Nine has always been given special significance in many cultures and stories.
It is the largest single-digit number.
It represents the ultimate, fulfillment, and completion.
In ancient times, emperors possessed the supreme status of the Nine-Five尊.
Myths speak of the Nine Heavens, the Nine Provinces, and the Nine Springs.
Transmigration novels, too, often feature a ninth-life reincarnation, nine stars aligning, or awakening after the ninth death.
And her birth year, 1989, also added up to exactly nine when its four digits were summed.
Lin Wanwan quickly typed into the spreadsheet:
“Sum of birth-year digits = 27 = 9.”
After thinking it over, she added another column: Nine has always been given special significance in many cultures and stories.
It is the largest single-digit number, symbolizing the ultimate, fulfillment, and completion. Ancient emperors possessed the supreme status of the Nine-Five尊, while myths spoke of the Nine Heavens, the Nine Provinces, and the Nine Springs. Even transmigration novels frequently featured a ninth-life reincarnation, nine stars aligning, or a protagonist finally awakening after the ninth death.
And her birth year—1989—also added up to exactly nine when its four digits were summed.
Lin Wanwan hardly hesitated. She immediately typed into the spreadsheet, “Sum of birth-year digits = 27 = 9.” After a moment's thought, she added a new column titled “Matches the Ultimate Number?” and filled in Yes beside her own information.
Once that was done, her eyes fell on the last two digits of 1989.
Eight and nine.
Eight and nine connected looked like a journey from infinity toward the ultimate, or the final step before some cycle reached its end. If a world's time truly operated within nine as its boundary, then eight would be the position closest to that boundary.
With that in mind, the four digits of 1989 seemed to have suddenly acquired a new interpretation. One and nine came first, like the beginning and end of a world; eight and nine came afterward, like reaching the end again after an infinite cycle.
Lin Wanwan's pen began moving faster and faster.
“1: The starting point of the original world.”
“9: The end of the original world.”
“8: An infinite space-time cycle.”
“9: The landing point in another world.”
After writing it all down, even she sat in silence for two seconds.
This interpretation had no scientific basis whatsoever. Strictly speaking, she had decided what each digit represented on the spot, in less than five minutes.
And yet, it fit far too well.
It fit as though these four digits had always hidden some kind of message, and no one had ever taken the time to interpret it seriously.
Lin Wanwan did not stop. She simply added her birth month and day to the calculations as well. She added every digit, reduced the results, split them apart, and rearranged them; calculated once from left to right and once backward; multiplied the middle values and subtracted the front from the back. Whenever the result contained an eight or a nine, or could be more or less connected to cycles, space-time, or the ultimate number, she marked the cell yellow.
As for results that yielded no meaning at all, she left them unmarked for the time being.
In less than twenty minutes, the entire worksheet had turned yellow.
Lin Wanwan stared at the highlighted cells and, for the first time, realized in such a direct way that her birth data actually contained so many “transmigration signals.”
Although most of those signals had just been found by her own hands.
But perhaps the fact that they could be found was proof in itself.
An ordinary person's birth year might not withstand so many layers of analysis.
As soon as this thought appeared, she even began searching for major events, technological developments, and cultural changes from 1989. The search results repeatedly featured descriptions such as “a turning point,” “upheaval,” “the end of the old order,” and “the beginning of a new era.” When Lin Wanwan saw those phrases, her spirits immediately lifted.
The old world ends.
The new world begins.
Wasn't that exactly what transmigration was?
The essence of transmigration was leaving one old world and entering a new one. And she had happened to be born in a year repeatedly described as “a turning point in the times.”
This absolutely wasn't an ordinary coincidence.
Lin Wanwan added a text box beside the worksheet and first wrote: “1989 = The year the world turned a corner.”
Below that, she added another line: “Those born in a year of transition may be more sensitive to changes in the boundaries between worlds.”
She read it twice and decided that “sensitive” was far too weak a word. So she deleted the last few words and rewrote it as: “Those born in a year of transition may be more likely to resonate with other dimensions of space-time.”
Resonate.
That was an excellent word.
It sounded sufficiently scientific while retaining just the right amount of mystery.
As for exactly what frequency she was supposed to resonate with, that remained under investigation.
Lin Wanwan quickly placed her birth conditions, the blood moon, shooting stars, and the Twin Moons into a single diagram. At the very top were the unusual celestial phenomena, including the blood moon, shooting stars, and Twin Moons. Below them were the transmigrator's own conditions, including birth year, Chinese zodiac sign, astrological sign, Four Pillars of Destiny, and life path number. In the middle were the personal triggering factors: sleep, unconsciousness, ancient artifacts, intense emotions, and an unstable state of consciousness.
The three groups of conditions converged from different directions, ultimately pointing to the “space-time intersection” in the center.
She added arrows, dotted lines, and boxes of different shapes. To make the diagram easier to understand, she even used different shades of background color. By the time the entire thing was finished, it was so complicated that it looked like the annual organizational chart of some enormous corporation.
Anyone passing by probably couldn't have understood it at first glance.
Probably not at second glance, either.
But Lin Wanwan understood it.
According to her current theory, the blood moon provided the time window, shooting stars provided the activation signal, and the Twin Moons represented the images of two worlds beginning to overlap. Birth conditions determined whether a person could be recognized by the passage, while ancient artifacts, sleep, or an unstable state of consciousness served to temporarily pull a transmigrator away from the stable state of their original body.
At least several of these conditions had to appear simultaneously within the same period of time.
That also explained why countless people slept, lost consciousness, or got into car accidents every day without a massive number of transmigrators appearing as a result.
Most people never encountered the correct celestial phenomena. Even if they did, they might not possess the right personal conditions. And even if both requirements were met, they could still be missing the true trigger that initiated the transfer.
Transmigration might never have been a simple accident.
It might instead be an extremely complicated selection mechanism.
At this thought, Lin Wanwan suddenly felt that the female leads in all those transmigration novels of the past couldn't really be called unlucky.
They had clearly been precisely selected by the universe from among billions of people.
The car accident was merely a surface-level manifestation.
Falling into the water was just part of the procedure.
Going to sleep might simply have been the preparatory state before the transfer of consciousness.
The true cause might have been written into their fates from the moment they were born.
They thought they had transmigrated by chance.
In reality, everything had been arranged long ago.
Lin Wanwan stared at her birth year as an indescribable emotion gradually welled up in her chest.
She suddenly remembered that she had loved historical stories ever since she was little. As she grew older, she became obsessed with period dramas and transmigration novels. Other people might read novels purely for entertainment, but she always found herself thinking about how to survive if she really transmigrated, how to make money, how to avoid palace intrigue, and how to keep from offending someone she absolutely shouldn't offend on her very first day simply because she didn't understand ancient etiquette.
She even often felt furious whenever she saw a female lead do something stupid.
How could anyone waste such a precious transmigration opportunity like that?
In the past, Lin Wanwan had simply thought it was because she read novels more seriously than most people.
Now that she thought about it, perhaps that wasn't the case at all.
Perhaps she hadn't happened to like transmigration novels. Perhaps some instinct hidden deep within her fate had always been reminding her to prepare for the future.
The reason she had read one novel after another, the reason she was so fascinated by life in ancient times, and the reason she instinctively imagined what she would do whenever she saw a female lead transmigrate might all have been because her soul had known for a long time that one day she would leave this world.
It was only tonight that her brain had finally received the complete signal.
Lin Wanwan's gaze returned to the complicated diagram of transmigration conditions.
Blood moon.
Twin Moons.
Shooting stars.
1989.
She connected the four clues with thick lines. The longer she stared, the more she felt that this didn't look like a theory she had forcibly cobbled together. It looked more like clues scattered over many years had finally all returned to their proper positions today.
This year, she had happened to finish her ninety-ninth transmigration novel.
The digits in her birth year added up to nine as well.
Nine represented the ultimate number.
The next blood moon would occur exactly thirty days from now.
The shooting-star activity period was close to the time of the lunar eclipse.
The overlapping image of Twin Moons had appeared more than once in the novels.
And she, of all people, had noticed these details.
If all of this was nothing but coincidence, there were an awful lot of coincidences.
Lin Wanwan even began to suspect that the reason she had waited until today to create this statistical chart might also have been part of fate's arrangement.
If she had begun her research a year earlier, the blood moon would still have been too far away. She might not have been able to maintain her enthusiasm and wait all the way until now. If she had started a month later, the lunar eclipse might already have passed.
All the conditions had surfaced at the same time on the very night she finished her ninety-ninth novel.
This was not an ordinary point in time.
This was the moment her destiny officially began.
At the very bottom of the transmigration-conditions diagram, Lin Wanwan added one final box and typed: “Designated transmigrator.”
She stared at it for a few seconds.
Too ordinary.
Delete.
She typed again: “Chosen transmigrator.”
The moment those four words appeared on the screen, the entire diagram took on a completely different air.
Lin Wanwan knew that a normal person might think she had gone completely off the deep end by this point.
But a normal person wouldn't spend an entire night cataloging ninety-nine transmigration novels, let alone create a blood-moon countdown chart.
Since she had already gone this far, there was no need to suddenly pretend to be rational at the very end.
Besides, although her theory still lacked evidence, it could already explain quite a few questions.
Why couldn't everyone transmigrate?
Why were transmigration incidents so often accompanied by unusual celestial phenomena?
Why did some people encounter an ancient artifact and suffer no consequences, while others immediately lost consciousness?
Because an ancient artifact might be nothing more than a key.
The celestial phenomena provided the time to open the door.
And a person's birth conditions determined who that key belonged to.
At this thought, Lin Wanwan added another line of tiny text to the diagram: “Those born in 1989 may possess a cross-dimensional identification code.”
She stared at the words “cross-dimensional identification code” for quite some time.
The longer she looked, the more satisfied she became.
A birth year wasn't merely a year. It might be an identification number the universe had assigned to her.
When the blood moon appeared, shooting stars streaked across the sky, and the moons of two worlds shone overhead at the same time, the space-time passage would read her birth information, confirm whether she was qualified, and then send her to the world she had always been meant to enter.
The more she thought about it, the more complete the idea became.
So complete that, at one point, Lin Wanwan suddenly felt as though her entire life of more than thirty years had finally been explained.
Why had modern life always seemed too ordinary to her?
Why had she always felt an inexplicable yearning for another era?
Why did ancient architecture, palaces, historical clothing, and figures from history occasionally give her a feeling that bordered on familiarity?
Perhaps that wasn't merely yearning.
Perhaps it was memory.
Her soul might never have belonged entirely to this place.
The year 1989 had merely been the year she temporarily landed in this world.
The blood moon thirty days from now would be the date of her true return.
The moment this thought surfaced, even Lin Wanwan herself was shaken by it.
She slowly rose from her chair and walked one circuit around the room. Her heart was beating unusually fast, yet her mind had never been clearer.
Of course she knew that this entire theory had no evidence.
She also knew that at least half of it had been forcibly pieced together from numerical symbolism, novel plots, and her own deductions.
But if someone really had been chosen by fate, fate couldn't possibly send her an official notice in the mail.
It couldn't say:
“Dear Ms. Lin Wanwan, congratulations! You have been selected as this year's cross-dimensional transfer candidate. On the night of the total lunar eclipse, please bring your ID and personal belongings to the designated location to complete your transmigration.”
True fate would only leave clues behind.
Whether she could understand them depended on the chosen person herself.
And she had understood.
Lin Wanwan sat back down at the computer and enlarged the diagram of transmigration conditions to fill the screen.
The blood-red moon sat at the very top. A shooting star slashed diagonally across the night sky, and two moon shadows overlapped. In the end, every line converged on her birth year.
1989.
She had never thought these four digits were special.
They were merely part of her ID, the birth year she entered over and over whenever she filled out forms, and the starting point used to calculate her age every year.
But now, they looked like a code that had been hidden for more than thirty years.
One represented the beginning.
Nine represented the ultimate number.
Eight represented infinity.
And the final nine represented one world reaching its end as another world was about to begin.
And after all the digits were added together, the result still returned to nine.
A complete cycle.
And an exit that was about to open.
Lin Wanwan reached out and lightly touched the four digits on the screen with her fingertip.
Her expression was more serious than it had ever been.
“I finally know why I was born in 1989.”
Part Four: Twin Moons and Shooting Stars | End