It started when a bloody rain was about to fall.

After hearing what Qin Lan said, Shi Linglong did not respond immediately.

She remained crouched, staring intently at the rock core sample in front of her, as if her eyes could pierce through the sample itself.

I saw the seabed from hundreds of millions of years ago, the magma churning deep within the earth's crust, and the continental plates drifting slowly and steadily over countless years.

After a while.

She then spoke.

"It's not unusual."

Shi Linglong's voice was soft, yet it carried an undeniable certainty.

"It's a signal."

Upon hearing this, Qin Lan was somewhat taken aback.

"Signal?"

At this moment, Shi Linglong finally raised her head.

At that moment, sunlight refracted through her glasses, casting a deep blue hue into her eyes.

In that deep blue depths, something seemed to be awakening.

Then she slowly got up.

The movements were extremely slow, so slow that it seemed as if the stretching of every inch of bone carried the solemnity of a mountain range rising up.

As the knees lifted from the ground, the indigo overalls cinched at the waist in a smooth arc, like the slow folding of rock strata over time.

His back stretched out section by section, and his shoulder line drew a clean outline in the backlight, like the most distinct silhouette when the morning light splits the mountain ridge.

When she stood up straight, her slender figure cast a long, slanted shadow inside the tent. The shadow fell on the canvas, undulating slightly in the wind, like mountains breathing in the twilight.

"The earth is speaking."

At the same time, Shi Linglong murmured.

"We finally heard it."

The crowd, who were initially captivated by the beauty of the two, involuntarily held their breath after hearing Shi Linglong and Qin Lan's conversation.

Sun Mingyuan's pen froze in mid-air, his eyes wide behind his glasses. He thought: Is the earth... speaking?

Zhao Changhe's fingers tightened slightly as he held the cigarette, causing the cigarette to deform between his fingers.

He had seen countless rock cores and heard countless reports, but this was the first time he had ever heard someone speak in such a tone.

Zhou Guoliang's white eyebrows suddenly twitched, and he instinctively sat up straight.

That sentence was like a pebble, thrown precisely into all the experience he had accumulated in the wilderness over half a lifetime, stirring not a ripple, but a heavy echo.

He Shusheng's hand holding the pen froze in place, his lips moved as if he wanted to say something but then swallowed it back.

He suddenly felt that the ground beneath his feet didn't feel as solid as it had before.

Even Liu Demao, the driver who was leaning against the tent entrance and about to take a nap, couldn't help but shiver. He even dropped the cigarette he had just lit. This was because he had been driving this route for many years, and sometimes he would drive at night, especially late at night, and these kinds of things were the most taboo for people in his line of work.

The air inside the tent seemed to freeze at that moment.

Shi Linglong's words landed heavily in the hearts of everyone in the tent, like a rock just taken from the depths of the earth—still carrying the chill of millions of years, making people's hair stand on end.

"A signal? Is the earth speaking?"

Hearing what Shi Linglong said, Qin Lan muttered this question to herself. Then, she composed herself, looked at the content displayed on the tablet in her hand, and continued speaking to Shi Linglong, who had already stood up beside her:

"Sister Linglong, look, at a depth of 150 meters, the intensity of the geomagnetic fluctuations has surged by 42% compared to last week. The existing model... is completely incompatible."

Her voice unconsciously lowered, as if she were sharing a secret she didn't want a third party to hear.

"Whether it's tectonic stress release or precursors of magmatic activity, the spectrum doesn't match. I've tried all known matching patterns and three different algorithms, but the result is always the same—unidentifiable."

At the same time, silence fell over the tent. Only the howling of the wind and the faint chirping of birds in the distance remained.

Then, the crowd, which had fallen silent because of the conversation between the two, began to whisper among themselves, and some people had unconsciously put down their labels and notebooks.

One of them frowned and whispered to his companion, "A signal? The earth is talking? What are they saying? What geomagnetic fluctuations... can't be matched?"

The man with the furrowed brow is Fang Dawei. He has broad shoulders and large hands, and looks like someone who does manual labor all year round.

He didn't understand the data, but he instinctively felt that what made the stonemason speak in that tone must be something significant.

His companion shook his head and replied in a low voice, "I don't know, but something doesn't sound right."

This companion was none other than the young team member named He Shusheng from before.

He said he didn't know, but for some reason, a word he had heard as a child came to mind—earthquake.

When older people say this word, they always lower their voices.

Another team member leaned closer, lowering his voice even further:

"Shi Gong was talking about signals, about the earth speaking... Qin Gong was talking about three algorithms, but none of them could be recognized."

The man who came closer was named Zheng Mingyi. He was in his early thirties, tall and thin, with a prominent Adam's apple that bobbed up and down as he spoke, like a rock on a mountain ridge being loosened by the wind.

He had worked in the team for five years and had never seen Shi Linglong speak in such a tone before. He had a vague feeling that something was about to rise from the ground.

The group exchanged glances, their initial bewilderment replaced by a growing unease. One team member even unconsciously rubbed his arms and muttered:

"Why do I suddenly feel a little cold..."

The person rubbing his arms is Luo Xiaoman, the youngest in the team, only nineteen years old, with a round face and two red patches on his cheeks from the mountain wind.

He didn't know why he felt cold, but he felt that the air in the tent had suddenly become heavy, making it hard to breathe.

Outside the tent, since no one heard the conversation between Shi Linglong and Qin Lan, everything remained as usual. Several exploration team members were seen bending over and adjusting a portable seismograph.

One of them straightened up and, by chance, caught a glimpse of Shi Linglong's profile through a gap in the tent's canvas, as she listened to Qin Lan speak. He paused, then whispered to the person beside him:

"Look at the stonemason's figure... doesn't it look like a mountain spirit in human form?"

This man is named Wu Dayong. He has a square face, thick eyebrows, a loud voice, and loves to joke around.

But he spoke these words very softly, as if afraid that someone inside the tent might hear them.

The other person glanced up, smiled and shook his head, but did not refute, and continued to bury his head in the numbers jumping on the recorder's dial.

This man was named Song Shuwen. His name was scholarly, and he was scholarly in general. He wore glasses on his nose, and the handwriting in his notebook was so neat it looked like printed text.

He smiled outwardly, but inwardly he thought: Wu Dayong is wrong. It's not that the spirit has transformed into human form; it's that the person has become like a mountain.

Two team members were carrying equipment boxes in the distance. One of the young men stopped and looked through the tent window at the two figures silhouetted against the light inside the tent. He whispered to his companion:

"These two girls on our team are really something else... tsk tsk."

This young man is named Ma Xiaochuan. He has tanned skin, a white smile, and likes to hum songs while working.

Before he finished speaking, that "tsk" was nothing more than a young man's instinctive admiration for beauty, without any unnecessary embellishment.

His companion kicked him: "Get to work." But he couldn't help but glance at him again.

His companion was named Ge Hongjun. He was two years older than Ma Xiaochuan, with broad shoulders and a thick back, looking like a martial arts expert.

After he kicked, he didn't look away, thinking: If these two were standing together, there would be no need to turn on the lights in the tent.

At the same time, after hearing what Qin Lan said, Shi Linglong did not speak, but took the tablet computer from Qin Lan's hands.

Her ten fingers were long and slender like jade chopsticks, with well-proportioned joints and clean, shell-colored nails.

When the cold white light of the screen shines on them, the ten fingers seem to emit a soft luster, like fluorite in the dark night.

Then, Shi Linglong's right fingertips glided smoothly over the violently fluctuating numbers and distorted graphs, fast and precise, without the slightest hesitation.

The chaotic torrent of data is automatically sorted, reconstructed, and upgraded in Shi Linglong's eyes.

What she saw was not cold, hard numbers—

Rather, it is the invisible tides surging deep within the earth's crust, the silent roar of rocks under pressure, and the subtle tremors of some sleeping being turning over in its dream.