The old man died in an old house in a mountain village. The police initially believed that he fell accidentally.
But he made a call to the police before he died. On the phone, he first announced "There is someone outside the door" in Mandarin, and then began to recite paragraph after paragraph in a language that no one could understand - until the door was pushed open, there was a muffled sound, and there was no response.
There is no second person in the country who can speak this language. It is not in the textbooks, it is not in the radio, there is no such item in the files, and even its name is not left. When a language dies to this extent, it does not die of natural old age, but because someone has done something to it.
The linguist who was expelled from the academic community was silently exposed to this recording. He quickly confirmed: it was not nonsense, it was a well-structured text of four paragraphs - like an oath, like quoting a certain document, like a list, and the last paragraph was like an instruction to a junior.
The old man has memorized it for decades and revised it for decades, waiting for someone to record it.
To understand this passage, Silence has to retrieve the stolen tape, go through the old accounts from fifty years ago, and match every name that has been fingerprinted. And the further he went, the clearer it became - what was blocking this sound was not just dead language, but also people who had been living and didn't want it to be understood.
As for whom the last instructions were left to, he didn't dare to think yet.
