She picked up the record and examined it closely under the light. The disc was clean; Uncle Chen had taken good care of it. Apart from a few extremely fine, almost imperceptible scratches that caused the skipped notes, there was nothing unusual. Those scratches looked like ordinary scratches, but why did they produce such a strange sound?
She thought of someone—Zhong Hua.
Zhong Hua was her college classmate, a geology major, who now works at a research institution, dealing with various rocks, soils, and geological data every day. Ayu found this matter too bizarre; perhaps someone like Zhong Hua, with his rational mind, could help her analyze it.
The next day, Ayu brought the record to Zhonghua's office.
"Vinyl records? Skipping the strings? And I even heard the cries of street vendors from my childhood?" Zhong Hua pushed up his glasses, his face full of "Have you been reading too many science fiction novels?" "Ayu, this doesn't make much sense."
"I know this sounds strange, but I really heard it!" Ayu said eagerly. "Can you take a look at this record for me, especially the skipped parts? Is there anything unusual about it?"
Zhong Hua smiled helplessly and took the record. Unlike A Yu, who just glanced at it, he took out a small magnifying glass he carried with him and carefully examined the disc, especially the marks that caused the skipped notes.
“Hmm… the trenches here are indeed different from other places,” Zhong Hua frowned. “The depth… seems to be deeper, and…” He paused, took out his phone, and searched for something. “Wait a minute, I feel like I’ve seen similar data somewhere before.”
Ayu looked at him curiously.
Zhong Hua flipped through the pages for a while and found a set of pictures and data. He turned his phone screen toward Ayu and said, "Look, this is a geological profile of the sand layers in the Dunhuang Mingsha Mountain that our team made before, as well as data simulations of the density, particle size, etc. of different sand layers."
Looking at the complex curves and charts on her phone screen, Ayu was completely bewildered: "What does this have to do with records?"
“Look here,” Zhong Hua pointed to the grooves on the record where the needle skipped, and then compared them with a data curve on his phone. “I just used a magnifying glass to roughly estimate the depth changes and intervals of these grooves… Look, this shape, this data fluctuation trend, doesn’t it match the geological profile data of the sand layer within a certain depth range of Mingsha Mountain… amazingly?”
Ayu leaned closer to take a look. Although she didn't understand geology, the undulating shape of those curves did indeed have an indescribable similarity to the "trajectory" of the record groove that Zhong Hua pointed out!
"This...how is this possible?" Ayu felt her worldview had been shaken. "How could the depth of the grooves on an old German record match the data of sand layers in Dunhuang, China?"
Zhong Hua's expression also turned serious, his earlier lighthearted banter vanished: "This is unbelievable. From a physics perspective, the grooves on a record are a physical record of sound; different sound vibration frequencies and amplitudes will leave different shapes of grooves on the record. But... geological profiles are naturally formed physical structures, the two are completely unrelated, unless..."
"Unless what?"
“Unless… what this groove records isn’t ordinary musical vibration at all,” Zhong Hua’s voice deepened, “or rather, it records some kind of… vibration or information that transcends our conventional understanding.”
The two stared at each other, an eerie silence filling the air.
“No, I have to try again,” Ayu suddenly said. “I want to listen to it again, and this time I’ll record it and see if I can analyze anything.”
She played the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata again. Zhong Hua took out her professional recording equipment and pointed it at the speaker.
The needle spun, the music flowed, and then, it reached the spot where the needle skipped again.
"Click!"
The skipping of the needle, the static, and the faint cry of "Osmanthus and Red Bean Soup" were all clearly recorded.
Ayu and Zhong Hua immediately began analyzing the recording. The spectrum of the noise was complex, but the hawking sound was indeed independent. What surprised them even more was that when they compared the waveform of the noise generated by the skipping sound with the geological data curve of the Singing Sand Dunes, they discovered that they also had a subtle "resonance" at certain key points!
“This is no coincidence,” Zhong Hua said firmly. “There must be some connection here that we don’t know about.”
They decided to delve deeper into that most "strange" trench. Perhaps, deeper within, lay even more secrets.
Ayu carefully placed the record back into the record player. This time, she and Zhonghua were both focused on the needle and listening to the sound coming from the speaker.
The stylus circled back and forth, reaching the unusually deep groove. It seemed to be more "difficult" than before, bouncing more noticeably and producing more dense and chaotic noise.
Suddenly, the stylus clicked and got stuck! It got stuck in a relatively deeper groove and stopped moving forward, just vibrating slightly in place, emitting a continuous, low "humming" sound.
Just then—
Inside the speaker, the chaotic noise seemed to be instantly cleared away by an invisible hand, and a clear, chilling sound rang out without warning.
"Tap...tap...tap..."
That's... the sound of camel bells?
No, to be more precise, it was the sound of camel footsteps!
The sound was somber and powerful, carrying a desolate and rhythmic quality unique to the desert. "Tap...tap..." one step after another, as if walking slowly and steadily from a distant place.
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