Zhong Hua's finger stopped at the center of the star map on the floor tiles. There was a tiny hole there, like a burn mark from a cigarette butt. He suddenly remembered his grandfather's logbook, a page of which contained a ship ticket from 1983. The ticket stub also had a burn mark of the same shape, which his grandfather had said was left by a spark from the Qingdao lighthouse. At this moment, the water droplets seeping from the hole gathered into crystals, revealing three layers of images inside: the surface layer was the water velocity spectrum of the Yubeng Waterfall, the middle layer was the star orbit coordinates of Namtso Lake, and the core layer was embedded with the hand-drawn nautical chart from his grandfather's logbook. The red dot on the nautical chart marking the lighthouse corresponded exactly to the center of the Big Dipper on the floor tile star map.
"Your grandfather's boat ticket..." Ayu's voice trembled, "and my grandmother's wooden box, and this clock..."
Her unfinished words were interrupted by a sudden, intensified resonance. The pendulum of the clock began to swing on its own, not at a mechanical, uniform speed, but at varying speeds, the arc of its swing mirroring the angle at which a swan spreads its wings on Qinghai Lake. In the reflection of the clock face, the image of the girl from 1999 and Ayu completely overlapped, the zipper of her down jacket and the pink ribbon intertwining to form a band of light, while the icy lake patterns and the steel supports of the construction scaffold in the background rose and fell in unison, like breathing.
Zhong Hua suddenly remembered something and dug through the soil between the floor tiles. Beneath the hole in the center of the star map lay a rusty iron box. A salty, fishy smell wafted out when it was pried open. Inside was a 1992 nautical logbook, the patterns of seashells Ayu had found on Weizhou Island hidden within the wave patterns. From a hidden compartment at the bottom of the box rolled out a pocket watch shaped like an anchor, its hands stopped at four in the morning—the exact moment when they had watched the Milky Way at Namtso Lake, when the lake froze over. The name of the ship engraved on the back of the watch, "Xiangyang," was the same as the merchant ship Zhong Hua's grandfather had served on in his youth.
"10:17." Ayu pointed to the wall clock, whose hands had begun to slowly turn. "The time you were born, the time my grandmother arrived in Shanghai by boat, and the time this pocket watch stopped..."
Before she finished speaking, the entire old waiting room suddenly froze for 0.1 seconds. All the suspended water droplets, the swinging pendulum, and the vibrating floor tiles solidified simultaneously. In the reflection of the clock face, a double image appeared: in reality, they stood in front of the glass curtain wall of the newly built subway station, while in the mirror image, the girl from 1999 was dropping a postcard into the old mailbox. The scenes from the two timelines intertwined on the glass, the zipper pattern of the windbreaker overlapping the wave pattern on the postcard, forming a loop that spanned time.
When the stillness ended, the clock emitted a long, drawn-out chime. This frequency, superimposed with the resonant waves of the camel bells of Dunhuang, the icefalls of Yubeng, and the star trails of Namtso, condensed into visible ripples in the air. As the ripples passed through the platform, water droplets seeping from the cracks in the floor tiles suddenly suspended in mid-air, coalescing into a three-dimensional model of the Weizhou Island volcano. The spot of light at the center of the model shimmered with the orange-red hues of the sunrise over Qinghai Lake, at the frequency of Zhong Hua's heartbeat.
Ayu instinctively grasped Zhonghua's hand and discovered that he was clutching half a piece of paper he had found in the tin box. Written in pencil, it read: "When the tides and star trails resonate, all echoes will find their origin." The handwriting and pressure points matched perfectly with the travelogue they had kept together during their trip, and the tear marks on the edge of the paper matched the 1948 ship ticket in Ayu's grandmother's wooden box.
Suddenly, the construction lights overhead flashed, illuminating the dark patterns on the arches of the old waiting room. Those marks, previously obscured by dust, revealed a complete star map under the light—the handle of the Big Dipper pointed towards Qinghai Lake, the tail of Ursa Minor connected to the snow-capped mountains of Yubeng Village, and at the center of the Milky Way were the coordinates of the platform where they stood. In the final swing of the pendulum, Ayu saw that the reflective strip on her down jacket, along with the pink ribbon from the girl's braid in 1999, cast a circular shadow on the ground—a shape strikingly similar to the outline of the ancient ice cap etched by glaciers that they had seen in Daocheng Yading.
As the excavator roared again, Zhong Hua stuffed the metal box into his backpack. A Yu glanced back at the clock; the hour hand had just reached 10:19, and the second hand had finally broken free from the 7 mark and begun to move normally. But she knew that in that 0.1-second stillness, the light spots of the star map on the floor tiles had formed a complete circle, with Zhong Hua's birth time at the center and every inch of land they had walked on embedded in its circumference. And those resonant sounds were seeping from the cracks in the old waiting room's bricks, becoming the ever-burning nightlights on the walls of the new subway station.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
