Lin Wanwan immediately returned to the search page and typed “when is the next total lunar eclipse?” into the search bar.
After she hit Search, a list of astronomy websites, news reports, and observation guides quickly appeared on the screen. She had only meant to confirm whether the next blood moon would be next year, three years from now, or a decade away. She never expected to freeze the moment the first result appeared.
The next total lunar eclipse would happen in one month.
Lin Wanwan stared at the date for several seconds. Her first thought was that she had read it wrong. She refreshed the page, but the date stayed the same. She tried another astronomy website, and the result was still the same day. She opened several observation guides in succession and checked the start of the eclipse, the beginning of totality, the maximum eclipse, the end of totality, and the end of the entire eclipse one by one. The websites used slightly different labeling conventions, and some times differed by a few minutes because of rounding, but the date was identical across the board.
It really was only one month away.
Not next year, and not several years from now, but thirty days later.
Lin Wanwan sat up straight without thinking.
She had initially treated the blood moon as nothing more than a special condition worth studying. She had even prepared herself for a long wait. After all, astronomical phenomena weren't going to accommodate her research schedule. If the next total lunar eclipse were five years away, she could only wait five years. If the observation site were on the other side of the world, she'd also have to consider airfare, lodging, visas, and how exactly to explain to her family why she had suddenly gone abroad just to look at a moon turning red.
But now, the date was only one month away.
More importantly, the data clearly indicated that the area where she lived was within the observable range. As long as the weather was clear that day, she wouldn't even need to take a plane, ask for time off, or travel into some remote wilderness. She only needed to find a place with a wide enough view and not too many tall buildings blocking it, then wait for the moon to be swallowed by shadow bit by bit until it finally turned dark red.
Lin Wanwan checked the information several more times.
The observation area was correct, the total lunar eclipse was visible, totality would occur at night, and even the date was so convenient it seemed almost deliberate.
Her heart began beating inexplicably fast.
Everything suddenly seemed too coincidental.
This year, she had happened to finish Novel Ninety-Nine. Tonight, she had happened to seriously consider for the first time what preparations she would need to make if she were the one to undergo transmigration. Then she had happened to create a statistics table, discovered that unusual celestial phenomena kept appearing in ninety-nine cases, and finally learned that the next total lunar eclipse would happen exactly thirty days later.
Any one of those things, viewed in isolation, could be dismissed as coincidence. But when everything happened one thing after another, it was difficult not to draw a certain conclusion.
It was as if everything she had done tonight wasn't a whim at all, but a road that had been laid out long ago. Only now had she reached one of its crossroads and seen the true direction ahead.
Lin Wanwan copied the date of the total lunar eclipse and pasted it into the “Special Celestial Phenomena” worksheet, entering the predicted time, observable regions, duration of totality, and time of maximum eclipse in order. After thinking for a moment, she created another column—the number of days remaining from today.
When the formula finished calculating, a number appeared in the cell.
Thirty.
She stared at it for a long time.
A month wasn't especially long, but it wasn't especially short, either. It was enough time to make some preparations, but nowhere near enough time to take things slow and think everything through.
Lin Wanwan didn't start making a checklist right away. Instead, she opened a new document and typed five words at the very top.
“The Blood Moon Transmigration Hypothesis”
The cursor blinked steadily beneath the title.
This was the first time she had truly attempted to construct a complete theory of transmigration. It wasn't a setting an author had casually written to move a novel's plot forward, nor was it a vague guess she had formed after reading a few cases. It was a hypothesis built from a person's condition, the factors that triggered transmigration, and unusual celestial phenomena.
She wrote down the first point: “Transmigration may require both personal and external conditions to be met simultaneously.”
Personal conditions might include death, a coma, sleep, contact with a special object, or a state of unstable consciousness. External conditions, meanwhile, might include a lunar eclipse, thunderstorms, meteors, a change in the color of the sky, or other rare celestial phenomena.
The appearance of any one condition alone might not be enough to cause transmigration. But when two kinds of conditions overlapped at the same time, the odds of transmigration might increase.
After thinking for a while, Lin Wanwan wrote down the second point: “Unusual celestial phenomena may briefly weaken the boundaries between different worlds.”
At this point, even she paused for several seconds.
“Weaken the boundaries between worlds” sounded far too much like something that would appear in a cultivation novel. She stared at the sentence for a while, then decided not to delete it. Instead, she added a parenthetical note after it—tentative wording.
At least until she found a more scientific term, it expressed what she meant accurately enough.
When a total lunar eclipse occurred, the sun, Earth, and moon would align in a special configuration, and the light in the night sky would change accordingly. As for whether this alignment caused other environmental changes that humanity had yet to notice, there was naturally no evidence at all.
But what if spacetime wasn't completely sealed off to begin with?
What if countless tiny cracks invisible to the naked eye already existed between different worlds, but under normal circumstances those cracks were too small for anything to pass through? And what if a total lunar eclipse could cause one of them to expand for an extremely brief moment?
Maybe physical objects couldn't pass through.
Then what about consciousness?
What about the soul?
Could a consciousness that had just left its body, or had temporarily lost its connection to its body, be carried to another world by some kind of force in that instant?
Lin Wanwan wrote down the third point: “The blood moon may not be the cause of transmigration, but the key that widens the cracks in spacetime.”
She read the sentence several times.
There was no evidence, no experiment, and not even any way to know whether so-called cracks in spacetime existed at all. The entire theory was built on ninety-nine fictional novels, a lunar eclipse that had yet to happen, and an Excel spreadsheet she had created in the early hours of the morning.
A normal person would probably tell her to shut down the computer and get some sleep.
But Lin Wanwan felt that this was already far more reasonable than the inexplicable transmigrations in novels.
At least her theory had conditions and a sequence of events, an observable time frame, and the possibility of being disproven. It wasn't a female lead tripping, waking up, and becoming the marquis's estate's legitimate daughter. Nor was it a truck conveniently rushing out of an intersection because the author had decided it was time for transmigration in Chapter One.
She even drew a flowchart for the entire hypothesis.
An unusual celestial phenomenon appears, the boundaries between worlds temporarily become unstable, personal consciousness breaks away from its original state, the cracks in spacetime widen, and finally—transmigration occurs.
Lin Wanwan looked at the flowchart, and the more she looked, the more complete it seemed.
Of course, the one thing it lacked happened to be the most important evidence of all.
But a theory had to be established before there was any way to verify it.
At the bottom of the document, she added another line: “Conditions for the hypothesis to hold: During the blood moon, other transmigration triggers must appear at the same time.”
After thinking about it, she deliberately added another sentence beneath it: “No experiments that could cause death or serious injury will be conducted at this time.”
This point was extremely important.
She wanted to study transmigration, not end up in the hospital because of some reckless experiment before the blood moon even arrived.
After organizing the theory, Lin Wanwan picked up her phone and flipped to the following month, finding the date of the total lunar eclipse on her calendar.
That day looked no different from any other. People would go to work and school as usual the day before, and the day after, people would still pay their bills and rush to finish their reports. Only she knew that a blood moon about to occur was hidden inside that seemingly ordinary date.
She picked up the paper calendar on her desk and drew a heavy red circle around the day. After completing one circle, she decided it wasn't eye-catching enough and added another around the outside. Finally, she wrote four words beside it—Blood Moon Observation.
Afterward, she reopened Excel and created a fourth worksheet.
Sheet name: Blood Moon Countdown. Date, days remaining, preparations for the day, completion status, supplementary information.
Starting from today, she entered the information row by row until the day of the total lunar eclipse.
Thirty rows in all.
From this moment on, this was no longer a long-term plan with no idea when it might become useful.
Now she had a deadline.
Thirty days.
She needed to confirm a suitable observation site—somewhere without tall buildings blocking the view, without excessively severe light pollution, preferably quiet, and convenient for preparing the necessary supplies and observation equipment in advance.
If nothing happened on the night of the blood moon, she could at least make a complete record of the entire eclipse and provide the Blood Moon Transmigration Hypothesis with its first genuine observation data.
But what if something really did happen?
Lin Wanwan's fingers stopped over the keyboard.
If transmigration really occurred, that place would become the place where she left this world.
Only at this moment did she truly realize that what she had created was no longer just a research plan.
It was a countdown that might change her entire life.
She sat quietly for a while, then reopened the statistics table for the ninety-nine novels and separated out every case related to blood moons. She began comparing them in greater detail: whether the female lead had been injured before transmigration, whether she had come into contact with an ancient artifact, whether she had been in a coma, near death, or an altered state of consciousness; how long after the blood moon appeared transmigration began; and which stage of the lunar eclipse it was in when transmigration occurred.
Finally, she added another column. “Did she actively prepare for transmigration?”
All five cases had the same answer: “No.”
Not one of those female leads knew she was about to undergo transmigration.
They had simply happened to encounter it, happened to be injured, happened to fall into a coma, and happened to see a red moon at that exact moment.
Lin Wanwan looked at the identical answers filling the column and suddenly realized that this might be the greatest difference between her and them.
She knew the blood moon was coming.
And she had thirty days.
If this total lunar eclipse really could open a door to another world, then the next thirty days were the only time she had to prepare in advance.
She switched back to the Blood Moon Countdown sheet and added several categories beside the preparation items: language and writing, ancient etiquette, food and water, basic medical care, survival skills, monetizable skills, and physical training.
Every category was blank.
Looking at the spreadsheet that had suddenly expanded, Lin Wanwan realized with perfect clarity for the first time that one month was far too short.
She hadn't memorized the Three Hundred Tang Poems yet, didn't know how to make salt, and had no idea what the recipe for soap was. As for treating wounds, her current medical knowledge probably stopped at rinsing one with clean water and sticking on a piece of breathable tape.
Never mind being transmigrated into a time of war or famine—even if she merely became an ordinary girl from a farming family, her most practiced skills right now were probably creating categories, applying formulas, and adjusting Excel's column widths.
And ancient people probably wouldn't have any use for a pivot table.
This realization made her anxious for a brief moment.
But that anxiety was quickly overwhelmed by an even stronger emotion.
Excitement.
She was no longer just sitting in front of a screen, fantasizing about possibly undergoing transmigration someday.
She had a specific date, a barely formed hypothesis, and a countdown that had started tonight.
And thirty days.
Thirty days to train herself from an ordinary modern person who only knew how to use Excel into someone who, at the very least, wouldn't starve to death on the first day after transmigration.
Lin Wanwan minimized the windows on her computer one by one, and her gaze fell back to the paper calendar on the desk.
The date circled twice in red stood out sharply amid the field of black numbers.
She suddenly remembered the ninety-ninth novel she had just finished that night, and the brazen declaration she had made after reaching the end of it—
If it were her, she would definitely survive until the end.
Then there were ninety-nine sets of data, five blood moon cases, and the red moon that would appear in the night sky thirty days from now.
Things that had originally seemed completely unrelated began connecting one by one before her eyes, like an invisible thread.
If she hadn't finished the ninety-ninth novel tonight, she wouldn't have suddenly started organizing the conditions for transmigration. If she hadn't created the statistics table, she wouldn't have noticed those unusual celestial phenomena appearing again and again. If she hadn't noticed the blood moon, she wouldn't have known that the next total lunar eclipse happened to be thirty days away.
It seemed that any earlier would have been too soon, and any later would have been too late.
It had to be tonight.
All the clues had appeared before her at once.
Lin Wanwan stared at the date circled in red, and a nearly absurd yet extraordinarily powerful sense of destiny suddenly rose in her heart.
It was as if this blood moon wasn't something she had happened to discover.
It had been waiting there all along.
Waiting for her to finish Novel Ninety-Nine.
Waiting for her to open that Excel spreadsheet.
And waiting for her to finally start believing that perhaps another world really did exist.
A long while later, she looked at the date and said softly, “It turns out the heavens arranged everything long ago.”
Part Three, Later | End