As the pendulum hummed for the 250th time in the waiting room, Ayu suddenly felt a familiar pressure in her eardrums—like the muffled sound of a sudden hailstorm hitting her tent by Namtso Lake years ago. She instinctively gripped Zhong Hua's wrist, her fingertips feeling the rhythm of his pulse, a rhythm that resonated strangely with the hum.

“Look.” Zhong Hua’s voice sounded like it had been soaked in water, carrying an unreal dampness.

The moment Ayu looked up, she froze on the spot. The glass curtain wall that had been reflecting the busy figures of the construction team was melting, the molten glass slowly flowing down the metal frame, gathering on the ground into a shimmering mirror. She saw her own reflection seeping into the mirror from two directions: the shoulders of her windbreaker were covered with this year's snow from Changbai Mountain, and the ends of her pigtails were still covered with sycamore fluff from 1999. When the two silhouettes overlapped in the center of the mirror, the reflection from the windbreaker zipper and the red ribbon on her pigtails suddenly lit up at the same time, like two intersecting lines of fire.

“This is…” Ayu started to say something, but found her voice caught in her throat. Suddenly, ripples appeared on the mirror, and the steel structure of the newly built subway station intertwined with the old mailbox pattern from her memory. Every intersection of the diamond grid was shimmering: some were bright with the orange-red of the sunrise over Qinghai Lake, some were tinged with the indigo of the Yubeng Ice Lake, and in the white light at the very center, she recognized it as the brightest North Star in the Namtso sky.

Zhong Hua's fingers suddenly covered the back of her hand, the warmth of his palm as hot as the pebble he had held in his hand in the Gobi Desert of Dunhuang that year. "Do you remember the loop we drew on the last page of the notebook?" His fingertips traced the grid in the mirror. "You said you wanted to connect all the paths we've taken into a loop, so that no matter where we started, we would always end up back at the starting point."

Ayu's breathing suddenly became labored. The worn-out travel notebook was lying in her backpack. The loop on the last page was drawn in three colors: orange-red represented the highway from Qinghai Lake to Dunhuang, indigo marked the altitude fluctuations of the Yunnan-Tibet Highway, and the black line that ran throughout was drawn by Zhong Hua with the nib of his pen dipped in his own nosebleed—that day at the sacred waterfall in Yubeng Village, he caught her when she almost slipped, and his forehead hit an icicle, causing blood to seep out. The blood that dripped onto the notebook and spread out perfectly formed the most beautiful arc of the loop.

The spacetime grid in the mirror suddenly trembled violently. As the model of the Weizhou Island volcano floated to the center of the grid, Ayu saw the solidified magma patterns flowing, like the basalt she had picked up in the crater last year, with half a seashell embedded in the pores of its cross-section. Immediately afterward, star trails from Namtso Lake surged in from all directions, and the Milky Way's flowing trajectory, which they had once captured with long exposures, now transformed into countless luminous threads, weaving intricate knots on the grid. The water droplets of the Yubeng Icefall remained in their falling posture, each droplet holding a moment: her reflection as she squatted by the frozen lake rinsing her mouth, the debris splashed up as Zhong Hua chiseled the ice with his ice axe, and even the white breath they exhaled and the frost that condensed on the tent ceiling as they listened to the cracking ice inside.

“It’s going to disappear.” Zhong Hua’s voice trembled almost imperceptibly.

Before Ayu could respond, all three items vanished simultaneously at the center of the grid. There was no deafening explosion, only a buzzing sound like the resonance of a conch shell. Energy waves spread out in layers like pebbles thrown into a lake, etching clearly visible patterns in the air. She saw the latitude and longitude of Qinghai Lake floating in the first ring of ripples, the contour lines of the Dunhuang Singing Sand Dunes embedded in the second ring, and the outermost ring densely covered with every path they had traveled: from the morning light at Qingdao Zhanqiao Pier to the fishing lights of Weizhou Island, from the stone-paved streets of Dali Ancient City to the prayer wheels in Lhasa, and even the old alley overgrown with moss that they had stumbled into by chance when they got lost in Fenghuang Ancient City last year.

The energy wave finally stopped in the center of the waiting room, and all the patterns suddenly rearranged. Ayu's pupils contracted sharply—it was the angle of the sunlight at sunrise over Qinghai Lake. She remembered that Zhong Hua had recorded this value with a camera light meter, and at the time he said, "Such light only comes once every ten years." Interwoven with it was the sound frequency of camel bells from Dunhuang. The sound of camel bells that they had recorded on their phones when they spent the night in the Gobi Desert last year seemed to be ringing in her ears again, even the intervals between camel yawns were exactly the same. And the gentlest curve was undoubtedly Zhong Hua's heartbeat. She had heard this sound in countless moments: the bottom of the cup of hot milk he handed her when she was watching over her father in the emergency room, the shoulder pressed against hers when they shared an umbrella on a rainy night, and even the moment he secretly whispered "Let's get married" in her ear under the starry sky of Namtso Lake.

In the instant the three paths intertwined into a loop, Ayu suddenly recalled the image on the last page of her travel journal. That day in a teahouse in Lhasa, sunlight streamed through the stained glass onto the notebook. She held Zhonghua's hand, and together, with his leaky fountain pen, they drew this loop that had no beginning and no end. They had said then that when they were old, they would walk along this circle again, wherever it led them, and when they got tired, they would sit down in a roadside teahouse and watch young people, just like they had back then, with eyes sparkling with longing for the distant horizon.

“It’s moving.” Zhong Hua’s fingertip gently touched the ring in the air.

Ayu saw the circle of light slowly rotating, its rotation speed exactly matching the angular velocity of the star orbits they had observed at Namtso Lake. As the loop passed the mirror-like surface, the liquid glass suddenly boiled, and the splashing water droplets solidified in the air into landmarks they had passed: Bird Island of Qinghai Lake floated at the top, with silhouettes of flying apsaras murals from the Mogao Grottoes of Dunhuang suspended below; the sacred waterfall of Yubeng Village flowed slowly along the arc of the loop; and the coral reefs of Weizhou Island formed a heart shape at the bottom.

“These… are all true.” Ayu’s voice choked with sobs. She had always thought those coincidences were just illusions: the peony on her mother’s embroidery matched the stitches of the old bookmark, the seashell pattern she found on Weizhou Island was hidden in Zhonghua’s grandfather’s logbook, and the last piece of the emergency room puzzle happened to be the train they missed in Lhasa… It turned out that all the scattered fragments were waiting for this moment to be pieced together into a complete picture.

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