The sweet fragrance of osmanthus and honey from the newly opened lacquer box immediately seeped into every corner of the room, dispelling the musty smell of papers and the bitter taste of black coffee. Lu Chenjue looked at the ivory-white cakes, their surfaces speckled with golden stamens like grains of gold dust fallen from a distant galaxy. He felt the tightness in his chest suddenly ease a little.
He sighed and pulled another chair closer for Shen Shuhe. “Have a seat. My office is a little messy. Sorry you had to see it like this.”
Shen Shuhe sat down, his eyes passing over the glass board covered in tangled mathematical notation. Though he did not fully understand the meaning of those Hamiltonian operators or complicated path integrals, he could still sense the deadlock and chaos reigning in the mind of the man before him. He asked softly, “Is the paper running into serious trouble, Chenjue?”
Lu Chenjue sat down across from him, fingers interlaced, his gaze fixed on the red equations written across the board. “The reviewers rejected my model because it lacks a boundary parameter to stabilize the wave function during inflation in the early universe. I’ve tried every coordinate transformation and every gauge symmetry, but this constant seems not to exist in any modern experimental data. Without it, this entire theory is nothing more than an untestable hypothesis. I’m beginning to suspect that the path I’ve been taking may have been a mistake from the very beginning.”
Shen Shuhe listened quietly, sensing the profound helplessness in every one of Lu Chenjue’s words. It was the pain of a solitary traveler searching for truth, only to discover that the sole path ahead ended in a bottomless abyss. He smiled faintly, his smile as graceful as moonlight filtering through leaves, then opened the lacquer box and took out a piece of osmanthus cake for Lu Chenjue. “Chenjue, try a little. Sometimes, when we stare at a dark spot for too long, our eyes become temporarily blind to the other streams of light around us.”
Lu Chenjue accepted the cake. The delicate sweetness of honey and the soft, chewy texture of glutinous rice flour spread across his tongue, carrying a simple yet tangible warmth that pulled him out of the abstract, frigid world of numbers.
After Lu Chenjue finished eating, Shen Shuhe leisurely took a neatly folded sheet of xuan paper from the pocket of his overcoat. He spread it across the table. On it were exquisitely neat lines of handwritten ink, the strokes slender yet full of strength: “Yesterday, while I was cataloguing the ancient manuscript *Sui-Tang Literary Records* at the library, I happened to read a strange astronomical record written by an official of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau in the fifteenth year of the Kaiyuan era during the Tang dynasty. I suddenly remembered what you once told me about fluctuations in quantum fields at the edge of the universe, so I copied this passage and brought it to you.”
Lu Chenjue leaned forward slightly, curiosity showing in his eyes. He followed Shen Shuhe’s slender finger to the lines of ancient text:
“In the fifteenth year of the Kaiyuan era, late in spring. Last night, violent wind and rain raged, with thunder and lightning without pause. At the third watch, an unusual streak of light suddenly appeared in the northeastern sky. Its red hue resembled frost flowers coagulated in mist; it flickered in and out of sight, its orbit turning and winding without following the usual laws of the stars. The phenomenon lasted three days before vanishing into the void on its own. The astronomical officials recorded it as an auspicious omen.”
Shen Shuhe read softly in his own soothing, lilting voice, then looked at Lu Chenjue and explained, “Chenjue, do you remember the famous poem *Spring Dawn* by the poet Meng Haoran? He composed it in the spring of the fifteenth year of the Kaiyuan era, while living in seclusion at Luomen Mountain. One line reads: ‘Dạ lai phong vũ thanh, Hoa lạc tri đa thiểu’—Last night came the sound of wind and rain; how many flowers must have fallen? Later generations, when reading the poem, always thought only of crabapple or peach blossoms scattered across a courtyard after a stormy night. But if we place it in the context of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau’s record from that same year, could those ‘fallen flowers’ dropping from above have been something other than flowers of the mortal world—could they have been the collapse of a macroscopic phenomenon in the stormy sky that night?”