Part Four, Middle | Twin Moons and Meteors
Lin Wanwan continued looking up the timing of recent meteor showers.
The search results showed that several relatively predictable meteor showers occurred every year. Some had long periods of activity, while others reached their peak in a single night. There were also meteor showers whose names sounded spectacular, yet in reality produced relatively few meteors per hour—and even that number was affected by moonlight, weather, light pollution, and the observation site.
She recorded every meteor shower that might appear over the next two months, then compared the dates with the next total lunar eclipse.
They did not completely overlap.
The peak of the nearest meteor shower occurred before the blood moon, while another fell after it. As for the night of the lunar eclipse, it was theoretically still possible to see a few scattered meteors, but there was no guarantee.
Lin Wanwan looked at the date chart, her initially soaring spirits dipping slightly.
If the blood moon had to coincide with a meteor shower, her current plan would very likely fail outright. The universe clearly had no intention of arranging every condition for her on the same day. A lunar eclipse was a lunar eclipse, and a meteor shower was a meteor shower. Each followed its own astronomical cycle and had no intention of cooperating with her transmigration.
She stared at those dates for a long time before suddenly noticing that, besides the “peak,” the meteor shower data also marked a much longer “period of activity.”
Meteor showers did not exist only on the night of their peak. The so-called peak was merely the moment when the number of meteors was highest and they were easiest to observe. Before and after that point, Earth could still pass through the same stream of meteoroids.
In other words, if the meteors’ effect did not depend on exactly how many could be seen with the naked eye, but instead depended on some kind of external environmental change, then what really needed to be compared might not be the peak at all, but the entire period of activity.
Lin Wanwan reorganized her celestial-events chart, adding the meteor shower’s start of activity, peak, end of activity, the lunar-eclipse date, and the time of greatest eclipse. To make the data clearer, she even drew a separate timeline and marked the start, peak, and end of the meteor shower, as well as the beginning, greatest eclipse, and end of the total lunar eclipse.
Once all the points had been arranged, she quickly discovered that the nearest meteor shower’s period of activity did indeed extend across the time before and after the lunar eclipse.
Although the peaks of the two phenomena did not overlap, viewed as a whole, they still fell within similar periods of activity.
This discovery reinvigorated Lin Wanwan.
She picked up her pen and wrote in her notebook: “They may not need to occur in the same minute. They may only need to take place during similar periods of astronomical activity.”
After thinking for a moment, she added: “Cannot be proven at present.”
Those six words were meant to remind her to remain rigorous, but for some reason, they did nothing to diminish her excitement.
Blood moon, meteor shower, twin-moon projection.
If all three phenomena drew near at the same time, perhaps they really could make two space-times briefly intersect for an instant.
Lin Wanwan reopened The Blood Moon Transmigration Hypothesis. She stared at the original title for a few seconds, then changed it to The Composite Celestial Phenomena Transmigration Hypothesis.
Perhaps the blood moon had never been the only key. It was merely one part of the entire mechanism. The true transmigration window might have to be formed by several celestial phenomena working together.
She began reorganizing her deductions. The first layer was a special time window provided by the total lunar eclipse. The second was a brief activation signal provided by meteor activity. The third might be a twin-moon projection formed by atmospheric refraction or an overlap between space-times. When all three phenomena overlapped, the stable boundary between worlds might no longer remain stable.
Lin Wanwan simply drew another diagram.
At the top was a red moon. In the lower left was a streaking meteor, while the lower right showed two overlapping lunar shadows. Three arrows all pointed toward a black circle in the center. Beside it, she wrote four words: “Spacetime Boundary Point.”
After finishing, she stared at the diagram for a while.
The diagram actually contained no mathematically verifiable content whatsoever. When you got right down to it, it was just a blood moon, a meteor, and two overlapping circles.
It looked more like the symbol of some mysterious organization.
But the visual effect was excellent.
Lin Wanwan even began seriously considering printing it on the cover of The Transmigration Preparation Manual someday.
That was assuming she successfully transmigrated first.
Otherwise, if the book were published, it would probably be shelved in the mind-body-spirit section; with a little luck, perhaps it would end up in fantasy literature. With worse luck, it might become an important reference for a psychologist evaluating her mental state.
Lin Wanwan set down her pen and leaned back in her chair.
She had barely managed to connect the conditions of the blood moon, twin moons, and meteors, but she soon thought of another problem.
Even if unusual celestial phenomena really could open a transmigration passage, why would the person who transmigrated in the end be one particular individual?
When a total lunar eclipse occurred, there were countless people throughout the entire observable region. Meteor showers had never been something visible to only one person, either. If everyone standing beneath the moonlight were sucked into another world, then after every lunar eclipse, global population statistics should show a massive shortfall.
The news would not be reporting merely on a total lunar eclipse. It would be reporting on the mass disappearance of civilians.
But nothing like that had ever happened in reality.
This meant that celestial phenomena could provide external conditions at most. The transmigrator herself also had to meet some kind of selection criteria.
At that thought, Lin Wanwan’s gaze slowly shifted toward the identification card at the edge of the desk.
She hesitated for a few seconds before reaching out and picking it up.
Name, date of birth, identification number.
Her gaze finally stopped at the field for her date of birth.
A string of utterly ordinary numbers sat quietly printed on the plastic card.
Lin Wanwan suddenly had an extremely bold idea.
Could transmigration actually have been decided from the moment of birth?
Perhaps not everyone could transmigrate. Only people born under certain specific conditions might truly be “chosen” when they encountered unusual celestial phenomena and personal triggering factors.
As soon as the thought appeared, she immediately created a new worksheet.
Tab name: Transmigrator Criteria.
First column: year of birth. Second column: month of birth. Third column: day of birth. Fourth column: time of birth. Fifth column: Chinese zodiac sign. Sixth column: zodiac sign. Seventh column: life path number. Eighth column: Four Pillars. Ninth column: number of strokes in the name.
When she reached the ninth column, Lin Wanwan’s hand paused.
Her original research had at least been tenuously perched on the edge of statistics and astronomy.
Now one foot had officially stepped into the world of divination.
But Lin Wanwan had no intention of turning back.
Transmigration had never seemed like something that could be explained through a single discipline alone. Since science currently had no answer, every method humanity had ever used to explain fate was worth temporarily incorporating into her research.
She was not being superstitious.
She was conducting interdisciplinary analysis.
Once that sentence appeared in her mind, Lin Wanwan immediately felt much more at ease.
She entered her date of birth first, then looked up her Chinese zodiac sign and zodiac sign.
Snake.
Leo.
Calculating her life path number required adding together every digit in her birth date, then reducing the result to a single digit.
Lin Wanwan picked up a calculator and ran through the calculation once.
Not reassured, she calculated it again using an Excel formula.
Only after getting the same result twice did she enter the number into the table.
Next came the Four Pillars.
She searched for the arrangement of the Four Pillars, the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches, and the relationship between one’s date and time of birth. She quickly discovered that the information on the websites was far more complicated than she had expected.
Heavenly Stems, Earthly Branches, yin and yang, the Five Elements, the year pillar, month pillar, day pillar, and hour pillar.
Lin Wanwan had originally assumed that once she entered her birth time into a website, the system would simply tell her whether she was “suited for transmigration” or “not suited for transmigration.”
In reality, the website only listed a long string of characters she could not yet understand.
There was metal, wood, water, fire, and earth.
It looked as though she had some of every element, yet somehow not quite enough of any of them.
She studied the results for a while, then had no choice but to copy the entire set of data into her table and write in the notes column: “Further research required.”
The number of strokes in her name was no simpler.
Different websites used inconsistent methods to calculate the strokes of certain characters. Some used modern stroke counts, while others followed traditional dictionaries. As a result, the Heavenly, Human, Earth, and Total Grids they calculated also came in different versions.
Lin Wanwan studied them for over ten minutes and still could not determine which method was more suitable for deciding whether someone could transmigrate. For the time being, she could only keep them all, planning to compare them once her sample size increased in the future.
The problem was, she had no birth data for any other genuine transmigrators.
The female leads in Novel Ninety-Nine mostly did not even have complete birthdays. Some were only said to be twenty-two, some had just graduated from college, and in some cases the protagonist was hit by a car in the very first sentence, leaving the author no time to assign her a zodiac sign.
Lin Wanwan searched all ninety-nine novels again and ultimately found only seven female leads with relatively complete birth data.
Three of them had unknown birth years and only their Chinese zodiac signs were mentioned. Two had birth dates identical to those of their authors. Another was blessed with a pure yin fate chart so rare that it appeared only once in a millennium.
The remaining one was even more outrageous.
A celestial omen appeared at her birth, with a hundred birds paying homage to the phoenix, and three fortune-tellers simultaneously declared that she was destined to face a calamity.
Lin Wanwan stared at the data in silence for several seconds.
There was no way to conduct any meaningful statistics with this.
In the end, she could only temporarily give up on comparing other transmigrators and begin by studying herself.
She pulled out her birth year and enlarged it.
1989.
What, exactly, was special about this year?
Lin Wanwan entered “unusual celestial phenomena in 1989” into the search bar. The results included solar eclipses, lunar eclipses, planetary movements, and astronomical records from various regions. Some phenomena appeared almost every year, while others could be observed only from specific areas.
For now, not a single result directly said, “People born this year are suited for transmigration.”
Lin Wanwan was not disappointed.
The truly important clues usually did not appear directly on the first page of search results.
Otherwise, transmigration would have become a popular college major long ago.
She stared at “1989” for a while and began breaking down the four digits.
One.
Nine.
Eight.
Nine.
One represented beginnings.
Nine represented endings.
From one to nine was a complete cycle, and 1989 contained both a beginning and an ending. One came first, while nine appeared twice. The eight in the middle, turned on its side, looked like an infinity symbol.
Beginning.
Endpoint.
Infinity.
Then, once again, a return to the endpoint.
Lin Wanwan stared at the four digits, and her heartbeat suddenly quickened.
She picked up her pen and wrote in order on the paper: “1 = starting point. 9 = ultimate number, endpoint. 8 = infinite cycle. 9 = the endpoint appearing again.”
After finishing, she tried looking at 1989 backward.
9891.
She stared at it for several seconds.
Nothing came to her.
So she split the four digits apart and added them together.
One plus nine plus eight plus nine equaled twenty-seven.
Two plus seven equaled nine.
Nine again.
Lin Wanwan slowly straightened in her chair.
Part Four, Middle | End