Full introduction to "The Sound of Return"
In a future where she has lost her ability to fictionalize, she must regain the "right to grieve" for humanity.
The year 2045 is the seventh year since the "Great Silence" enveloped the world. Humanity has collectively lost the neurological ability to create metaphors, understand stories, and make fictions. The world became efficient, honest, precise—and suffocatingly cold. Art becomes archeology, religion is reduced to historical entries, and love is redefined as a biochemical formula. Officials claim that this is the evolution of civilization and a "rite of passage."
Eva Koch, a researcher at the Institute of Cognition in Berlin, discovered a deliberately concealed truth when sorting out data from the "Great Silence" event: mysterious sound waves recorded simultaneously at 720 locations around the world actually constituted the ninth line of the Guimei hexagram in the "Book of Changes". At this time, she came into contact with a boy born after the "Great Silence" - a ten-year-old child who theoretically never had the ability to make fiction, and he drew a bird with "tears in its eyes".
"Because it's sad," the boy said. "It can't go back."
This metaphorical statement that shouldn't exist pushes Ava into a quest across the continent. Under the funding and supervision of the "Pure Society", she was ordered to "clean up" the remaining cognitive anomalies around the world, but her real mission was to piece together the erased truth:
* In Bolivia, the last forest hinterland mapped by algorithms, the indigenous elders guarding ancient wisdom told her that human civilization had signed a "metaphorical covenant" with all things - we understand the world through stories, and the world responds to us through metaphors. The "Great Silence" was a one-sided
