Zhong Hua's heart skipped a beat. Weizhou Island, Orion, the wear and tear on the typewriter... all the clues suddenly connected. He remembered that among A Yu's mother's belongings was a 1962 copy of "A Record of Weizhou Island's Scenery," with the words "Presented to Teacher Chen" written in pen on the title page, the handwriting extremely similar to the faintly visible letter strokes on the toner paper.
That evening, Zhong Hua reinstalled the ribbon into the typewriter and tried pressing the worn keys. The letters "J," "K," and "L" on the blank paper indeed came out crooked, much like the stitches that suddenly tightened when Ayu's mother was knitting a sweater. He traced the outline of Orion on the toner paper and discovered that the spacing between the letters, when converted to actual distances, was exactly the projected distance from the Namtso observatory to the celestial bodies—this was no coincidence. People in 1958 couldn't possibly have known the precise coordinates of Namtso, let alone the distances between the star orbits.
“Look at the shadow,” Ayu suddenly pointed to the table. As the sun set, the movement of the toner shadow seemed to quicken, like the accelerated flow of water at Yubeng Waterfall in the afternoon due to rising temperatures. Zhong Hua took out his phone to time it, and sure enough, the shadow moved 3.8 meters per second, consistent with their measured afternoon flow rate of the waterfall.
“This ribbon is like a timer,” Zhong Hua murmured. “It uses the shadows cast by the toner particles to record the speed of water flow in a certain place.”
IV. The Resonance of the Time Loom
Ayu rummaged through her mother's old trunk and found a blue cloth bundle containing an unfinished brocade. As she unfolded it, Zhong Hua gasped—the brocade was woven with colorful silk threads depicting the volcanic rocks of Weizhou Island, the pores outlined in silver thread, perfectly matching the blank areas of the carbon paper. Above the volcanic rocks, clusters of silk threads embroidered stars formed the shape of Orion, their distances matching the observational data for Namtso Lake.
“My mom always says this is a gift for ‘Old Chen’.” Ayu’s fingers traced the silver thread pores. “She says that when she looks at the stars on Weizhou Island, she always thinks of the days when she was young and writing poetry at the newspaper.”
The truth gradually became clear: In 1958, Editor Chen used this typewriter to write poetry at the newspaper office, and the rheumatism in her finger joints caused her to type out specific key marks; later, she went to Weizhou Island and drew the pores of volcanic rock into her manuscript; and Ayu's mother, perhaps a member of the poetry society, used brocade to reproduce her manuscript, and the forceful stitches of her work coincided with the wear and tear of the typewriter.
The most amazing thing is the movement of the shadows. Zhong Hua checked the hydrological data of Yubeng Waterfall and found that the water flow speed does indeed change with the intensity of sunlight: 3.2 meters per second in the morning, 3.8 meters per second in the afternoon, and then drops back down in the evening. The movement of the colored shadows is synchronized with the rhythm of the water flow thousands of miles away, as if this typewriter has resonated with the water molecules of the waterfall in some unknown way.
“Just like when my mom knits a sweater, the stitches follow her heartbeat,” Ayu suddenly said. “When Old Chen, the editor, types, does the wear and tear on the keys follow her breathing rhythm? And these rhythms resonate with the volcanic rocks of Weizhou Island, the stars of Namtso Lake, the waterfalls of Yubeng… in some way?”
The setting sun sank completely into the buildings, the toner shadows disappearing into the twilight. Zhong Hua turned on his desk lamp; the light pierced through the color band, casting a blurry Orion constellation on the wall. He tried pressing the "J" key; the hammer struck with a muffled sound, like the echo of icicles falling from the Yubeng Waterfall.
Suddenly, Ayu pointed to the shadow on the wall—the location of Orion's Belt Star. There, three tiny spots of light had appeared, like three twinkling stars. Zhong Hua recalled that night at Namtso Lake, when Orion hung above the sacred lake, and the reflections of the three Belt Stars on the lake's surface trembled slightly, as if they might drift away with the current at any moment.
V. Unfinished Poems and Eternal Textures
A few days later, Zhong Hua discovered something even more astonishing in the typewriter's paper tray—on the back of the toner paper, half a poem was written in extremely faint pencil marks:
When the vents of a volcano catch starlight
The ripples of Namtso Lake then climbed onto the keyboard.
My knuckles tap out an eternal rhythm.
And the flow rate of the sacred waterfall is passing through the color band of 1958…
The handwriting was Chen's, and at the end was a small brocade pattern. Ayu recognized it as the pattern on her mother's unfinished blue cloth bag, and the imagery in the poem was exactly the elements on the toner paper: volcano, stars, keyboard, and divine waterfall.
It turns out that Editor Chen had foreseen all of this. The letters she typed in 1958 not only formed the constellation Orion, but also recorded the geology of Weizhou Island with the falling toner; the wear and tear on her fingers was passed on to Ayu's mother's knitting needles through the typewriter; and the movement of the color ribbon and shadows was a precise replication of the flow of water by time.
“Look,” Zhong Hua placed the toner paper on the blue cloth bag, the volcanic rock patterns on the two completely overlapping, “Editor Chen wrote poetry with a typewriter, my mother wrote poetry with knitting needles, and this machine writes poetry with toner and shadows.”
Now, this 1958 typewriter sits on the bookshelf in the living room. Whenever the setting sun shines through the window, the toner shadows of the ribbons flow across the tabletop, their speed perfectly mirroring the real-time flow of the Yubeng Waterfall. Sometimes, Ayu sits beside it knitting, and the rhythm of the bamboo needles gradually merges with the worn curves of the keys and the speed of the shadows.
Zhong Hua would occasionally press the "J" key and listen to the muffled echo. He knew that it was not only the sound of the hammer striking the ribbon, but also the sound of starlight from 1958 passing through the pores of volcanic rock, the sound of the water from Namtso Lake flowing over the keyboard, and the sound of the water from Yubeng Waterfall flowing through time.
The shadows cast by those carbon particles on the tabletop never truly ceased moving. With the speed of a divine waterfall, they wove an endless poem about stars, volcanoes, and flowing water on the earthly scale. When Ayu finished the last stitch, the silver threads in the blue cloth bag suddenly flashed with a faint light, aligning perfectly with the three stars in the Orion shadow on the wall—a moment strikingly similar to the Milky Way they had witnessed at Namtso Lake, piercing the sacred lake.
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