They took the book to Wuzhen, where the old master dyer was collecting the fabrics drying in the sun. The indigo cloth fluttered in the wind, and as sunlight filtered through, the crackled patterns on its surface cast dappled shadows on the ground. Ayu took out *The Little Prince*, and the old master put on his reading glasses, his fingertips tracing the title page. Suddenly, he laughed: “This handwriting is from my apprentice. Back then, he always read while dyeing cloth, and I would scold him if his pen got on the fabric.” He pointed to an old wooden box in the corner of the workshop, “Inside are his design sketches; he always drew stars like volcanoes.”

The moment the wooden crate was opened, Ayu held her breath. Inside, stacks of indigo cloth were painted with various designs in white ink: the crater of planet B612, the Little Prince's sheep, and a pilot's hat. The brushstrokes of each design were exactly the same as the penmanship on the title page. On the top piece of cloth, there was a small tin box, with the words "For those who cannot wait" written next to it. The indigo smudges at the edges of the lettering were exactly the same shade as the pencil marks on the ticket stub tucked inside the book.

"Where did he go after that?" Zhong Hua asked, his finger tracing the volcano pattern on the fabric, the shape of which perfectly matched the satellite map of Weizhou Island. The old craftsman sighed and pointed to the riverbank outside the fabric workshop: "After the film festival that year, he said he was going to see the sunrise over Qinghai Lake, and he never came back." The river breeze blew, and the indigo fabric hanging out to dry rustled. Ayu saw the shadows of the fabric swaying on the ground, suddenly forming the shape of the Namtso starry sky, and in the center of the Milky Way, there was exactly the planet B612 that Zhong Hua had arranged with pebbles when they were stargazing last year.

On the way back to Shanghai, Ayu laid *The Little Prince* open on her lap. As the train passed Taihu Lake, the setting sun shone through the window onto the pages, and the fountain pen handwriting on the title page suddenly became transparent—embedded in the underlying paper were extremely fine blue fibers, arranged in the shape of fabric. She remembered the old dyer's words: "Good indigo will seep into the fibers and cannot be washed away." And the direction of those fibers, following the strokes of the handwriting, outlined the route from Shanghai to Qinghai Lake, much like the nautical chart in Zhonghua's grandfather's logbook.

Zhong Hua got up in the middle of the night and saw A Yu sitting on the bay window, holding "The Little Prince." Moonlight shone through the gaps in the sycamore leaves, casting shimmering shadows on the pages. "Look," she pointed to a passage in the "Fox" chapter, where the ink had smudged into a small puddle, "doesn't it look like the crater of Weizhou Island?" Zhong Hua leaned closer to look, and in the reflection of the puddle, he saw floating bamboo poles from a dyeing workshop, their shadows overlapping the outlines of the gaps between subway seats. And deep within the reflection, a blurry figure was drawing a map, the trajectory of the pen tip marking the old street they had walked that day.

Later, Ayu placed the book next to the pothos on the balcony. Sunlight shone through the glass onto the cover, and the faded bright yellow gradually revealed the underlying color—the same blue as the indigo fabric from the dye shop. One day, while watering the pothos, she noticed that the water droplets on the leaves, when falling onto the edges of the pages, would gather along the strokes of the penmanship, eventually forming a tiny blue crystal at the end of the word "child," its shape perfectly matching the pores in the volcanic rock of Weizhou Island.

One weekend after autumn arrived, they went to the old alley again. Under the 17th sycamore tree, a new sapling had been planted. At the base of the sapling was a tin box containing a letter written by Ayu: "We went to Qinghai Lake. At sunrise, the lake looked like a piece of indigo cloth." Zhong Hua had drawn a Little Prince on the letter. He was standing beside a volcano, holding a star in his hand that was slowly shining at the speed of the Namtso starry sky.

As the subway passed that station again, Ayu noticed that another patch of sycamore leaves outside the window had turned yellow. She remembered what the old dyer had said: indigo needs to endure the wind and sun of all four seasons for its color to truly penetrate the fabric. She seemed to catch a glimpse of parchment through the gap in the seat; she reached out to touch it, but her fingertips touched Zhonghua's hand. The calluses on his palms matched the shape of the worn edges on the spine of *The Little Prince* perfectly.

On the way home, Zhong Hua suddenly stopped and pointed to a newly opened bookstore. An old-fashioned typewriter was displayed in the window, next to a copy of *The Little Prince*, its cover a bright yellow. Ayu noticed a line written in pen on the title page: "All the stars glitter in indigo." The ink smudged at the ends of the strokes, leaving tiny trails, much like the fleeting blue shadows of indigo cloth hanging on bamboo poles in a Wuzhen dyeing workshop when the wind blew.