Amber layers formed over time

As the last old item was removed from the wooden crate, Ayu suddenly noticed something unusual about the wood grain in the darker layer at the bottom—the varying shades of brown lines formed a map of their journey: the blue of Qinghai Lake locked in the center of the tree rings, the green of Yubeng Village spreading along the edges, and the volcanic red of Weizhou Island seeping from a crack. Zhonghua lightly tapped the bottom of the crate with his fingernail; the echo resonated with the sound of sand they had heard at the Singing Sand Dunes in Dunhuang, and the ripples from the vibrations seemed to replicate the orbiting path of the stars at Namtso Lake in the air.

"Look at this." Ayu held up an eraser she had found in a tin box. The cartoon pattern from 1998 had worn flat, but under a certain light, it revealed strange raised lines—those raised lines formed the migratory routes of birds on Bird Island in Qinghai Lake, and the wear marks on the edge of the eraser were exactly the path of a typhoon recorded in Zhong Hua's grandfather's logbook. When Zhong Hua took the eraser, he suddenly smelled a very faint sulfurous odor, which reminded him of the smell of the Weizhou Island volcano, and the rate at which the odor evaporated was exactly the same as the rate at which the water melted at the Yubeng Village Sacred Waterfall.

The moving company's urging came from downstairs, but Ayu found one last thing at the bottom of the box—under her mother's thimble was half a sketch of the old train station from 1999. The clock tower's hands were stopped at 10:17, reminding Zhonghua of his birth time, and the pattern of the platform tiles was exactly the same as the waiting room tiles they had just removed that morning. On the back of the drawing paper, written in lipstick, were the words "New Beginning." The strokes of these three characters gradually deepened in the sunlight, eventually turning the orange-red of the sunrise over Qinghai Lake, and the speed at which the color seeped in was in rhythm with Zhonghua's heartbeat.

Resonance spacetime coordinates

As the truck started, the camphor wood box rattled softly in the trunk. Ayu looked back out the side window; on the balcony of the old house, the shadow of the sycamore tree was tilted at a strange angle—the tip of the shadow pointed precisely to the new neighborhood they were about to move into. Zhong Hua's hand on the steering wheel suddenly froze. The speedometer needle stopped at 65 km/h, a number that reminded him of the 65 bridges he had crossed during his travels. And the speedometer's rotation frequency was exactly the same as the cassette tape of "Seven Mile Fragrance" in the old wooden box.

In the elevator of the new apartment building, Ayu noticed that the floor pattern was an enlarged version of a peony embroidery. When the elevator reached the 17th floor, the door opening chime was exactly the same as the sound of the old wooden box's brass lock popping open, and the light from the corridor light shining through the glow stick in her hand cast spots on the floor that gradually changed color with the sunset over Qinghai Lake. The moment Zhong Hua opened the door to his new home, the mosaic of the entryway tiles stunned him—the geometric patterns combined to form the route map hidden in the bottom of the old wooden box, and the mica sheets embedded in the gaps between the tiles flickered at a frequency synchronized with the magnitude fluctuations of the stars in the sky above Namtso Lake.

When unpacking, Ayu placed the family photo in the center of the bookshelf. As the setting sun streamed through the window, the shadows of the sycamore trees in the photo suddenly extended into reality—the area covered by these shadows, with the spines of the books on the shelf arranged precisely in the altitude curve of the Yunnan-Tibet Highway. Zhonghua put the cassette tape into the new stereo; this time, there was no static, only the clear sound of camel bells flowing from the speakers, and the pauses in the bells corresponded to their breathing rhythm during their trek in Yubeng Village. Most magically, when the prelude to "Seven Mile Fragrance" began, the scent of real jasmine suddenly wafted in from outside the window, the trajectory of the fragrance drawing a perfect spiral of the Weizhou Island volcano in the air.

Late at night, Ayu discovered a hidden compartment in the wardrobe of her new bedroom. The blue cloth lining the compartment was the same style as the embroidery hoop in the old wooden chest, and embroidered on the cloth with silver thread were all the maps they had drawn during their travels—the wavy lines of Qinghai Lake winding around the snow-capped mountains of Daocheng Yading, the sand dunes of Dunhuang connecting to the Milky Way over Namtso Lake. As her fingertips traced the words "New Beginning," the silver thread suddenly emitted a faint glow, the color of which gradually changed from the orange-red of Qinghai Lake to the blue of the Yubeng Icefall, finally settling on the deep purple of the starry sky over Namtso Lake. The duration of this gradual change was precisely all the years from their births to their reunion.

When Zhong Hua walked in, he saw A Yu smiling at the dim light. He followed her gaze and saw that the outlines of the map embroidered with silver threads were casting dynamic shadows on the wall—the waves of Qinghai Lake were rising and falling, the snow-capped mountains of Daocheng were melting, the sand dunes of Dunhuang were shifting, and the stars of Namtso were twinkling. The center point where all the shadows converged fell precisely on the backs of their clasped hands, forming a circle without beginning or end, much like the smooth stone ring they saw on the last day of their trip at the Weizhou Island volcano, polished by the waves for thousands of years.