At 4 a.m., the lights in the second-hand market flickered on and off like broken LEDs. I squatted at the entrance of "Laowang Electronics" and watched him toss a discarded motherboard high into the air before dropping it heavily into a metal barrel. The parts scattered like a miniature firework display, also resembling a funeral for an era. Laowang said, "These boards are either gold or toxic. Throwing them away is a crime, but selling them is a loss." At that moment, I took a serious look at the six words "circuit board recycling equipment" for the first time—they weren't cold mechanical terms, but the forgotten heartbeat of a city. A week later, I followed a transport truck to the "Green Vein Factory" on the outskirts of the city. Outside the factory, climbing ivy crept into the rusted air conditioning units; inside, a silver-gray dragon was awakening. Conveyor belts fed tons of discarded boards into disassembling machines, where blades, like a pianist's fingers, precisely stripped off capacitors, chips, and heat sinks. Magnetic separators opened their invisible jaws, swallowing iron and nickel. Vortex current sorting machines flung out aluminum flakes, emitting clear clanging sounds like wind chimes in the afternoon corridor. The most mysterious area was the hydrometallurgy zone, where green etching solutions swirled in glass tanks, capturing invisible gold, palladium, and copper ions. Engineer Zhao handed me a filter paper covered with speckles of gold powder, like dusk-crushed light. "0.3 grams of gold," he said, "from ten mobile phone boards, enough to plate the gold fingers of a memory stick." I suddenly understood that recycling isn't "disposal," but "reclamation"—melting scattered time into the keys to the future. However, even the most advanced equipment can't overcome human negligence. Some dump brominated flame retardants directly into rivers to save 800 yuan per ton in wastewater treatment fees. Others smuggle foreign waste at night, letting discarded boards sail across oceans to "bury" Chinese villages. I returned to Laowang's market and placed the gold-plated samples I brought from the factory in front of him. He picked up the nearly transparent gold dot and gazed at it for a long time, like watching a miniature of his life. The next day, his stall displayed a handwritten sign: "High-price recycling of discarded boards, only selling from official factories." The words were scribbled, but like a new circuit, they reconnected conscience to the earth. Today, Green Vein's Phase II factory is under construction, with plans to install quieter low-temperature crushing lines. At night, I passed the construction site and saw the crane's long arm swinging back and forth like a giant soldering iron, welding stars into the city's veins. I thought that perhaps one day, every discarded circuit board would return home like a child, regrowing a golden pulse under the machine's gentle call. At that moment, the city would no longer be a graveyard for waste, but a charging station for memories; and recycling equipment would transform from cold steel into breathing, beating, forgiving companions.