The light spots of Qinghai Lake

The clock in the waiting room stubbornly stopped at 10:17, the moment Zhong Hua was born. The air was thick with the smell of old wood and dust, a scent of a forgotten time. Ayu squatted on the floor, her fingertips unconsciously tracing the cold tiles. Under the pale light of the overhead lamp, the mica flakes embedded in the cracks occasionally flashed with a faint, startling blue that made her heart skip a beat. It was the color of Qinghai Lake, the pure, almost unsettling, misty blue of the lake at sunrise, before it was bathed in molten gold, during their travels.

Zhong Hua stood beside the old ticket gate, the rust on the metal surface resembling some ancient totem, layer upon layer. He gently scratched it with his fingernail, the peeling rust powder falling off to reveal the dark red primer underneath, its age almost blurred—1987, like a faded secret. "Ayu," he suddenly spoke, his voice unusually clear in the empty waiting room, "Look at this."

Ayu got up and walked over. Following the direction of his finger, she saw that where the rust had peeled away, an irregular outline was faintly forming. She leaned closer to look, and her heart clenched—the outline looked exactly like a satellite image of Bird Island on Qinghai Lake, with even the few small, protruding peninsulas faintly discernible. “It really looks like it…” she murmured, her breathing becoming rapid.

Just then, without warning, a faint spot of light suddenly appeared in the center of the ground, near the stopped clock. The color of the spot was the same as the Qinghai Lake that haunted their dreams—pure, deep, and carrying a vibrant life force that didn't belong to this gloomy waiting room.

"What's that?" Zhong Hua saw it too. He walked over carefully, as if afraid of disturbing something.

The light spot seemed to have a life of its own, pulsating slightly. With each pulsation, the area it covered expanded slightly, and at the same time, a drop of water slowly seeped from the cracks in the floor tiles beneath it. The droplet was round and translucent, standing out starkly against the dust-covered ground.

“Heartbeat…” Ayu whispered, her eyes fixed on the spot of light, “It’s beating like a heartbeat.”

They held their breath and began to count. One, two, three… More and more water droplets appeared, flowing along the patterns on the floor tiles, forming tiny, shimmering streams. The flickering light seemed to synchronize with their heartbeats; the throbbing in their chests became faster and clearer with the shimmering light of Qinghai Lake.

The air seemed to freeze, and time itself became blurred. The surrounding old objects—rusty turnstiles, dusty benches, peeling bulletin boards—were all shrouded in a strange halo under the dappled sunlight.

“Twenty…twenty-one…twenty-two…” Zhong Hua’s voice trembled slightly.

When the light spot completed its 23rd jump, a sudden change occurred!

All the water droplets scattered on the ground, as if pulled by an invisible hand, suddenly detached themselves from the ground and converged towards the center of the light spot. They danced, collided, and merged in the air at a dazzling speed. Finally, to their astonishment, all the water droplets coalesced into a crystal ball the size of a basketball, crystal clear.

The crystal ball floated in mid-air, its interior shimmering with light, as if it had captured a starry sky, a lake, and... many more indescribable things.

"Look!" Ayu grabbed Zhong Hua's arm; her fingertips were icy cold.

Inside the crystal ball, there was not chaos, but three layers of images clearly emerged, like a carefully inlaid painting, layer upon layer, yet without interfering with each other.

On the surface, there were flowing, silvery-white bands of light, surging and leaping rhythmically, outlining the shape and power of the waterfall. That was the sacred waterfall of Yubeng Village! Ayu recognized it immediately; the speed of the water, the way it splashed, even the chilling mist—it was exactly the same as what they had felt standing beneath the sacred waterfall. The flow of the light bands was the velocity spectrum of the waterfall's flow; every turn, every surge, was so precise it was chilling.

In the middle layer, the images shifted. The silvery-white water receded, replaced by a deep, inky blue background, within which countless points of light twinkled and swirled. It was the starry sky! More precisely, the starry sky of Namtso Lake. Ayu saw the familiar Big Dipper, the Milky Way stretching across the sky, and even the coordinates of several specific shooting stars they had once recorded on the lakeshore. Those points of light moved within the crystal sphere according to the actual laws of celestial motion, distant and mysterious.

At the very heart of the scene, against the backdrop of the mid-level starry sky, an even older, more yellowed image slowly emerged. It was a nautical chart, its texture and color bearing the marks of time. On it, coastlines, islands, and intricate nautical markings were outlined in ink. “That’s…” Zhong Hua’s voice was filled with shock and disbelief, “a nautical chart from my grandfather’s logbook! I saw it when I was a child. It marked the route from the Bohai Bay to the Shandong Peninsula, and those special reef markings—only he used those symbols!”

The three images, from three different times and places, were perfectly integrated and coexisted within this crystal ball. Ayu felt a chill run down her spine, yet she was also enveloped by a tremendous, indescribable shock.

She moved forward involuntarily, almost pressing her face against the cold, smooth surface of the crystal ball. A faint, strange sound reached her ears through the crystal.

That was a superposition of three sounds.

First came the "ding-dong, ding-dong...", a rhythmic sound, carrying a touch of desolation and remoteness. It was the sound of bells on the necks of camels on the Gobi Desert in Dunhuang, the intermittent sounds of camel bells that they had heard in the twilight, resonating with the wind and sand.

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