"My grandfather may have visited Weizhou Island back then." Zhong Hua pointed to the part of the map where the outlines of the Shandong Peninsula and Weizhou Island overlapped. "Look at the details of this fault line. Ordinary nautical charts wouldn't mark it in such detail unless you've seen it with your own eyes." He recalled a half-photograph tucked in his grandfather's diary. The background was black volcanic rock, and a young man in a sailor shirt was standing in front of the rock wall. What he was holding was unclear, but the texture of the rock wall was exactly the same as the photo of Dripstone Screen on Weizhou Island that Ayu had taken.
As the sun set, the light from the dormer window turned a warm orange. Ayu re-embedded the silver foil moon into the Weihai Bay on the map and noticed that its shadow perfectly covered the red dot of the lighthouse. Only then did she notice the extremely fine ripples hidden within the ink lines along the map's edge. These ripples started from the Bohai Bay, extended along the outline of the Shandong Peninsula, and finally converged into a small vortex in the lower right corner of the map. At the center of the vortex, three small characters were engraved with a needle tip: "Stargazer".
"The tide rises and falls twice a day," Zhong Hua said, flipping through his grandfather's logbook to find the entry for September 15, 1983. "That day he wrote: 'When Vega crosses the meridian, the third wave of tide just overflows the bow of the boat, and the wave height is proportional to the altitude of the star's orbit.'" Ayu calculated the dates of stargazing at Namtso Lake and discovered that the day they recorded Vega's trajectory was exactly the 15th day of the lunar calendar—the same lunar phase as September 15, 1983. It turns out that forty years ago, at the same tidal moment, under the same constellation, Zhong Hua's grandfather was also at sea gazing at the same starry sky.
The silver moon gleamed faintly in the twilight, like a seal collected by time. Ayu suddenly understood why those old objects always connected their journeys in wonderful ways: the peonies her mother embroidered were the sunset over Qinghai Lake, the radio her father repaired had the camel bells of Dunhuang, and this 1983 nautical map, with ink lines and silver foil, wove the tides of the Bohai Bay, the volcanic rocks of Weizhou Island, the star trails of Namtso Lake, and the footprints of two generations into an invisible net.
"You said," Ayu picked up the map, letting the last rays of sunlight filter through the pages, "that the resonance of the tides and star trails, isn't it like our connection to the past?" The ink lines on the map were as transparent as cicada wings in the light, the outlines of the Shandong Peninsula and Weizhou Island overlapping into strange geometric shapes, while the red dot of the Weihai Lighthouse aligned directly with the point where the star trails over Namtso Lake ended, as if the coordinates of two different time periods were being calibrated at this moment. The silvery moonlight fell on the backs of their clasped hands, warm like a mark from 1983.
The cries of someone selling evening newspapers came from downstairs, startling the sparrows outside the window. Ayu carefully put the map and the silver moon into the wooden box containing her travel souvenirs. The box already contained sand from Qinghai Lake, fragments of glacial lake water from Yubeng Village, and copper camel bell buckles from Dunhuang; now, it also held this map connecting the ocean and the starry sky. As Zhong Hua closed the box, he heard a soft "click," as if something had finally found its place.
That night, Ayu had a dream. She dreamt she was standing on the volcanic rocks of Weizhou Island, the tide rising at the speed of the star trails of Namtso Lake. In the distance, the Weihai Lighthouse shone red, and as its beam streaked across the night sky, the light trail of Vega fell precisely on the crest of a wave. In the splashing water, she saw her grandfather, Zhong Hua, standing at the bow of a ship in 1983, holding a silver foil moon in his hand. In the moon's reflection, she and Zhong Hua were seen stargazing at Namtso Lake. The tide and the star trails resonated in unison in her dream, the sound like the pencil marks on the back of a map, gently etched into the pages of time.
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