The renovation of the community hospital began during the rainy season. The smell of disinfectant mixed with the dust from the peeling paint, making the corridor resemble a damp, ancient painting. As Ayu squatted in the corner of the pharmacy organizing the old Chinese medicine cabinet, her fingernail suddenly scratched the bottom of the angelica root drawer—under the elm wood bottom, polished smooth by countless hands, something hard seemed to be stuck. She held her breath and pried open the three-centimeter-wide strip of wood, her fingertips touching a piece of warm, smooth peach wood. The grain of the wood bulged out like the arc of a volcano under her fingertips, much like the basalt specimen she had picked up on Weizhou Island last year.
I. Magnolia handwriting and volcanic texture
The moment the wooden plaque was flipped over, Zhong Hua was passing by the door carrying a cardboard box. The bronze medicine scale in his hand clattered to the ground because the two characters "Magnolia" engraved on the plaque—the white strokes between the strokes—were exactly the same as the signature of "Magnolia Powder" in his grandfather's medical records. The half-box of medical books left behind by the old man when he passed away all had this unique pause in the brushstrokes on the title pages: the beginning strokes were like a cone drawing in sand, and the ink would naturally bleed into a small crescent moon at the end, much like the outline of Crescent Lake in Dunhuang. Ayu shone her phone flashlight on the wood grain and suddenly exclaimed: those varying shades of brownish-red veins revealed the three-dimensional structure of the Weizhou Island volcano under the light—the central depression of the fumarole, the fault zone of the ring-shaped mountain wall, and even the ravine formed by the lava flow on the southeast side, all perfectly overlapped with the model in the geological museum.
"Your grandfather went to Weizhou Island back then?" Ayu's fingertip traced the last stroke of the character "夷" (Yi), which landed precisely on the 21° North latitude line of the volcano crater model. Zhong Hua took the wooden plaque and held it up to the window. Sunlight filtered through the oil glands in the wood grain, casting dappled patterns of light on his palm. He remembered when he was ten years old, sorting through his grandfather's belongings, he had seen half a yellowed ship ticket in the interleaving of the "Compendium of Materia Medica." The ticket showed the route "Zhanjiang-Beihai," and the date was July 1983—the very month the Weizhou Island volcanic geological expedition team landed on the island. Suddenly, a slight "click" came from deep within the medicine cabinet. The bottom of the angelica drawer automatically popped open a hidden compartment, from which rolled out a bronze seal. The four characters "Zhong's Pharmacy" were engraved on the seal, and the worn curve of its edges was exactly the same as the cast iron railing of the Weizhou Island lighthouse.
II. The Superimposed Time and Space in the Fragrance of Herbs
The medicinal aroma emanating from the wooden plaque peaked at three in the afternoon. Ayu brought it to her nose and inhaled lightly. The top notes were a rich, bittersweet angelica, much like the butter tea simmering in a copper pot in a Tibetan family's home in Yubeng Village—the kind of heavy, earthy fat that the old woman added to the tea when they stayed there last autumn. The middle notes suddenly shifted to a sharp, crisp camphor, instantly reminding her of the cold wind of a morning at Namtso Lake: at an altitude of 4,700 meters, the air was filled with ice crystals, and inhaling it brought a penetrating chill to the nasal cavity, turning even breathing into a pale blue mist. The most magical part was the base notes, the faint, sweet scent of dried tangerine peel, which resonated with the apricot peel water they drank by Crescent Lake in Dunhuang. The candied apricot flesh soaked in the melting sand dunes was sweet with a hint of the scorched sun of the Gobi Desert.
Zhong Hua placed the wooden plaque into the electronic scale, and the display showed "217 grams." This weight suddenly reminded him of his grandfather's medical records: during an expedition to Weizhou Island in 1983, 217 grams of magnolia flower combined with mint were used to treat fishermen suffering from coughs and asthma caused by volcanic ash. Even more astonishing was the density of the wooden plaque—the data measured by Ayu with calipers was exactly equal to the average density of the volcanic rock of Weizhou Island and the ice layer of Namtso Lake. When she immersed the wooden plaque in a petri dish filled with alcohol, the floating oil droplets suddenly coalesced into a line: the largest one rotated in the center, surrounded by twelve smaller oil droplets orbiting in the pattern of the Big Dipper, while the molecular cloud surrounding the line moved slowly at the speed of migratory birds at Qinghai Lake.
III. Satellite Map in Oil Droplets
As the twilight sunlight slanted through the pharmacy window, the first drop of oil seeped from the grain of the wooden sign. Ayu caught it on a glass slide and placed it under a dissecting microscope—the tension patterns on the surface of the oil drop automatically arranged themselves into a satellite map of Qinghai Lake: Bird Island floated like a comma on the northwest side, the outline of Sand Island resembled a naked carp, and even the famous "Eye of the Sea God" shaped bay on the shoreline was as clear as a high-resolution screenshot of Google Maps. When the second drop of oil fell, the pattern suddenly switched to the contour lines of Yubeng Village: the pyramid-shaped peak of Kawagebo, the V-shaped canyon of the Sacred Waterfall, the crescent-shaped depression of the glacial lake, and even the zigzag horse trail leading to Xiaonong's base camp were all developed with perfect precision on the surface of the oil drop.
Zhong Hua suddenly grabbed the wooden plaque and rushed into the X-ray room. The moment the scanner screen lit up, both of them held their breath: the duct structure inside the peach wood revealed the cave layout of the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang in the image—the Library Cave in Cave 17, the Great Buddha Hall in Cave 96, and the Nirvana Cave in Cave 158, even the corridors connecting the caves were completely consistent with the actual site. And when he adjusted the scanning angle, the growth rings on the edge of the wooden plaque suddenly formed a star map of Namtso Lake: the Summer Triangle on the left, the Milky Way stretching across the center, and most chillingly, the mineral crystals embedded in the gaps in the growth rings corresponded exactly to the trajectories of the 12 meteors they had recorded during their stargazing last year.
IV. The bronze medicine mortar in the hidden compartment
Deep within the drawer of the Angelica sinensis plant, besides the bronze seal, lay an object wrapped in oilcloth. The moment the oilcloth was unwrapped, Ayu recognized it as a Han Dynasty bronze medicine grinder. The inscription "Jianwu Three Years" engraved on the bottom of the grinding trough caused Zhong Hua's pupils to shrink—this was a "family heirloom" recorded in his grandfather's medical records, said to have once ground ephedra and peony in Zhang Zhongjing's original prescription for *Shanghan Lun* (Treatise on Cold Damage). Even more astonishing was the grinder's weight: 2170 grams, exactly ten times the weight of the wooden plaque. When Zhong Hua placed the wooden plaque in the grinding trough and rolled it, the static electricity generated by the friction between the bronze and the peach wood caused the medicinal powder to coalesce into a miniature tornado in the air—the eye of the tornado revealed a dynamic model of a volcanic eruption on Weizhou Island, while the rotating powder particles formed the cracks on the surface of Namtso Lake when it froze.
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