Eternal Silence

Silence does not speak. When he was carried out of Zhilin, the whole village thought he was mute - the gong beat in his ear for three days, and his eyelids did not move. They are wrong. He is not mute. He just never knew how to change the thing on his chest into the shape of his mouth. His ears were closed. But with his ears closed, he learned another thing—— **Others use their ears to hear sounds. He sees with his eyes. ** He could see the undulating circle of a word, the emptiness of a lie, the missing piece of a bell. The sounds in this world are becoming less and less. There is an invisible "quiet" in the south that swallows up dozens of miles a year. Wherever it passes, the person neither dies nor moves—eyes open, awake, nailed in place, turned into a statue. Jingchao is still eighty miles away from Luosheng Village. It keeps advancing year after year, and no one ever sees it stop. He cannot hear the world. So this world has never heard of him. Fourteen years later, he walked out of the village carrying a bell that had never rung. ——And the thing that makes the world quiet has noticed him.