City. Settlement area. A jungle composed of industry and flesh and blood. Thrive and grow in the groans and songs of the world. The background of this performance is the grandest symphony and endless carnival, but every actor and every part is silent. They may have made a sound, but they were lost in the moments when no one paid attention.
In a city, you can tell hundreds of directions by looking at one road. On the road surface, mud is mixed with stones quarried from the cliff. There is a finger-thick hole in the center, and a sound-producing nail and a lighting lamp are inserted into the hole. Every city has different tastes for lights. The lights on this road are colorful, so gorgeous that they don't match the background of the city, as if a layer of poisonous neon is hanging around the feet of pedestrians. As the frequencies received in the bottom sound tubes change, they change color in an unpredictable sequence.
The architecture on the road is as fickle as these lights, depending on the expectations and preferences of its owners. A high grid-like house with walls made of steel plates and titanium alloys. The interior is wrapped in many interlayers that evacuate air, and the outermost layer is covered with smoked leather. This high house is built to escape the outside world and enjoy the most luxurious tranquility inside, but it can cause long-term health problems. The rows of low houses that are far away from the tall houses are almost made of hundreds of square sound-absorbing bags filled with soil, as crude as a child's pebbled fortress.
The surface of the sound-absorbing bags is sometimes covered with large stickers, simplified shapes of some tools, or various gestures, deliberately drawing straighter or sharper grains. That's all to block the damaged location of the sound-absorbing bag. Living in this kind of house can barely protect you from the noise from the road, as well as the dust and particles kicked up, but you can't do anything about the wild noise underground. Homeowners don't expect this, they just go for the low price. Perhaps they hope that all their silly laughter and crying will be covered up by the song of the world.
There are more houses. Loose or tight structure. Make a compromise between materials and design between tall houses and short ones. The viscous soundproofing fluid squirmed and expanded in the interlayer, and the wind chime made of resonant metal film hung motionless on the window while emitting a high-pitched scream that pierced the wall panel. The potted bacteria hang under the wind chime, squirming, twisting, growing, and shining brightly with the movement.
In this extremely noisy space, electric vehicles pass by like water. There is more energy storage in cities than in rural areas, but the demand for electricity can never be met. For this reason, each electric vehicle has a limit. As the sap-filled rubber wheels rolled slowly across the road, the people on the cars would use hand gestures to utter veiled curses. Those gestures are not allowed by the higher-ups and have never been given meaning in official regulations, but people who have been in the same area for a long time will understand it.
People begging on the roadside can understand the meaning of all gestures. He had lived for more than one hundred and forty years, was deprived of all his property for offending others, had no descendants, and lived on the meager charity of public duty. He is a man who can watch the road for a long time, and his senses have completely declined. When some cranial tingling dispersal alarm sounded, he would just sit there until those special cars passed by.
A rare car can be seen in its styling.
The funeral car has a bronze sculpture and an iron cage at the end, and all the valuables of the deceased's life are placed in the cage to attract the soul to follow. People with military honors sit in a carriage with a diaphragm vibrating drum and a crossbow rail, and are pulled by a bronze statue of a rock ox at the front. Those varying numbers of oxen, a ferocious beast that is now extinct. They are equipped with fuel and combustion engines inside, their eyes emit red and blue light, and the huge mouth on their chest spits out billowing black smoke. There are also rich people's cars, with various ores and stone bodies of ancient animals hung on the outside, and they are also driven by oil and gas from the ground.
This extravagant practice was more popular in the ancient slave times, but now it is officially prohibited by law. Only the criminals are punished as miners, descending into underground caverns filled with echoes of terror to cleanse away their sins with pickaxes and oil pumps. Most people can endure such hard labor for two to three years before succumbing to rhythmic disease. Their hope is to find something in the deep mine, a precious sedimentary oil spring, or a vibrating rough crystal. Then they are likely to receive amnesty.
Seizing of what is beneath the earth. The eternal war between earthly life and the world. When the earliest sound plumbers drove sound nails into the ground as slaves, most of them were killed by the terrifying rhythm coming from the ground. All railways are laid on the dust stained with their flesh and blood, and their bones are mixed with copper and iron juice, permanently stationed at the edge of the world. It is said that it was the advice of the Immortal, but no one knows the reason.
There are older and darker times. There are no sound tubes and crystal diaphragms. Craftsmen are always asked to make a long ladder that won't melt. They want to use this ladder to drive to the red and shiny magma fragments in the westernmost sky and steal the unusually bright light. At that time they were not aware of fire and heat, because there was only the cold light emitted by the bacteria on the ground. When people make a sound close to the frequency of a scream, these bacterial colonies light up due to resonance.
That was the primitive religion and gods. People sent sacrifices into the cave where the gods lived and hung them on the cave walls covered with fungi. They would chop off his fingers to prevent him from making gestures in order to promote more vocalizations. After that, there is a series of steps in which they will gradually peel off the skin of the sacrifice and plant mycelium on the flesh, while giving the best nutrition and care. Throughout the ceremony, trained priests gathered here to write and draw by the light of the flora. They are so pious that they can turn a deaf ear to all the noise in the cave.
There are many reasons for the decline of old religions. But for the old man sitting on the street in the city, all he can know are those fabricated stories that most people are willing to listen to. In ancient times, there was a pair of lovers. The woman had the best singing voice, but she never sang to outsiders. Until her lover was chosen as a sacrifice and disappeared into the village forever. She finally violated the sacred teachings and went to the cave in the forbidden place. When she saw the morbidly lush luminous bacteria outside the cave and the remains of her lover between death and life, she let out a soul-rending cry, and the whole valley glowed brightly.
But forget these ancient things. Time hints at the old man on the city street. The past and the future have nothing to do with you, poor man. You should open your eyes wide and seize every moment, every scene of this moment, that is all you can bring into the fire and the bronze statue.
The old man's wrinkled skin tightened in panic at the suggestion. He stared at the street with twitching eyelids. In the sonic world of endless singing that had long since banished him, only those poisonous neon-colored hazes of light proved their existence to him. Time is still passing, unfolding the illusion of light. The wheels rolled over the holes leading to the ground. Every crevice in the house is crawling with bacteria. The ghosts of the abyss and caves wander the solid stone with them.
At this time, a noble lady passed by on the road.
A rare beauty. She was sitting on an electric car, and she was still very tall. The skin is dark brown and silky, and it is obvious that he has lived in a house with sufficient light and warmth all year round. Her bare arms and shoulders were full of flesh and blood, and the lines were as smooth and strong as the waist and abdomen of a sand cow. On her splayed ears and rare golden brown hair, she wears a horned headscarf and is decorated with flower-shaped chains. Those flowers are undoubtedly exaggerated shapes, making them look too delicate and small, and are dotted with bright red minerals. Nowadays, rich people have a tacit understanding of the origins of these treasures. They will say that they are all accumulated antiquities. He will never admit that he still buys new minerals mined by criminals on the black market.
This beauty is like a monster emerging from a statue, and every move she makes is as artistic as a statue. Her bright eyes also release a continuous current like a crystal diaphragm. When the old man on the street saw her, he seemed to hear the underground singing again in his chaotic consciousness, but it was not coming from the underground, but from his withered and weak chest.
The rubber wheel stopped beside him. The bronze-like lady bent over and looked at him in the car. Her arms hung down from the door railing, and her overly slender yet nimble and cute fingers slid through the air. She gestured to him, with a hint of Eastern custom in her movements.
Where to go from the central square? she asked him.
The old man squinted at her, and he noticed that there was a black round lens hanging on her chest, like a tool used by astronomers to observe fragments in the sky. This beauty's car is also strangely simple, with no animal fur or mineral samples hanging on it. The coachman was a tall, silent man who waited patiently for the lady to negotiate with him.
Central Square. He finally started to think. Then gesture slowly. in front. Then turn left, then right. Where the evil relics are placed.
The beauty smiled with satisfaction. The electricity in her eyes danced with a hint of sly joy. She lowered her head and threw a disc at him. Golden light swirled on the ground, which were gold coins with ancient marks.
Her lips moved and she spoke a word that the old man could not hear. Then the tram started again and disappeared on the road eroded by neon light and fog.
