Just then, a sun shower began to fall outside the window. The seventh arc of the rainbow shone precisely through the X-ray room window, illuminating the point where the wooden plaque met the medicine grinder. Ayu saw the characters "Magnolia" on the wooden plaque suddenly seep out, forming a miniature lake in the bronze grinding trough: the lake water was the characteristic turquoise of Qinghai Lake, the shape of the island in the center was exactly the same as Bird Island, and the erosion marks on the shoreline were slowly changing at the same rate of glacial melting they had observed in Yubeng Village. Zhong Hua reached out to touch the lake surface, and the moment his fingertips touched the water, he heard three sounds resonating in his eardrums: the sound of his grandfather pounding medicine with a pestle and mortar, the roar of waves crashing against volcanic rocks on Weizhou Island, and the cracking sound of the ice on Namtso Lake. The frequency of these three sounds combined perfectly harmonized with the pendulum of the clock hanging in the community hospital corridor.
As the last rays of sunlight brushed past the medicine grinder, invisible engravings suddenly appeared on the bronze surface. Ayu traced them down with a pencil and discovered they were a nautical chart: a virtual route from Weizhou Island to Namtso Lake, passing Crescent Lake in Dunhuang, the Sacred Waterfall in Yubeng Village, and finally drawing a closed circle at Bird Island in Qinghai Lake. At the intersection of the route, the characters "Magnolia" were written in cinnabar ink, the handwriting identical to that on the wooden sign, except that the ink contained tiny crystals—Zhong Hua observed under a microscope and discovered that these were mixed powders from volcanic ash from Weizhou Island, ice cores from Namtso Lake, and bird feathers from Qinghai Lake. Isotope analysis of the three showed that they all formed in July 1983, the summer his grandfather went to the island to conduct research.
Deep within the medicine cabinet, in a hidden compartment, lay a yellowed note. Ayu picked it up and saw it was her grandfather's handwriting: "When magnolia meets volcanic rock, the fragrance of medicine transcends time." On the back of the note, the outline of a wooden plaque was sketched in pen, and in the recessed area of the peach wood grain, a familiar pattern was drawn—the cracked stone they had found last year at the sacred waterfall in Yubeng Village, its texture perfectly matching the model of the Weizhou Island volcano on the plaque. Just then, a nurse's voice came from the corridor, saying that the formaldehyde level in the old Chinese medicine cabinet had suddenly dropped to zero, and all the herbs in the drawers were emitting a peculiar fragrance mixed with angelica, camphor, and some unknown mineral. The fragrance condensed into a mist in the air, slowly outlining every point they had traveled to, from the volcanic rocks of Weizhou Island to the starry sky of Namtso Lake, finally converging in the center of the pharmacy into a luminous ring, much like the golden rings formed by sunlight piercing through the clouds at sunrise over Qinghai Lake.
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