Zhong Hua picked up the conch shell and twirled it in the light. Suddenly, a bluish-purple light flashed deep within the shell, much like the sunset they had seen at Qinghai Lake. Even more astonishingly, the reflection of a fragment of a sea map was mirrored in the inner wall of the shell, with coral branches and wave patterns swaying gently with his breath, as if they were living in the deep sea within the shell.
IV. Resonance of Tides and Star Trails
The next day, they took the fragments and the triton shell to the archives. In the 1982 logbook, Zhong Hua found the voyage record of the cargo ship "Liaohai". The penmanship at the captain's signature was identical to the handwriting on the nautical chart fragment. The record mentioned that on July 15, 1982, the cargo ship encountered a geomagnetic storm in the Bohai Bay, the compass malfunctioned, and the crew relied on celestial observations and a spare nautical chart for navigation, which "had special wave patterns that could identify the location of coral reefs."
"A geomagnetic storm." Ayu suddenly remembered something. She opened the astronomical records on her phone. On the night they stargazed at Namtso Lake in 2023, a small-scale geomagnetic storm happened, causing a ten-minute interruption of the cell phone signal. And the pulsar data that Zhong Hua had recorded in his notebook showed abnormal fluctuations during that period.
The afternoon sun shone through the high windows of the archives, illuminating the fragments. Ayu suddenly noticed that when the sunlight shone at a 45-degree angle, the ink dots on the timetable formed a line, starting from Shanghai Port, passing Qingdao Port, and then abruptly turning southwest—the direction that line extended was precisely where Yubeng Village was located. And if a conch shell was placed at the intersection of the dots, the reflection from its shell would be projected onto the wall, forming the outline of Namtso Lake.
“Resonance,” Zhong Hua murmured. “The resonance of tides and star orbits.” He remembered his grandfather saying that the old sailors believed that when the sea level rose to a certain critical point, the gravitational pull of star orbits would cause the coral reefs to emit a special frequency. The geomagnetic storm of 1982 may have amplified this frequency, allowing the sailors far away in the Bohai Bay to draw the corals of Weizhou Island on the nautical chart.
V. Unfinished routes
On the last day of the demolition, Ayu put the fragments and the triton shells back into the camphor wood box. The moment she closed the lid, she suddenly heard a click—not the sound of a brass clasp, but a slight vibration from a hidden compartment at the bottom of the box. She reopened the compartment and found a yellowed note under the shell, on which was written in the same blue ink: "When the tides and star trails are in sync, the course will be complete."
That night, Zhong Hua had a dream. In his dream, he stood on the deck of the "Liaohai" ship in 1982, seeing the captain drawing a nautical chart. Sure enough, the coral of Weizhou Island was hidden in the patterns of the waves. Ahead of the ship, the starry sky over Namtso Lake was rising above the sea, and the light of pulsars transformed into lighthouses, guiding the course. When the ship passed a certain coordinate in the Bohai Bay, he saw his young grandfather standing at the bow, holding in his hand the very same conch shell.
In reality, Ayu woke up at three in the morning. She went to the balcony and saw the moon hanging in the sky above the city, its shape remarkably similar to a wave pattern on a fragment of a Shanghai map. She took out her phone and found a photo she had taken during her pilgrimage to Yubeng Village—that day, under the sacred waterfall, her and Zhong Hua's shadows were stretched by the sunlight and cast on the rock face, perfectly coinciding with the contour lines formed by light spots on the fragment.
The camphor wood chest gleamed softly in the moonlight. Ayu suddenly understood that the 1982 nautical timetable, the coral reefs of Weizhou Island, the pulsar at Namtso Lake, and the pilgrimage route around Yubeng Village were never coincidences. They were anchor points in time, linked together by some mysterious force, waiting for later generations to, on a rainy afternoon, to retrieve from beneath the peeling posters the memories sealed by the waves and star trails.
That unfinished voyage from Shanghai to Qingdao may never have been a geographical endpoint. When Ayu picked up the fragment again and examined it closely in the moonlight, she saw the lines of blue ink glowing faintly—it was her grandfather's fountain pen, drawn more than thirty years ago, by the light of the ship's cabin, a line of light that transcended time and space for her and Zhong Hua in the future. In this light, there was the breath of the coral of Weizhou Island, the heartbeat of the stars of Namtso Lake, and every step they took side by side on the pilgrimage route through Yubeng Village.
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