The Path on the Pendulum

Chapter One: The Time of Shutdown

On the seventh day of the rainy season, the air was so humid you could wring water out of it. Zhong Hua squatted in front of an old wooden chest in the attic, the musty smell of camphor wood mixed with dust lingering around his nose. The grandfather's clock leaned against the corner, its bronze pendulum covered with a layer of dark green patina, the hands stubbornly stopped at 3:15—this time like a solidified scar, embedded among the mottled Roman numerals on the clock face.

“This clock needs to be repaired.” Ayu handed over a rag, her fingertips brushing against the grapevines carved on the top of the clock. “It hasn’t rung since your grandfather passed away.”

Zhong Hua remained silent, his palm pressed against the cold clock face. He suddenly recalled the time when he was ten years old, when his grandfather sat in a wicker chair telling him nautical stories. Every hour the clock struck the hour, the light in the old man's eyes would reflect the swaying of the pendulum. At this moment, under the glass of the clock face, in the shadow of the 3:15 hand, he could vaguely see fine streaks of accumulated dust, much like the pores on the volcanic rock of Weizhou Island.

Old Zhou, the watch repairman, was a regular at the watch shop at the alley entrance. When his fingers, clad in reading glasses, unscrewed the back cover of the clock, a dry, grinding sound came from the gears. "This movement needs oiling," he said, fiddling with the mainspring with tweezers. Suddenly, he exclaimed "Huh!"—a yellowed piece of paper drifted out from between the gears, its edges still stained with solidified machine oil.

Ayu picked up the piece of paper. The ink on the paper, which read "Shanghai Port - Guangzhou Port," had faded to a light brown. The 1983 postmark looked like a faded birthmark. On the back of the ticket, a simplified route map was drawn in blue ink. The location of the Pearl River estuary was circled, and the wavy lines extending from the circle were drawn with rough strokes, much like a child's doodle.

“1983…” Zhong Hua stared at the date on the ship ticket and suddenly remembered that his grandfather’s logbook contained weather records for the same year. “He should have been running the Bohai Bay route that year.”

Old Zhou examined the pattern on the ship ticket with a magnifying glass: "This paper is the special watermarked paper for old ship tickets, but this route map..." He paused, then pointed with tweezers to the circle at the Pearl River Estuary on the map, "The circled area looks like a reef, but I checked the nautical chart from that year, and it wasn't marked there."

Ayu's fingertips suddenly stopped at the edge of the boat ticket—the most worn part of the paper, the shape of the broken fibers exactly matching the chipped opening of the message in a bottle she found on Weizhou Island. Inside that clear glass bottle, there was a similarly yellowed strip of paper, the ink blurred into irregular clouds by the seawater, and the blank space in the center of the clouds was also a blurry circle.

“A message in a bottle from Weizhou Island…” she murmured, pulling a laminated note from her backpack. “Look at the shape of the ink smudges.”

Zhong Hua placed the boat ticket and the slip of paper side by side. Under the lamp, the ink diffusion patterns on both overlapped like mirror images—the circle of the Pearl River Estuary on the boat ticket corresponded to the blank circle on the slip of paper, and the wavy lines of the route map on the boat ticket filled the indentations of the ink on the slip of paper exactly. When Lao Zhou leaned closer to look, he suddenly gasped: "This is no coincidence. It's the same ink that spread under similar humidity conditions."

Suddenly, a "click" sound came from inside the clock. Old Zhou quickly used tweezers to fix the loose gear: "The pendulum bearing is a bit deformed, so I have to take it apart and adjust it." As he spoke, he removed the pendulum. The brass pendulum was engraved with fine patterns. He had thought it was just decoration, but now, under the light, it showed regular undulations—just like the crests and troughs of ocean waves.

Chapter Two: The Secret Within the Gears

While disassembling the pendulum, Lao Zhou's tweezers accidentally touched the bottom of the pendulum, and a copper piece the size of a fingernail fell off. There were tiny characters engraved on the back of the copper piece, which Ayu had to make out with her phone's flashlight: "'Qingdao' 1983.7.15 21°02′N, 109°09′E"—the coordinates of Weizhou Island.

“Your grandfather worked on cargo ships, how could he have gone to Weizhou Island?” Zhong Hua frowned, his grandfather’s logbook had never mentioned this small island in the South China Sea.

Old Zhou wiped the oil stains off the copper plate with a cotton swab: "In the summer of 1983, there was a typhoon in the South China Sea, and many ships would temporarily seek shelter from the wind." He pointed to the wave pattern on the pendulum, "This is a typhoon wave height chart. The weight of the pendulum has been specially adjusted, and it should be used to record a certain swing frequency."

Ayu suddenly remembered the note in the bottle. Besides the smudged ink, there was a line of almost invisible pencil writing on it. She had once made a pencil rubbing of it, revealing the three characters "Waiting for the wind," the handwriting childish, as if it were written by a child. Looking at the route map on the ferry ticket, she suddenly realized that the circle at the Pearl River Estuary was precisely the safe harbor during typhoons.

"The frequency of the pendulum's swing..." she murmured, "could it be related to the waves?"

Old Zhou was oiling the gears when he heard this and paused. "Theoretically, it's feasible, but it requires extremely precise calculations." He wound up the clockwork, and the pendulum began to swing slightly. "Listen to the sound."

"Click...click..."

The pendulum swung with a steady and regular rhythm, much like a beat. Ayu closed her eyes and suddenly recalled the scene when she watched the swans at Qinghai Lake—before the flock of swans took flight, they would flap their wings regularly, and the interval between each flap was strikingly similar to the rhythm of this pendulum.

“The swans of Qinghai Lake…” Zhong Hua was also stunned. “When we went there last year, you said that the frequency of their wing flapping before taking off sounded like they were clapping.”

Old Zhou took off his glasses and wiped them. "Interesting." He adjusted the weight of the pendulum and wound it up again. "Let's try it now."

A new "click" sound rang out, slightly faster than before. Ayu suddenly opened her eyes: "This is... the sound of the icefall falling in Yubeng Village!" Last year, when they were hiking in Yubeng, they had recorded the frequency of icicles falling by the icy lake, and the sound of the pendulum now matched that.

Old Zhou got interested and adjusted the weight again: "Listen again."

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