Urban Fragments and Echoes of Xinghu Lake: The Mystery of Old Station Remains and Shipping Boxes
Chapter One: Fragments of Time Amidst the Rubble
The roar of excavators tore through the early morning air as Ayu squatted in front of the rubble of the old train station. Rusty rail nails were embedded among the concrete fragments, and sunlight pierced through the dust, casting dappled shadows on the back of her hands. The construction team had already demolished half of the platform, the broken steel bars like exposed bones, and in the rubble at her feet, a grayish-blue fragment of a station sign was showing half of its scratches.
"Watch out for broken glass." Zhong Hua handed over gloves, his work pants stained with mud from last night's downpour at the knees. He had just loaded the last rail onto the truck when he turned around and saw A Yu holding a sharp-edged stone between her fingers—the number "2007" on the fragment was half covered by cement, and rust seeped out from the engravings like congealed blood.
“This is the old station’s year plaque.” Ayu scraped away the surface dust with her fingernail, revealing the white coating under the bluestone slab. “When I was a child, I came to the station with my dad to see him off. He always pointed to the station sign and said that the strokes of the numbers looked like seagulls spreading their wings.”
Zhong Hua squatted down, his fingers tracing the cracks in the broken glass. The glass shards embedded in the cracks were only the size of a fingernail, their irregular edges gleaming coldly in the sunlight. He suddenly grabbed A Yu's wrist: "Look at this shard—isn't the fracture surface like this the ice shard you picked up last year at the frozen lake in Yubeng Village?"
Ayu leaned closer to look, and in the reflection of the glass shards, a memory of Lan Bing suddenly flashed: that year, she squatted by the frozen lake, Zhong Hua's shadow cast on the crack, the crisp sound of the icicle breaking still ringing in her ears. At this moment, the glass shards in the cracks of the fragments had edges and curves that perfectly matched the cross-section of the icicle, even the tiny air bubbles at the edges of the shards were exactly the same.
“2007…” Zhong Hua murmured, his fingertips tracing the worn edges of the numbers. “That year I had just started junior high school. My dad took me on a green-skinned train to Dunhuang. On the Gobi Desert, we saw a camel caravan with bells ringing rhythmically…”
Before he could finish speaking, a long, drawn-out whistle suddenly sounded in the distance. It wasn't the roar of an excavator, but the vibration of some old machine, like rusty gears grinding against rails. Ayu looked up sharply. Dusk was spreading over the construction site fence, and in the orange-red light, the whistle's trailing note overlapped with the tinkling of camel bells from the Gobi Desert in Dunhuang in her memory—the two frequencies rose and fell, like the same comb strumming the strings of time.
"Was it a green train?" Ayu's voice trembled, the tattered piece of train ticket burning in her palm. She remembered the train ticket stub her father had clutched before he died, also from 2007, departing from this old station and embarking on a journey from which he would never return.
Zhong Hua didn't answer, his gaze fixed on the depths of the cracks in the shards. In the reflection of the glass shards, the trajectory of bubbles beneath the blue ice of the frozen lake suddenly appeared, and the shape of the bubbles' arrangement mirrored the cracks in the old station platform's floor tiles. As another ship's whistle pierced the twilight, the number "2007" on the shards suddenly seeped water, the patterns spreading across the stone surface resembling the flow velocity spectrum of the sacred waterfall in Yubeng Village.
Chapter Two: Salty Memories in the Sailing Chest
Before the rubble was leveled by the bulldozer, Zhong Hua's boots kicked something hard. The smell of rust mixed with a salty, fishy odor wafted from under the rubble. He dug through the stones and saw a copper box that was only half-buried—the brass covering the corners of the box had oxidized to a dark green, and the clasp was engraved with a blurry anchor pattern.
"It looks like something used for navigation." Ayu squatted down, her fingertips tracing the seaweed pattern on the lid of the box. "How did it end up buried at the train station?"
The lock on the box was rusted, and when Zhong Hua pried it open with a crowbar, the "click" echoed in the empty construction site. The moment the lid was lifted, a strong, salty smell wafted out. Inside the dark compartment were several stacks of yellowed papers, with the words "1992 Nautical Log" written in blue ink on the top kraft paper.
"Qingdao to Sanya?" Zhong Hua flipped through the logbook, the salt crystals on the edges of the pages glistening in the sunlight. "This flight route map..."
He suddenly stopped. Hidden within the blue ink lines of the waves were intricate seashell patterns. Ayu leaned closer to examine them; the spiraling direction of those patterns was exactly the same as the conch shells she had found in the volcanic crevices of Weizhou Island, down to the growth lines on the shell's surface. Even more astonishingly, the coordinates of the lighthouse location marked in red ink on the route chart were precisely the spot where they had pitched their tents last year while stargazing at Namtso Lake.
“There’s something else here.” Ayu parted the pages and felt the raised section in the hidden compartment at the bottom of the box. Pressing the brass clasp, the hidden compartment popped out and a pocket watch rolled out—the case was cast in the shape of an anchor, with tiny grains of sand stuck in the anchor chain’s texture. Zhonghua opened the watch cover, and the hands stopped at four in the morning. The engraving style of the Roman numeral “Ⅳ” was exactly the same as the font on the wall clock in the old station waiting room.
“Four o’clock in the morning…” Ayu suddenly remembered that night at Namtso Lake. When the lake had just formed a thin layer of ice and the Milky Way was hanging down, she heard the sound of water flowing under the ice. Zhong Hua said that was the heartbeat of the lake water as it froze. At this moment, the hands of her pocket watch stopped, which was the instant the lake ice was completely frozen, and the wave pattern engraved on the inside of the watch cover coincided with the direction of the cracks on the ice that night.
Zhong Hua turned the crown of his watch, and the pocket watch suddenly made a "click" sound. It wasn't the ticking of time, but the sound of gears turning like a ship's wheel. This sound made A Yu shudder—she remembered the old grandfather clock in her father's study, which made the same rhythm every time it was wound up, and the arc of the clock's pendulum was exactly the same as the angle at which the waves of Weizhou Island crashed against the rocks.
Chapter Three: The Resonance Code of Fragments and the Flight Box
As dusk completely enveloped the construction site, Ayu placed the fragments of the bus stop sign and the nautical logbook side by side on the makeshift table in the work shed. The number "2007" on the bluestone fragment gleamed faintly under the light, while the logbook inside the nautical logbook lay open, and a wave pattern on the blue ink route map corresponded precisely to the location of the glass shards in the crack of the fragment.
“Look here.” Zhong Hua traced a wave on the flight map with a pencil. “This curve matches the gap of the '0' on the fragment perfectly.”
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