele inscribed with “Wang Wuming” in the western desert, the faint glow after the blood absorption had not completely extinguished. The archaeologist rubbed his tingling fingertips, shocked to see a new sentence appear on the back:

“Now known.”

He trembled as he pulled out his camera to take a picture, but found that the lens could not capture any image. No matter how he adjusted the angle, the photos showed only yellow sand and the broken stele, as if everything just now had been an illusion.

But he knew it wasn’t.

He silently put away his tools, and before leaving, wrote a sentence on the sand:

“History is not on the stele, but in the eyes of the one who reads the stele.”

The wind rose, the sand shifted, and the words were buried in an instant.

And in that small village where spring rain continuously fell, the child completed his painting. He cut off the line of words in the corner, carefully tucked it into his textbook, then ran out, climbed onto the rooftop, and shouted loudly to the sky in the drizzle:

“I want to be a storyteller! I want everyone to remember what should not be forgotten!”

Raindrops tapped on the tiles, like millions of voices responding.

The bronze bell rang again.

This time, it was more than one chime.

Jin’yu City, Donghai Island, Huanhu Academy, Northwest Courier Station, Southern Fishing Village, Western Ruins… Across Jiuzhou, wherever there was a Ji Lake, bronze bells chimed softly, their sound waves interwoven, forming an invisible ballad that traversed mountains and rivers, lingering between heaven and earth.

Su Mian stood on the high platform of the academy, the wind sighing in her ears, but a smile touched her lips.

“Do you hear it?” she said to the disciple beside her. “That is memory growing.”

The disciple shook his head blankly: “But nothing is happening.”

“No.” Su Mian gently touched her eye patch. “The greatest changes are never in thunder and lightning, but in the subtle turn of a human heart. When a person dares to say ‘I remember,’ they have already lit a lamp. And this lamp will illuminate another person’s darkness. Passed on like this, it eventually becomes a sea of stars.”

She paused, looking up at the sky.

“What we guard is never memory itself, but the courage to remember. As long as there are still people willing to tell, and people willing to listen, this world will never truly forget.”

The rain gradually stopped.

The clouds parted a sliver, and moonlight spilled onto the lake, reflecting the “Yisheng Tree” standing silently, its branches and leaves flourishing, its roots deeply embedded in the earth’s veins, names shimmering incessantly on its leaves—some familiar, some strange; some departed, some still in the human world.

And at the highest point of the canopy, the inscription remained clearly visible:

Believers are not alone, those who remember live forever.

No one knew how long this resonance would last, nor could anyone predict whether new cracks would appear in the future. But at this moment, across Jiuzhou, countless ordinary people were quietly opening drawers, flipping through old books, wiping dust from sealed objects, preparing to tell stories that had been hidden for too long.

Because they finally understood:

Memory is not a burden, but a bridge.

A bridge to the past, a bridge to each other, a bridge to the future.

As long as there are people willing to walk on it, the bridge will not break.

The bronze bell stirred slightly, its lingering sound winding, merging into the spring breeze, and drifting into the distance.