Dent: a Life Without Words

One ordinary afternoon, all words, numbers, and symbols in the world began to disappear. Not erased, but slowly and irreversibly dissolved as if it had never existed - from the blackboard, from the pages of books, from computer screens, from street signs, from people's memories. It is a natural phenomenon in which a "silent filter" sweeps across the Earth from the depths of the universe. It does not target any life, leaves no explanation, and does not care about any civilization. Chen Yu, a professor of linguistics, has been obsessed with proving that "symbols are the bones of thought" throughout his life, but he has personally witnessed the dissolution of bones. His student Lin Xiao, a young girl who cannot think in symbols but can "memorize" lines with her fingertips, becomes his only guide to the new world. Su Ruo, a radio astronomer in the mountains, was the first to capture the trajectory of the filter with an instrument; Zhao Shoujing, a restorer at the Northern Archives, chose to protect the paper itself rather than the content on it after tens of thousands of ancient books became blank. Their hearing is more sensitive than ours, and their touch is more delicate than ours. They touch the walls with their hands, find their way with their feet, and exchange information with their breath. They no longer "read" the world, they "live" in it directly. When the lines on the last wall are smoothed by wind and rain, when the last filter sweeps across a land that no longer produces symbols - what humans leave behind is not language, not writings, not anything that can be "read". There are only dents, those traces of existence that have been repeatedly scratched by fingers, repeatedly heated by body temperature, and cannot be restored by any translation.