As Lao Zhou was tidying up his tools, he suddenly pointed to a corner of the workbench: "Look, there seems to be something in the water used to clean the movement." Zhong Hua leaned over and saw several grains of fine sand at the bottom of the stainless steel tray, the sand grains shimmering with a strange metallic luster under the light. He picked one up, and the texture was completely different from the sand grains of Mingsha Mountain—finer, heavier, and with a cool metallic feel.
“This isn’t sand from the Singing Sand Dunes.” Ayu pulled out a bottle of sand she’d collected in Dunhuang for comparison. The sand in the bottle was a warm golden color, while the sand in the tray was silvery-gray, like crushed stardust. Zhong Hua suddenly recalled a passage in his grandfather’s diary: “Winter 1937, encountered a meteor shower in the Bering Sea. The deck was covered in stardust, which felt like ice to the touch and didn’t melt for a long time.” Could the dents in the gears really be from a meteor impact? And were these sand grains stardust that had adhered to the movement’s mechanism back then?
The clock's pendulum suddenly sped up, its ticking becoming rapid, like a sandstorm before a downpour. Ayu instinctively grasped Zhonghua's hand, and the two looked out the window simultaneously—the sycamore leaves at the alley entrance were rustling without wind, their sound gradually synchronizing with the clock's swing, creating an increasingly powerful resonance. Old Zhou suddenly covered his ears: "This sound…it sounds familiar."
Zhong Hua suddenly recalled that last year at Namtso Lake, they got up at four in the morning to stargaze, and the "crack" sound of the ice forming on the lake's surface was resonant with the same frequency as what was happening now. Ayu, on the other hand, remembered the long echo of icicles falling into the lake beneath the sacred waterfall in Yubeng Village, which seemed to be an extension of this frequency as well. These natural sounds, scattered across different times and spaces, were now resonating through this 1900 movement on the watch repair shop's workbench.
“Perhaps my grandfather knew all along.” Zhong Hua picked up the movement, and the blue light in the recess seemed to shine even brighter. “He hid this movement in the clock so that we would discover that nature and time are actually a resonance of the same frequency.” He recalled his grandfather’s last words: “Time is not a straight line, but a series of ripples. As long as the frequency is right, the past and the present will overlap.”
At that moment, the clock's pendulum suddenly stopped at 3:15—the same position as before. But this time, the Roman numerals on the clock face seemed to be glowing faintly, and the shadow of the pendulum cast on the wall formed an outline that matched the satellite image of the Weizhou Island volcano. Old Zhou trembled as he picked up the magnifying glass and looked again at the dented gear: "Look... the pattern seems to have changed."
Sure enough, the previously fixed radial patterns now seemed to wriggle slightly, as if alive, each fine line extending and contracting, as if simulating the trajectory of falling sand grains. Ayu suddenly exclaimed, "This is real-time! The current frequency of sand grains falling in Mingsha Mountain is being revealed through these depressions!"
They didn't know why the movement possessed such magical power, nor what their grandfather had experienced back then. But at this moment, when the sound of the pendulum swinging perfectly overlapped with the sound of sand grains in their memories, they suddenly understood that some connections transcend time and space—like the volcanic rock pores of Weizhou Island and the dents of a meteor from 1900, like the sound of sand grains in Dunhuang and the ticking of a clock, they were all part of the cosmic resonance, and their grandfather's clock was merely the medium that embodied this resonance.
As they left the watch repair shop, the setting sun bathed the alleyway in amber light. Zhong Hua carried the repaired clock, while A Yu clutched a few grains of silver-gray "stardust." Behind them, the clock in Old Zhou's shop continued to tick, its sound filtering through the sycamore leaves, mingling with the calls of birds returning home and the ringing of bicycle bells in the distance, creating a strange harmony.
Back home, Zhong Hua placed the grandfather clock on the bookshelf, and the pendulum began to swing again. This time, the ticking sound seemed to contain something else—the sound of waves crashing against the rocks of Weizhou Island, the tinkling of camel bells in Dunhuang, the cracking sound of ice breaking on Namtso Lake, and the tune of a boat song that his grandfather used to hum on the deck when he was young.
Ayu placed the volcanic rock specimen next to the clock. As sunlight pierced through the two, the shadows on the table overlapped again. She suddenly pointed to the point where the shadows met: "Look, doesn't it look like the swans we saw spreading their wings at Qinghai Lake?"
Zhong Hua looked in the direction she was pointing. The shadows of the gear's indentation and the pores of the volcanic rock combined to form the shape of outstretched wings in the sunlight, with the edges shimmering with tiny lights, much like the reflection of dewdrops on a swan's wings at sunrise over Qinghai Lake.
The clock continued to chime, this time no longer merely marking the passage of time, but a resonant song composed of stardust, volcanoes, grains of sand, and time itself. Zhong Hua and A Yu exchanged a smile; they knew that this old clock, left by their grandfather, had not only restored time but also allowed those scattered memories to rediscover their resonant frequencies through the meshing of gears and the swinging of the pendulum.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
