The suspended water droplet prism spun faster and faster, seven colored light bands intertwining into a spiral, much like the seashells they found on Weizhou Island. Each rotation flung out more fragments of memories: the peonies on Mother's embroidery bloomed in red light, the compass in Grandfather's logbook spun in blue light, and the circuit diagram of the radio Father was half-repairing appeared in white light. Even those more subtle, almost forgotten moments were stripped away—the ginkgo leaf on the shared umbrella on the rainy night in episode 204, the fiery clouds locked in the glass marble in episode 217, the scent of peach wood medicine in the medicine cabinet in episode 225—all now turned into particles of light, merging into the prism's rotation.

Ayu reached out, her fingertips touching the edge of the pillar of light. An unexpected warmth, like the sunrise over Qinghai Lake, or the temperature of Zhong Hua's palm. As her fingers passed through the orange-red band of light, the girl with pigtails from 1999 suddenly turned around. The girl's face was strikingly similar to Ayu's at this moment, only her eyes held a clear, bewildered look from the past. The postcard in her hand had already been dropped into the mailbox, and the cast-iron texture of the mailbox was overlapping with the glass curtain wall of the newly built subway station, forming an eerie yet harmonious pattern.

"Was that...me?" Ayu's voice trembled slightly. She remembered the old wooden crate she found when she moved, the peonies her mother embroidered on the letter paper, and the radio her father was halfway repairing in the photo. It turned out that all the old things, all the trips, and all the seemingly accidental encounters had found a connecting point in this prism.

Zhong Hua's heart continued to pound, and the flashing of the light spots never stopped. The rotation of the prism stirred the airflow throughout the waiting room, and dust particles lined up in the beams of light, outlining the route of the Yunnan-Tibet Highway; screws left behind by the construction team were shaken into the air, forming the outline of the Namtso Lake ring road; even the spider webs in the corners of the walls revealed the contour lines of the Yubeng Village pilgrimage route under the light.

“Frequency…” Zhong Hua suddenly spoke, his voice amplified by multiple resonances, “The camel bells of Dunhuang, the icefalls of Yubeng, the star trails of Namtso… their frequencies and the hum of the clock overlap, forming a resonance. It’s like… like these memories themselves, waiting for a certain moment to be awakened again.”

He pointed to the spot of light at the core of the prism, the orange-red dot contracting and expanding in a strange, predictable pattern: "My heartbeat, the sunrise over Qinghai Lake... this is no coincidence. Do you remember that night at Namtso, when we measured our heart rates, and they were exactly in sync with the speed of the water flowing beneath the ice? And in Dunhuang, the intervals between camel bells were the same as the number of stitches your mother took to embroider a peony..."

Ayu was stunned. She remembered the ship ticket the watch repairman had shaken out of the clock in episode 209, the unmailed postcard in the mailbox in episode 220, and the countless instances of "overlapping patterns" and "resonant frequencies." It wasn't a coincidence, but rather a pattern buried by time, like fossils in the strata, like the chronology in tree rings, existing in their lives all along, waiting to be reinterpreted at the moment the clock struck 10:18.

The prism's rotation reached its peak, and all the light bands suddenly collapsed inward, forming a bright core. The model of the Weizhou Island volcano, the star trails of Namtso Lake, and the icy water droplets of Yubeng Village merged at this core, bursting forth with a soft yet intense light. Within the light, Ayu saw the girl with pigtails from 1999 completely overlap with her present self; the postcard in her hand transformed into a beam of light, flying towards the direction of Zhong Hua's grandfather's clock.

The absolute stillness of 0.1 seconds has ended.

The waiting room returned to normal. Dust continued to fall, the drill's roar returned, and a drop of water from Ayu's hair finally fell to the ground, leaving a small wet patch on the concrete. The clock hands pointed to 10:19, the pendulum ticking normally, as if everything that had just happened was merely an illusion.

But a faint orange-red glow lingered in the air, like the afterglow of sunrise over Qinghai Lake. The water droplets in the cracks of the floor tiles disappeared, leaving only damp marks, vaguely resembling the outline of the Weizhou Island volcano. Zhong Hua's heartbeat gradually calmed down, but A Yu could feel that the temperature of his palms was higher than usual, and the lingering resonance in his pulse seemed to still remain.

“We…” Ayu wanted to say something, but found her throat tighten. She looked at Zhong Hua and found that he was also looking at her, his eyes filled with shock and confusion, but more than anything, a strange calm, as if he had experienced a baptism of time and space.

Zhong Hua didn't speak, but simply took something out of his pocket. It was a piece of volcanic rock they had found on Weizhou Island, with a naturally formed pore on it, its shape strikingly similar to a satellite map of Namtso Lake. At this moment, a faint orange-red light remained in the pore, flickering at an extremely slow pace in rhythm with Zhong Hua's heartbeat.

Suddenly, the announcement over the loudspeaker in the waiting room blared, announcing the upcoming trial operation of the newly built subway station. The cold, mechanical electronic female voice contrasted sharply with the earlier buzzing that had blended sounds of camel bells, icefalls, and star trails. But neither Ayu nor Zhong Hua paid it any attention.

They looked up at the glass surface of the clock, where the double image was no longer visible, only their blurry reflections, wearing windbreakers and covered in construction dust, standing before the blueprints of the new subway station. But Ayu knew that deep within that glass, in the folds of time, the girl with pigtails from 1999 was still delivering that postcard with the image of ocean waves, and every line on that postcard had become part of the land beneath their feet, part of the sunrise over Qinghai Lake, the starry sky over Namtso Lake, and the eternally flowing sacred waterfall of Yubeng Village.

The suspended water droplet prism disappeared, but the illuminated fragments of memory have transformed into light in their lives, resonating continuously with every heartbeat and every breath. Just like the orange-red light spot in the volcanic rock in Zhong Hua's palm at this moment, faint, yet eternal.