The surface layer shows a woman in overalls handing an enamel mug to someone off-camera under a sycamore tree in 1972; the middle layer shows the snowy Changbai Mountain in 2023, where Ayu and Zhonghua are adjusting a snowman's carrot nose; the core layer is the rocky beach of Weizhou Island, where waves are crashing against the rocks at the speed of water stains in the photograph. As the three images overlap, Zhonghua suddenly hears the chimes of his grandfather's clock—the 3:15 chimes are mixed with the echoes of camel bells from Dunhuang, snow falling on Changbai Mountain, and waves crashing on Weizhou Island. The ripples formed by these mixed sound waves on the surface of the developing solution are exactly like magnified versions of the water stains and rings on the photographic paper.
When Ayu's fingers touched the surface of the crystal, she suddenly felt the warmth of her grandmother's silver bracelet. The character "安" (An) engraved on the inside of the bracelet was now revealed in its complete strokes under the refraction of the crystal—the beginning of the strokes formed a continuous movement with the gesture of the woman holding the enamel cup in the photo, and the return stroke at the end pointed directly to the dot at the core of the crystal that shimmered with the blue light of Weizhou Island.
The rain outside the darkroom stopped, and the first ray of sunlight pierced through the red filter, casting a rainbow on the crystal. Zhong Hua and A Yu simultaneously saw that the seven colors of the rainbow were arranging themselves in the order they had traveled: the orange of Qinghai Lake, the camel-yellow of Dunhuang, the snow-white of Changbai Mountain, the indigo of Weizhou Island... As the last ray of violet light merged into the crystal, they heard a faint crackling sound from the water stains at the edge of the photographic paper—a resonance produced by the crystallization of time, its frequency perfectly matching their heartbeats when they first watched the sunrise at Qinghai Lake.
When Ayu placed the kraft paper bag containing three photos into the desiccant box, the cotton thread at the opening of the bag suddenly tied a knot on its own. The shape of this knot was the same as the crack that had been patched with silver thread on the bottom of her grandmother's dowry bowl, and the twist of the cotton thread was exactly the same as the braiding density of the woman's hair under the sycamore tree at 3:45 PM in 1972. The moment Zhong Hua locked the desiccant box, he saw the shadow of the lock cast a complete circle on the wall—a time loop composed of enamel cup floral patterns, snowman carrots, and the waves of Weizhou Island, and at the center of the loop, the faint light of Ayu's grandmother's silver bracelet shimmered.
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