After sorting out the reasons behind transmigration, Lin Wanwan didn't close the spreadsheet right away.
She was still far from finished analyzing the data from Novel Ninety-Nine. Death, comas, sleep, and ancient objects could only explain what those female leads had gone through before transmigrating. They couldn't explain why those women, specifically, had transmigrated.
After all, the same things happened in the real world every day. People got into car accidents, fell into the water, worked late into the night until they lost consciousness, or slept soundly through the entire night. If those situations alone were enough to cause transmigration, there would probably be so many transmigrators in the world by now that they could form an intertemporal hometown association.
But in reality, at least among the information Lin Wanwan had been able to find, no one had produced truly reliable evidence proving they had ever visited another spacetime.
That meant the “reasons for transmigration” she had compiled so far were likely only one of the conditions. There might be other factors that truly determined whether someone could leave their original world.
Lin Wanwan reopened the first worksheet.
Besides “reason for transmigration,” the original columns included one labeled “time transmigration occurred.” When she had entered the data, she had simply recorded the dates, times, and circumstances mentioned in the novels without analyzing them in any particular way. Looking through the column again now, she realized the contents were far more complicated than she had originally imagined.
11:40 p.m., exactly midnight, 3:00 a.m., the night of a full moon, an evening of thunder and pouring rain, a once-in-a-century meteor shower, and even instances when the sky suddenly turned dark red.
Lin Wanwan slowly scrolled down, her movements gradually slowing.
At first, she had assumed these were just bits of background description the authors had tossed in to create atmosphere. After all, transmigration couldn't happen on a bright, sunny morning while the breakfast shop downstairs was still shouting, “Order number three is ready!” Compared with that, nighttime, thunder, meteors, and a changing sky obviously made for a better story.
But when the data from all ninety-nine novels was arranged in the same column, those descriptions, originally scattered across different stories, began to reveal an uncanny repetition.
In Novel Twelve, the female lead fell into the water on the night of a full moon. In Novel Twenty-Three, a lunar eclipse appeared in the sky just as the female lead got into a car accident. In Novel Thirty-Seven, the female lead lost consciousness at the meteor shower's peak. In Novel Forty-One, thunder boomed outside the window when the female lead touched an ancient mirror. In Novel Fifty-Eight, the previously clear night sky suddenly turned dark red, and then the female lead vanished from her room without a trace.
By Novel Seventy-Four, the female lead had even looked up at the red moon before jumping from a tall building.
Lin Wanwan's gaze lingered on the final entry for several seconds.
A red moon.
She remembered that scene. In that novel, the female lead didn't lose consciousness immediately after her fall. In midair, she saw the entire sky stained as if with blood, while a black crack appeared around the full moon. The next second, the crack suddenly widened and swallowed her whole. When she woke again, she was already lying in a coffin inside an unfamiliar prince's estate.
At the time, Lin Wanwan had thought the opening scene was incredibly cinematic. Looking back now, she realized the red moon hadn't appeared only once.
She immediately searched the spreadsheet in turn for “red moon,” “blood moon,” “moon turning red,” and “dark red moonlight.” Before long, she found five entries.
The number wasn't particularly large—far fewer than traffic accidents, and not nearly as common as full moons or thunderstorms. But in all five stories, whenever a red moon appeared, it was almost always accompanied by some kind of abnormal phenomenon.
Someone saw the sky split open. Someone's soul left their body beneath the moonlight. Someone was merely standing in place, yet their body gradually turned transparent in the red glow. And after one female lead transmigrated, she repeatedly saw the same blood-red full moon in the memories left behind by the original owner.
A full moon was sometimes nothing more than a time marker. Thunderstorms could simply be used to create atmosphere, and meteors were even more often used for making wishes.
But the red moon seemed different.
Every time it appeared, it wasn't merely hanging in the sky for people to admire. It was more like a signal—a warning that appeared in advance, before the two worlds were about to overlap.
Lin Wanwan sat up straight and reviewed the other cases related to celestial phenomena. Full moons, lunar eclipses, thunderstorms, meteors, changing skies, unknown columns of light, red moons—conditions that had once seemed like scattered background details now appeared to be strung together by an invisible thread.
She had always believed that the key to transmigration lay solely in the transmigrator herself. What had she experienced? What had she lost? Had she died, fallen into a coma, or merely fallen asleep?
But now it seemed that when transmigration occurred, the external environment often changed at the same time.
Perhaps what truly opened the passage had never been one person's death alone.
Death, unconsciousness, or sleep merely allowed a person's consciousness to temporarily break away from its original stable state. What truly determined where that consciousness was ultimately sent might be some special condition that appeared in the outside world at the same time.
This idea had no scientific basis whatsoever.
At least, not yet.
But Lin Wanwan had no intention of dismissing it simply because it sounded absurd. After all, she was researching transmigration. If every part of a transmigration theory had to conform perfectly to common sense, then the very existence of the subject itself seemed rather contrary to common sense.
She added a third tab at the bottom of the worksheet.
The cursor paused in the blank name field. Lin Wanwan thought for a moment, then typed four characters: Special Celestial Phenomena.
Next, she created the columns one by one: novel title, type of celestial phenomenon, time the phenomenon appeared, time transmigration occurred, and the interval between the two. Her fingers paused over the keyboard for a moment before she added one final column: whether a spacetime rift or soul transfer had appeared.
Once all the columns were set up, she still didn't begin entering data right away.
Lin Wanwan stared at the four characters “Special Celestial Phenomena” in the tab name and suddenly realized there was a problem.
Novels could casually depict the sky splitting open or moonlight changing color, or even have a bolt of lightning strike someone straight into another world. But what exactly was a blood moon in reality?
Did it really have some special difference from an ordinary full moon, or did novelists simply love using it as an atmospheric prop because “blood moon” sounded mysterious enough?
She switched to her browser and typed “cause of blood moon” into the search bar.
The results appeared almost immediately.
A blood moon wasn't an independent astronomical phenomenon. It was the common name for the dark red appearance of the moon during a total lunar eclipse. When the sun, Earth, and moon moved into positions approaching a straight line, with Earth directly between the sun and the moon, the moon entered Earth's shadow.
In theory, once Earth's shadow blocked the sunlight, the moon should have been plunged into complete darkness. However, some sunlight still passed through Earth's atmosphere and, after being refracted, reached the moon. Blue light, with its shorter wavelength, scattered extensively in the atmosphere, while red light, with its longer wavelength, passed through the atmosphere more easily and ultimately fell on the moon's surface. As a result, the moon's original bright glow took on a dark red, copper-red, or even bloodlike hue.
Lin Wanwan read the entire explanation from beginning to end.
There was no mysterious energy, no spacetime rift, and certainly no mysterious passage dedicated to transporting transmigrators. There was only the sun, Earth, the moon, and light refracting through the atmosphere.
The scientific explanation was so complete that it left almost no room for imagination.
She leaned back in her chair and stared at the lunar eclipse diagram on the screen for several seconds. Then she sat up straight again.
Science could explain why the moon turned red, but that explanation only showed how red moonlight formed. It couldn't prove that a total lunar eclipse absolutely couldn't produce other effects humanity had yet to notice.
A thunderstorm could be explained by moisture, air currents, and electrical charges. But knowing how lightning formed didn't mean humanity had mastered every subtle change taking place within a storm. By the same token, the optical principles behind a total lunar eclipse were already crystal clear, but “knowing why the moon turns red” and “proving that a blood moon cannot affect spacetime” were two entirely different questions.
Lin Wanwan picked up a pen and wrote in her notebook: “Blood moon = the moon appearing red during a total lunar eclipse.”
On the next line, she wrote: “Known phenomenon: Red light is refracted through Earth's atmosphere and shines onto the moon's surface.”
After thinking for a moment, she added another sentence below: “Unknown phenomenon: Whether the probability of transmigration might change during a total lunar eclipse.”
After finishing, she carefully added four more words at the end: No evidence so far.
That was more in keeping with the spirit of research.
She wasn't trying to argue against science. She simply believed that existing scientific explanations didn't address the question of transmigration. After all, ordinary astronomical research wouldn't specifically count how many people suddenly disappeared from the modern world on the night of a total lunar eclipse, or how many people woke up as ancient young ladies.
Rather than saying science had already proven this didn't exist, it was more accurate to say that ordinary scientists would never use something like this as a research topic in the first place.
With that thought, Lin Wanwan suddenly felt that her research direction had become a little more reasonable.
At least half a point more reasonable.
She continued searching and soon discovered that the blood moon had another feature more important than those of other celestial phenomena—it could be predicted.
Meteors occasionally streaked across the sky without warning, and thunderstorms were affected by changes in the weather. As for the ancient mirrors and jade pendants responsible for triggering transmigration in the novels, she had no idea where she was supposed to find them.
A total lunar eclipse was different.
Astronomers could calculate in advance, based on the orbits of the sun, Earth, and moon, the date a total lunar eclipse would occur, its start time, its duration, and which regions would be able to see it.
In other words, if the blood moon really was connected to transmigration, she wouldn't need to wait and rely on luck.
She could find out in advance when it would appear, look for a suitable observation site ahead of time, and record her physical condition, the time, and her surroundings beforehand. She could even compare the other conditions that had appeared in the novels one by one.
Lin Wanwan returned to the Special Celestial Phenomena tab and added several more columns after the original ones: whether it could be predicted in advance, whether it could be safely observed in reality, and whether it could occur at the same time as other transmigration conditions.
In the blood moon row, she entered “predictable,” “observable,” and “no need to deliberately create danger” in order.
When the cursor stopped in the final cell, Lin Wanwan remembered several earlier cases.
In Novel Twenty-Three, the female lead got into a car accident during a lunar eclipse. In another case, the female lead touched an ancient mirror when the blood moon was at its reddest. As for the female lead who jumped from the tall building, it wasn't until the red moon appeared that the sky truly split open.
These cases shared one striking similarity.
The blood moon had never seemed to make anyone transmigrate by itself.
It was more like an additional condition.
Things that normally wouldn't happen might have had their likelihood amplified during that special period.
Lin Wanwan typed into the notes column: “Provisionally classified as a transmigration-amplifying condition.”
She stared at the sentence for a while. The longer she looked at it, the more reasonable it seemed.
Traffic accidents, death, ancient objects, and sleep were all conditions that acted on the transmigrator herself. The blood moon was different. It didn't belong to any one person. When it appeared, the entire night sky—even the entire world—was under the same celestial phenomenon.
If transmigration really was the brief overlap of two spacetimes at a particular moment, then perhaps the cause of that overlap shouldn't be one person's accident at all. It should be an external condition occurring outside the transmigrator.
Science told her that a blood moon wasn't a miracle. It was simply a total lunar eclipse.
But a total lunar eclipse wasn't an ordinary full moon, either.
The sun, Earth, and moon had to move into specific positions before the moon could fully enter Earth's shadow. It was a precise alignment, a special position that could form only at a particular time.
Lin Wanwan lowered her head and wrote the day's second conclusion in her notebook: “A blood moon itself may not cause transmigration, but it might provide the time window required for transmigration.”
She drew two lines beneath the words “time window.”
Since this window could be predicted in advance, she only needed to confirm one thing next.
When exactly would the next blood moon appear?